Damage/Control
There are times when I just suddenly feel entirely too damaged to navigate the vicissitudes of normal life: like, grownups. And happy/sane people.
I am suddenly (in my head) this small filthy-cheeked guttersnipe crouched behind a lone potted palm in some gilt-bedizened Late-Baroque banquet hall's darkest corner, peering out from between lush fronds at the revelers arrayed--sparkling with wit and grace--before me.
They are laughing (not unkindly) and talking and dancing the foxtrot, leaning in to lay hands on one another's forearms as they share wonderful jokes. In flawless French. Not even tripping over the subjunctive conjugation, or anything.
I don't know how they do it, because by comparison my tiny black heart is a mere rattling pitiful handful of clovis points and potsherds, garroted together with half a frayed shoelace and one dessicatedly reptilian albatross toe.
Also, I have a really bad haircut. And no small talk. And my sneakers are of course filled with frigidly filthy slush, like very small foot-shaped Sno-Kones. That leak.
Furthermore, I have had nothing to eat for three days but cold nettle soup.
and one spoonful of someone else's gruel. Stolen. About the theft of which I feel fathoms of guilt.
(We are still in my head, here. I actually just had some cheese and stuff--no worries.)
This is mental scenery which could only be properly rendered by Edward Gorey... a rejected frame from The Gashlycrumb Tinies, perhaps: "C is for Cornelia, Consumed by Self-Doubt."
Which would be entirely perfect because it would *also* mean I got beaten out at the sad-childhood-demise-poster-model audition by Clara, Who Wasted Away--not to mention Desmond, Thrown Out of a Sleigh. And Fanny, Sucked Dry by a Leech.
(Fanny totally wins, BTW. Leeches are foul. I mean, look at that fucking thing. Bleh! And I say that not even knowing which end is the actual part for sucking blood.)
I do not believe I get any joy out of feeling this way, though most Twentieth-Century psychotherapeutic paradigms would beg to differ, claiming that I secretly--yea, lustily--revel in the excruciating omphaloskeptic glory of such blatantly Rococo Dickensian Sarah-Crewe-in-a-rusty-barbed-wire-thong self-loathing.
Mostly, when I wallow in that mode, I just think I'm an idiot. And kind of damaged. Okay: too damaged. From stuff that maybe a better person would have survived without quite so much mental craquelure.
Which is not to say that I do not experience joy. I do, so profoundly. Joy is the whole point, rare and glancing though it may be.
I guess, really, the truth of the matter is that I'm just deeply in touch with my inner Leonard Cohen.
And I'm goddamn lucky, too, because I mine that vein pretty deep for my writing, being one of those "if you cut me, do I not bleed narrative?" types. And--yea, verily--I almost make a living at it.
Also, I am not living actual tragedy, at least most of the time. Just indulging in the angst of privilege, which is a fucking luxury in and of itself when you get right down to it--even when it hurts.
I mean, for God's sake, I am not a stick-limbed Biafran child with a belly bloated to the size of a small Hindenburg, too weak to brush the flies out of my eyes. I am not being strafed by Jap Zeroes in a Nanking rice paddy in the late Thirties. I am not trying to survive Dachau on nothing but lice-cakes and meager once-a-day servings of cabbage-shadow soup. Or jumping from a window of the Triangle Waist Company fire--100 years ago yesterday.
Or tsunamis and radiation, or getting shot at in Libya or Damascus right now.
I live in America in the twenty-fucking-first century. We have antibiotics and anesthesia. We have birth control (and my personal favorites: Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. Right up there with epidurals.)
We even still have unions--at least this month.
Also, no one hacked off my clitoris when I hit puberty, or married me off to Warren Jeffs at the age of twelve
and I am allowed to vote even though I'm equipped with ovaries and a popo. Plus which I went to college and have circumnavigated the globe. And didn't die of either syphillis or TB as a result (thank you, tetracycline and isonicotinylhydrazine [INH]).
And lo, eventually I got fucking published. Which boggles the mind.
I am, to quote the aliens who show up in the middle of Monty Python's Life of Brian to scoop the title character out of mid-air--just when he's tumbling off the top of a mud-brick ziggurat-esque building and about to go fatally splat in the streets of Ancient Israel--a "lucky bah-stahd." (Because hey, it's Monty Python, so even the aliens totally have British accents.)
Okay, so there has also been some abandonment, autism, infidelity, divorce, a boatload of pretty fucking brutal verbal stuff, suicides and other hideously untimely deaths of beloved friends and family members, plus a raft of miscellaneous but still ruthless ugly shit I don't really want to go into right now. All of it crowds the hell out of my mosh-pit life like several dozen thousand Nazi-punk assholes ripped to the gills on methanphetamine and Olde English 800. Especially over the last couple of years.
But we all have some of that: the kind of stuff that doesn't seem less awful even after you cry about it at great length. Repeatedly.
I'm starting to realize that it's what makes you a grownup. Which sucks, but there it is.
I even ended up discussing it with a shrink yesterday. Okay, mostly the fact that I'm writing about some of the nastiest crap at the moment.
"That must be hard," he said.
I crossed my arms and smiled at him. "Ya think?"
"But surely you find it cathartic?"
"I find it like opening a vein every morning with the claw end of a cheap hammer. Onto my keyboard."
He kind of blanched at that, poor guy.
I leaned forward. "You don't really feel better afterward. Just tired."
"Then why do it?"
"Because I get paid," I said. "I don't have a lot of other skills. I'm a really shitty waitress. And because maybe it will help someone else who's going through the same kind of shit."
He nodded.
"Look," I said, "could we just do the prescription part of this? It's starting to snow again."
I pretty much don't get the whole shrink thing. Obviously. But I show up for the meds.
It just feels like whining, to me. And I keep thinking about how bored they must be. And try to make them laugh. Which is ridiculous.
I'm not repressing much, believe me.
Because mostly one endures, you know? Even if it all seems overwhelmingly, irredeemably sad every goddamn time you happen to be lying awake in the dark at three in the morning and the bad monsters show up.
But there are things you can do when you feel like a clinically depressed Canadian in a Saskatchewan February, navigating the longest and darkest L. Cohen latitudes of the soul.
Like, read something. If you don't have the concentration to handle a novel, or even an essay, try a sentence:
Always behind you stands waiting something immense and black, something fresh and brilliant, and within one bound you are in it.
--Romola Nijinksy, foreword to
Paul Claudel's Nijinsky
I mean, that's from a woman whose husband ended up in a bad nuthouse. He looked back over his shoulder at her as he was being taken away and said, "Femmka, ne desesperes pas, car il y a un dieu." (Do not despair, little wife, because there is a God.)
Or this, from an essay by the guy who wrote Clockwork Orange:
What matters is talk, family, cheap wine in the open air, the wresting of minimal sweetness out of the long-known bitterness of living.
--Anthony Burgess, "Is America Falling Apart?"
And I say if you don't have family, make one. You'll probably have a better time at Thanksgiving, too.
Or just read the following, which makes me laugh every damn time:
I'd like to clear up one last thing before I go off and eat an entire banana cream pie by myself: men and women do not get stuck together when they screw. Oh, sure, you can beat her at arm wrestling, throw her across the room, mow her down in the line for Bruce Springsteen tickets, but you're no match for her vagina? Come on.
If a woman could keep you inside her by clamping her vaginal muscles in an inextricable viselike grip, you'd be there now.
--Shary Flenniken, National Lampoon
You will find the linguistic elixir of mental succor in totally unexpected places.
The following is something I culled from an article about cheese-and-chutney sandwiches that appeared eleven-ish years ago in Salon, for instance:
Don't tell me that making a quiche can be equally fun, and that cheese is no dinner, because even monkeys know this. It's just that when the ball is bouncing, or everyone's leaving to go swimming--in the dark, when you're stunned and splashing in the bracing ink, and you are the ink, and you find yourself going 'oh, my God, oh, my God" like in that Chekov story--you want your kitchen time to be brief.
--Chris Colin, "Ancient, Yet Edible," Salon
I mean, come on... that's just a paragraph brimming with sheer beauty. Lapidary and sublime. The bad monsters don't stand a chance against it, not even mine.
They will be reduced to staring forlornly at the horizon, lowing in sympathy.
And that's as good as it gets, I think.
You can't control damage. You can survive it, you can even try to gain wisdom out of it--or use it as something against the dull impasto of which joy can be more deeply savored, whenever joy returns to you--but the damage won't be tamped down.
You can't outrun it, either. You will be scathed. The only way out is through.
That's how it works, being alive. Which of course utterly sucks, and I'm sorry it happens that way. I would fix it if I could.
But here's what I always forget, whenever I'm hiding behind a potted palm all dirt-cheeked and orphany in the glamorous-parties-I-don't-belong-at of my mind: you have to tell someone.
Preferably someone who's known you a long time, and likes you anyway. (If you don't have one of those, email me and I'll do the honors. Really. Because absolute strangers have done it for me, many, many times.)
A newish lover is probably not your best bet, and I say that having just burst into tears two nights in a row at three a.m. in this very nice man whom I like a great deal's bed. He was terrifically kind about it, but it's hard not to feel like a total freak in that situation if you are the cryer rather than the cryee.
I ended up discussing that with my pal Andi yesterday afternoon, actually. Apres shrink.
"So, this poor guy," I said. "I ended up totally crying two nights in a row at, like, three in the morning."
"What did he do?" she asked.
"He was extremely nice about it. Said he was happy I felt comfortable crying around him, and that sometimes people just need to leak."
"Obviously a mensch."
"Obviously. But still... I mean, maybe I'm just too damaged. To be around actual people. Like, guy people, especially. It seems patently unfair to vomit up all your shards of glass and lumps of coal into someone else's lap when they had nothing to do with it. I mean totally right up there with whoever threw that Stroh's bottle at Iggy Pop's head at the end of his earlier version of 'Louie Louie.' Not the one where he says, 'A fine little girl's waiting for me/But I'm as bent as Dostoevsky,' and talks about AIDS and homelessness and how fucked up Bush is. The dirty one. That he did with the Stooges, apparently live. Which is actually the only Stooges song I ever liked at all--"
"--You are not damaged," she said.
"Please. I am the fucking empress of damage. I'm soaking in it, like the bowl of Palmolive Madge always had."
"You are not damaged. You have survived a bunch of incredibly shitty circumstances. Which is different."
"It feels like damage," I said. "I mean, especially when I keep bursting into fucking tears and stuff. Who would want to be around that?"
"I would. Every day. In fact I am kind of pissed that you don't live next door, and that you have other friends with whom I have to allow you to spend time. So there."
Which is why I love Andi.
And then we both agreed it's too bad we're not lesbians who are madly hot for each other, because that would just simplify a whole bunch of shit.
A final thought (really! I promise!):
I remember once standing in a long line at the counter of a framing store in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was the fall of 1997, and that week it felt like everything I had loved in my life was in ruins.
I didn't want to be standing in line, I wanted to slouch back to my car and weep in the parking lot with my forehead against the steering wheel. But I'd already been there for twenty minutes and I didn't know if I could gird my loins enough to come back, so I just blinked a lot and tried to breathe really, really shallowly.
Which is totally NOT what they tell you to do in yoga, but is rather helpful if you're trying not to burst into tears in front of a framing store full of strangers.
So, okay, I was standing behind two women who were just shooting the shit with one another. They started talking about poetry. One quoted a stanza of her favorite sonnet, which was lovely but I don't remember it at all.
The second woman said, "You want to hear my favorite bit of poetry?"
Woman number one nodded.
Woman number two spread her arms wide, closed her eyes, tilted her head back, and intoned:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
And I was just... gobsmacked. Slackjawed. The fever broke and there was this thrill of Lux et Veritas radiating outward from my chest.
The chick opened her eyes and brought her arms down, and I tapped her on the shoulder shyly and said, "Please, who wrote that?"
She laughed and said, "oh, crap, I can't remember! I know it will come to me..."
I gave her my email address. "If it does, will you let me know?"
She promised she would, and later that afternoon I got an email from her.
Two words:
Leonard Cohen.
It's from his song "Anthem."
I liked that verse so much I went home from the framing store and painted it in gold across the back of a chair.
Here's a video of the whole thing from Youtube. It was posted by someone called 7generations with no explanation, and titled
"Singing Leonard Cohen's Anthem deep in the winter of 2010"
I don't know who these people are, but I totally love them:
Take that, imaginary potted palm.
