It’s five minutes before class begins and one student, a mousy girl who twitches occasionally and whispers answers to my questions after I respond to her half-mast upraised tentative hand that must be propped up by the other hand in order to give it any height, says, “I think no one’s here because of the shooting.”
The classroom is one third full, not unusual for the hour and time in the semester, about one third of the way through.
I wanted to doff off her suggestion as somewhat silly or illogical to assure her, actually, but as is always the case in teaching college students–or any students–sensitivity is paramount, so I pause a complete second. But in drawing up my response, I immediately flash angrily, “No, probably not. Why wouldn’t they be used to this sort of news by now? After all, mass shootings happen every other day now. It’s just become the new normal.”
I immediately regret my callousness.
This student has confessed in her second essay written for this class that she suffers from epilepsy, a recent discovery that has left her to picking up pieces, rescuing remnants of her former life that held nothing but unfettered future, the worst day up until then being when an elementary school kid called her a mop-head. She told me her medication affects her memory, slows her.
When she confided in me, I thought of my daughter in college two states north from home. She suffers from a recent sport-inflicted concussion, confused and depressed, her mind sluggish and stalling–going on too long now. She fears. I fear.
******
Last week at the head of the classroom, I repeated the line from a prose poem assigned for that day, “In the end, we are alone in the house of the heart.” I then asked the students if they thought that was true. Some thought so. Most did not know.
I offered my story of watching a cancer patient die, slowly, how, after months of gathering her family around her, then one by one sending each off not to return to her as she got sicker, she hunkered down inside herself the last three weeks, doing the difficult work of dying. It certainly looked like no one could help her do it, that she had to do it alone. To further illustrate, I likened that aloneness to being elbowed in the diaphragm, down on the soccer field, fighting for air. All of the hovering bodies above you as you lie on the ground can do nothing for you–you don’t even see them–as you fight the pain and fear of never breathing, diving deeply inside yourself for that will to bear it, to survive or brave surrender.
I thought the dying example was illustrative, poignant. Some stared in reflection, some in emergency-broadcast-test-pattern mode, others in churning liquid emotion. One young man gripped his head in his hands, face hidden, staring down the sheen of the teflon coated desk.
My heart winced.
Shucking Seeds
Flustered, mind agape, silently wide-eyed,
I know not what sits behind her eyes.
She, a squirrel up a date palm, looking for acorns,
and I, a logical storm looking for a landing, apace,
we dance the squares of the place, tiled and tidy,
a touch of mildewed madness escaping. We spin.
She hides, a cushion pin stuck in the grimy wall.
Magenta stew toppled around her meaty face, her,
I stare across the room at only silhouette;
flat ribbon plastic words float to her
cordon her off like a crime scene
in the corner, dark, smoldering
punk in a steamy seamless-ness,
drunken porridge, we two–a corruption,
an oil leak of foul forethought.
She takes me home–her home–
a wondrous oak tree, reaching
branching, bleeding out the red roots.
We shuck seeds, plant acorns, see what grows.
Ghosting
I learned this term today in an elephant journal article. It means “ending a romantic relationship, by cutting off all contact and ignoring the former partner’s attempts to reach out.”
Like the writer who defined the term, I am in the dark about new trends, words and expressions quite often despite having two teenage daughters. I often think how far behind the times I will fall when my contact with them is not daily–in my house. They keep me fresh and as close to hip and trendy as I will ever be (which is not very close), often with exasperated faces, slumped shoulders to punctuate the sheer agony of educating an older person.
However, rudeness is not confined to youth. I agree that ghosting is rude, excluding abusive relationships, of course. Treating people as if they are disposable plastic bags, discarded (probably on the ground) after use without a thought to future ramifications (pollution-physical and emotional) to other beings both human and animal is more than unkind, more than cruel. It is brutal.
The kindest gift is knowledge with all of its up and downsides. I may be rejected, feel bad about being rejected or even about myself, if someone dumps me face to face or in an email or text, but ice that rejection with someone’s cowardice or cruelty to keep me ignorant in the face of such dumping, well that is too much.
First, I not only wind up feeling rejected but ashamed on top of that. Once I discover the ghosting, I am bound to feel doubly embarrassed that I did not know the person I cared about was such a coward, such an unethical person. That is the part that would throw me into despair. How could I not know I was dealing with an asshole?
That realization–that I am stupid, unobservant and/or naive–kills me more than someone rejecting me for being me. I do not need validation from someone else, though it certainly feels wonderful to be appreciated. But I DO need to know who I am dealing with–for my own safety. For how do I make wiser decisions in the future if I have a defective bullshit detector?
The battle is always between the bravery and freedom to trust against cautiousness, the wisdom to discern others’ intentions and needs, and whether those fit my own. The difficulty, of course, is in achieving clarity, sorting through what’s mine and what’s someone else’s. They get conflated and confused sometimes. Is it me who wants exclusivity or am I capitulating to some unspoken or spoken desire of the person I HOPE to build a relationship with in time? It gets complicated picking through the nuances.
Knowledge is the best armor. Knowing the self and observing others is a lifelong study. I hardly ever get it right. The attempt is all I or anyone ever has, but the trick is to develop an intuition or listen to the one inborn, weak as it is, mixed in with recollection of tendencies and traits that are recognizably lethal.
I believe ghosters are detectable to those paying attention.
Barring the sociopaths, those who would do others harm smell differently, and I mean that more in a metaphoric than a literal sense. Tight listening to instincts, like wearing infrared goggles, reveal the dark hidden. If only we use the gear at our disposal: eyes, ears, heart and mind, take note of the signs, the hints, looks and words–not in suspicion but in curiosity, like an archeological exploration, seeing what the landscape bears underneath, hopeful of gems of discovery but mindful that the earth may be barren or even collapsable and dangerous.
Perhaps ghosting is more a phenomenom of youth with its inexperience, fewer notes on lived case studies. Or it should be. But even young people have inherent tools to sniff out fear, falsehood and feelings. If only they respect themselves and their abilities, without trepidation over likely mistakes.
Buddha proclaimed it way before I did. Suffering, though inevitable, is minimized in the mindful.
credit: futuresequence.com
Fugue
Sundays.
In day-drifts I spend them in lengthy morning sheets,
woven threads striping maypole my legs with yours.
Skills.
You have them: attentive, unwavering, intent.
Your strong gentleness fills our bed with symphonic hum, a vibrational fugue.
I cry.
Some tenderness tears at lost time, flaked off bits of skinned cycles round,
a heart with no hands.
Touch: soft swept fingers warm atop cupped palms, like namaste hands, loose prayers.
Your hands.
The edges brush by bristled cheek, full flesh and heated like sun-baked summer squash.
Promises: unsaid, steady and willed.
You cannot.
Ties from September past,
a dozen dozen or more in months melded to seamless years of you and you and you.
And her.
Until: always when, yet, but still, then again, for now, someday, and forgive me.
credit: thisisnickwhite.com
Who’s that Knocking at my Door?
A shadow slumps in the doorway, a darkness hollowed by blazing corners
where the light exhales, squeezing past the hulking figure that is my father.
“What are we having for breakfast?” Code for make me something to eat.
Desires, requests, pleas, all are puzzles to a man who knows no direct say.
“Sure, go ahead and eat without me. You don’t give a shit about me anyway.”
Read: I want to be loved, appreciated and acknowledged as a human being.
He knows no direct. His sentences scrape the underside of a mirror, inverted.
An uneducated master of language manipulates impulses, inherited relations
to move, respond, act, resist and surrender–a force of father-thinned twining.
Mother instilled the love of words in those of us who shone in penning letters.
She idled hours in solving crosswords, leafing magazines, and correcting him.
“‘Don’t got’ is a double negative and makes you sound like an illiterate moron.”
Her words sliding by as if unspoken, he ignored her, she, his virtual dictionary,
until Scrabble time, where strategy schooled the unwary wordsmith defensed.
A board game master, card player extraordinaire and pathological liar, he waits.
Convinced long ago she filled me with philologist love, I glance upon his notion;
my words form around the blankness in the doorway, the gamesman stares me
while the muse I wrestled to the ground, a slutty run-around, scampers past him.
credit: i2.wp.com
Autophony: The sound of living inside a mother’s dementia
I scrapped together a few writings I blogged over the year and produced this piece that was published yesterday.
Tripping on sounds, I hear birds outside my window, muffled, over the swish-throb of a heartbeat in my ears, a pulsing slightly alarming and soothing all the same. I also hear a dish clanking outside the closed door of my room, emanating from the kitchen where I imagine my mother is sitting, skeletal and serene in her wheelchair, gazing off through the filmy stare that inhabits her face now. The cataracts of her mind’s eye reaches some unknown space outside or inside her head that swirls and lulls the cerebral juices to twitching stillness, her jerking to and from that space in split-second recognition of a face, idea, song slice or voice. I imagine her waiting like the baby bird with beak wide open in anticipation of its mother’s nurturing tongue, depositing the meaty worm of egg or pear. She is spoon-fed…continue here.
Ashley Madison and American Hypocrisy
What do I think about the Ashley Madison come Josh Duggar (a name I first heard yesterday) “scandal”? Not too much. Surprising coming from someone whose blog is themed on the mistress in that word’s narrowest and broadest sense. But I have written a lot on the subject of infidelity from all sides, and much boils down to the same recurring ideas:
People get hurt–are hurt–and that saddens me. Luckily, counseling resources for the infidelity-wounded exist. Some have called those hurt by infidelity, victims, like the wife of this Duggar, publicly humiliated by someone who apparently spoke out in defense of “family values.” A shame, but the story often unfolds as more complicated than good guys and bad guys, abusers and victims.
People are not honest. Relationships survive on honesty, an ongoing practice that most are not dedicated to but expect from others.
America’s hypocrisy and sexual dysfunction fosters dysfunctional relationships. It is no secret that what we say what we want is not what we want–or do. I featured this article from The Daily Beast before, but it reports the unsurprising facts and bears repeating:
As Pew reports, extramarital affairs are generally condemned worldwide but the U.S. still seems to be uniquely moralistic about them. In fact, most major developed nations in the world are more accepting of infidelity than the U.S., including Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, Spain, and Japan.
In France, a mere 47 percent of adults find extramarital affairs unacceptable, which is less an endorsement of their practice and more a reflection of a widespread refusal to think of it as “a moral issue.” In America, sex is a moral language by default; abroad, less so…
All this being said, Americans’ sexual words do match up with their sexual actions in some special cases. Fifty-seven percent of men and 65 percent of women approve of having babies outside of marriage, although CDC estimates show that only 40 percent of all births are to unmarried women. Divorce rates appear to be on their way down in the 21st century while acceptance of divorce has been steadily increasing.
But these are some of the only realistic moral attitudes in a country where sexual attitudes and sexual behavior tend to be dissonant. And although this mismatch might be mystifying in and of itself, the probable reasons behind it are not: the United States has the largest population of Christians of any country and is one of the only deeply religious wealthy nations in the world. That math—like most Americans—does itself.
Ashley Madison? Only in America.
credit: johnmbecker.com
Medicinal Embrace
“I hate when someone cuts me off, and then flips me off as if my very existence provoked the act.”
She nods, not lifting her eyes from the words on the screen, and mumbles a “hmmm…”
“But the worst part is that I get so angry about it, cursing out loud, speeding up, trying to make eye contact to give the person the stink eye and stab them with my utter disgust. Why would I even care? Why would I make myself so worked up?”
Still bathed in the glow of the screen and not looking up, she responds distractedly, “I don’t know.”
“And I immediately check myself and wonder how I could lose my cool like that, let someone just take me out of myself into the hate zone. My thoughts get ripped from wherever they were to this horrid place some stupid stranger took me to–with my permission. It frustrates me that I cannot resist…cannot NOT react.”
She looks up from the computer, and turns all the way around in her chair, 180 degrees, and faces her now–she with her back turned who rummages through the refrigerator as her complaints dissolve into questions that perplex the vegetables she picks up one by one–broccoli rabes, Japanese eggplant, and summer squash–examines and then shuffles to the far side of the shelf.
“Then my reaction to having reacted like an ass, an overly angry ass, is even worse, just berating myself for being out of control and habitually reactive. I mean I just want to let these things pass without getting my adrenaline pumping—just once. But the whole thing is just one big ugly pattern that I can’t change….ingrained, like….a disease…Have you seen the…? I think I put it…
Oh! I didn’t hear you sneak up behind me. Aw baby, that’s so nice…you’re so toasty warm. Just what the doctor ordered mmmm…”
credit: http://www.annashukeylo.com/
Bar Deflection
A man walks in to the bar and sidles up to me, stool side snug,
gives a side glance quick-like, casual, and motions for the boy;
at least he looks like a boy, tatted up the arm muscle contours,
blues and greens twitching and bulging in the heaves of lugging.
But his face smiles baby-faced 21, hype curbed in sedative cool.
Fleshy-courteous grin, his lips precede his face to our bar seats.
“Scotch, straight up,” he orders as if awaiting a standing ovation.
I make for my screen, avoiding an audience for what’s on Twitter,
scrolling in feigned interest, the intensity frosting an act of denial.
A momentary pondering how my deft fingers in memory motion
flick images by the dozens past, rehearsed in the skin of bones,
I lose sight of him who I spy in the heat of electromagnetic sense.
But he makes himself known with shoe scuffle and breathy groan,
the kind that signals satisfaction of the quaff, smack of the throat,
wedging himself in the blankness of space I apportioned off to me.
“What are you drinking?” the gargling chuff of each word spit out
in rhythmic steam of Scotch, cloying ambition, and blind incursion.
Lifting my head with a start, I flash from half-mast to widened lids.
“Liquid, something liquid,” I reply, speaking to the drop on his lips.
His chin is at 5 o’clock, at shadows, retiring, and sun-downed dark.
Slicked, stay-put hair, one rogue strand licking forehead to cheek,
peppered head to toe with an in-between-ness of age and youth,
he stares, hiding discomfort behind the glaze of liquid eye screen.
“My optometrist knew my diet by my crystal clear corneas,” I offer.
Then he smiles, his eyes disappearing inside of his face in pause.
Deliberately he turns away, glass in one hand, the other propped,
a podium for his head, as his eyes bore holes in the wet, oak bar.
I study his exposed cheek a minute, while he recomposes himself.
Will he strike again from his fox hole retreat, re-armed and ready?
Then likewise turn my head downward, alit to a screen of options.
photo credit: beeroftomorrow.com
The Gift of Writing in the Mindful Word
My first piece published as a contributing writer for this wonderful journal, The Mindful Word, came out today. Please enjoy this esssay about writing and teaching students old and young about the craft I attribute as salve for what ails us in the human condition of illusory separateness.
Peace,
the Gaze
In the gaze of the other 