proteanme

I think I slept maybe two hours last night. It’s been a hard year for me for getting to and staying asleep, which is weird because all my life I’ve been a sound sleeper. I think turning down the volume on so much external stimulation and really experiencing my mind and heart is taking some adjusting to. Last night my mind was like a broken record replaying this bit of information that I discovered accidentally about this girl I like. It was a battle of trying to chant down the spinning out in my head by counting backwards and just spinning out. Spinning out won; it almost always does. I likely should have gotten up and put on my headphones and just drawn some, but I kept thinking I would tire myself out. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say I was just not wanting to take care of myself around spinning out.

When I finally fell asleep for about an hour at 2am I had these sad dreams. In one dream I was getting it on with a girl that I know for sure I don’t want to get it on with and it was so detailed and so uncomfortable and so not what I wanna do that I remember thinking what the fuck am I doing, man and then feeling relieved when it ended and that dream faded into an art gallery scene, all quiet and stark. The gallery was having a photography show. For some reason I remember that the walls appeared almost yellow in color, yellow like an old newspaper fading. I was looking at some photos taken by this girl I do like. The same girl I talk about here every now and then. I came up on a photo that I somehow knew was recent. It was of the girl and this butch laying on a bed facing each other; the butch’es back was to camera, but and this girl, the one I like, she was resting her head over her butch’es shoulder and looking into the camera. The photo had a caption I can’t remember, but it was something like “me and the bare arm of my butch.” As I stood looking at the the photo it started to enlarge itself; I woke up before it got big enough that I could make out the details of this girl’s face.

I dunno if what woke me up was not wanting to see how this girl looks, feeling so safe and open with someone else, or all the ruckus from the thunder and lightening at play outside my windows. Maybe some of both. But I got up and sat on my couch and bared witness to nature’s show – a real midwestern thunderstorm complete with rolling booms, lighting flashes and a big loud downpour. It was comforting but at the same time it nearly broke me, as thunderstorms remind me how far away I am from things I love, like home, and things I long for.

I’ve been thinking about a comment Ned left on my dark words post.

The example you give, Liz, illuminates what you were struggling to talk about quite well – how useful is the label “killer” when thinking about your dad? not “how useful is it to call someone a killer” in the abstract (though that’s interesting too), but did the label “killer” mess with your dad’s mind, did it provide any useful guidance for him when he needed it, did it facilitate better understanding on his part or on the part of anyone else?

I imagine my dad did not think of himself as a killer, although I don’t know for sure and maybe I will ask him. But it was not until I was able to get to know something about his combat experience that I was able to get to know him. Given that, the “killer” label has helped me understand my dad in a profound way, because it has allowed me to be close to the events that most shaped his life and to understand what is dark about him. And through that I’ve learned that darkness is often much more complex than it looks from the outset and to really understand it one often has to suspend judgment. It makes me think about Daniel Mendelsohn talking about the Jewish Secret police in these little towns in Poland and the Ukraine who identified Jews to the Nazi’s and how he said could not judge them from his place in history because it’s unfair to say what he would have done if he had the chance to save his own family by turning in someone else. I know we’d all like to believe we’d have been heroes, but I’m not sure I would have been very heroic when I think of the Nazi tactics to punish sympathizers who hid Jews, which often consisted not only of killing everyone in the household of the sympathizer, but killing everyone in the the town and the towns nearby that shared the sympathizer’s last name.

The sun is finally shining. Right the fuck on. I didn’t think I was gonna make it last week. I’m sure we’ve got some more rain ahead of us, but Oregon summer is so close I can almost taste it.

Thinking of the sunshine juxtaposed with my blogging about darkness reminds me of this Nan Goldin photo I saw last week. It was a picture of some train tracks running off into this clump of trees that seemed to be painted against a stunning sunset, all purple and red and gold. There was such a beautiful subtlety to it that I immediately thought of the midwest. Then I read the caption – train tracks at Birkenau. And I thought of course. Of course there were stunning sunsets there, of course such beauty would exist while humans were being tortured and murdered inside the walls. And I couldn’t stop looking at it, no matter what other book I picked up, I kept going back to it. The photo illustrates what I’m struggling so hard to articulate, that darkness does not exist outside our humanity.

Some of my interest in the language we use to talk about the darker parts of ourselves and the darker parts of our world stems from being raised by parents who had intimate relationships with darkness. My dad is a WW2 combat veteran, a Marine who fought in the South Pacific, and he suffers from post traumatic stress. My mom has her own dark story to tell; the details are not mine to reveal, but suffice it to say she saw some of the worst in someone she loved dearly. So as you can imagine, lots and lots went unsaid in my household, and to be fair I don’t know how either of my parents could have described the seminal events in their lives to me and my sister.

I’ve tried to imagine my dad killing people and tried to imagine what he did to survive people trying to kill him. And I’d guess that the darkness he experienced in himself and in other people was not something he wanted us to see in him or the in the world. But at the same time he felt the most alive there in the midst of all that. I know this because he told me as much. And it breaks my heart because that made him kinda fucked. It wasn’t like he could say “Hey kids, guess what? The world can be a terrible place and I have a terrible secret. I’m really fucking good at killing people and even better at not getting killed, and lemme tell you, that right there, that gave me a reason for living. I sure wish it was you kids and your mom, but what can I tell ya. Now pack up your shit cause Daddy’s taking you to the state fair.”

I wonder what it says about us humans, all the labels we derived from our short comings and frailties and from the darkest parts of ourselves – rapists, murderers, liars, crooks, cheats, molesters, good-for-nothings, thieves, swindlers, goons, bullies and so on. Help me out if you can think of a comparable list derived from the best of who we are. What do we got: heros and saviors and the likes. Even then they tend not be about specific behaviors, and certainly not about specific behaviors we want to encourage.

I think there’s something going on about fear and punishment and how little we are interested as a culture in cultivating compassion and forgiveness.

First, let me run up the flag here and say that at best, there is a thin thread to string this post together, but I still want to talk about it. Hope you’ll bear with me.

The whole thing in my last post about willingness v. will is part of an ongoing conversation I’ve been having with myself for a while now about the power of language. What we call something, how we refer it – that often says something more than the literal intentions. What’s most salient for me right now is the aggressive language used around disease and disorder. Things like, her battle with cancer, he conquered his fears, fighting the good fight, the will to live, etc. My efforts around healing or even managing my own maladies have been better served by a less combative lexicon.

But this experience of language goes way beyond my personal experience. For instance, if I told you a relative of mine died in the Holocaust, the term “died”, a fairly neutral term, does not suggest the horror that person endured, maybe being starved, then tortured, and finally lined up naked in front of big pit and shot in the head. But if I tell you my relative was murdered in the Holocaust, the term “murdered” suggests that something much more violent happened in his or her dying. And I think is more accurate way to talk about those deaths. And mass murder is accurate way to talk about genocide.

The power of language also extends to how we talk about folks who perpetrate acts of horror. Let’s take someone who commits rape, at the very least a pretty fucking foul thing to do. The perpetrator becomes a rapist, defined forever by the worst of himself. And I’m going with “him” because most perps are male. And in defining that guy by what’s darkest in him we push him outside humanity. And who does that serve? How does that serve justice? In taking away the humanity of the guy who commits rape, we’re not restoring humanity to his victim.

Bell Hooks said: For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?

Went to a party where a bunch of fellow Geminis were celebrating their birthdays and once it came out I was a twin they put a candle on the cake for me too, which was very nice. I ended up spending a chunk of time playing with these little three and four year old kids, although the twelve year old would have liked more attention. And I had forgotten how much I liked that – the way they make up songs and dance, the way they are always imagining something, the way they like you or don’t and whatever they are feeling is just so right there. Mostly we built these crazy tall towers out of blocks so they could take turns pretending to be a t-rex or a tornadoes or an earthquake and knock the towers down. Later when I was playing with this little guy he stopped and looked at me for a little bit and said, “you have rainbow eyes.” So sweet. And my eyes are this mix of green, blue and brown. Thinking about hanging out and playing made me wonder if I should add playing with kids to the list of things that make being alive feel special to me.

Apparently I’m gonna be angry and sad for a while and goal right now is to figure out how to manage that without getting my ass kicked by some motorist who I’ve targeted with my displaced frustration. Looks like a fun summer.

It’s not that I’m bitter, it’s more than I’m tired and scared. And lonely. I’m out here on this limb and there’s nothing to grab onto, except every now and then I talk with my oldest friend and she says something so sweet to me, like oh baby, and then I feel so incredibly loved. She gives me a touchstone in all this acreage I need.

Yesterday RU told me I’ve been seeming sad, angry and disappointed lately. Hard not to chafe at that, even if it rings true, or maybe because it rings true. I know I’m in an uncomfortable place right now and part of what’s going on is cultivating the willingness to be uncomfortable and I imagine that at times that’s not super pleasant to be around. I’ve been thinking about Dave’s comment on my incubating post, reminding me about needing “a way to make it back to that center while you explore the fringes. Call it a mantra, home(’centering’ spot), or even people in your life that drag you back – kicking and screaming from the focus of discovery back into the wonder of being.”

I’d love it if more than one of those people lived here in Portland. Please don’t mistake this for a pity party as that’s not my intention. I’m just in this in between spot that’s a little lonely. Cause since I’ve been out here I’ve gone after a number of friends that don’t quite fit and right now I’m really looking for connections with more resonance. Most of my resonators are hundreds if not thousands of miles away and I hope you know that you are sorely missed.

I really loved Silvia’s recent post and how it reminded me of lots of things, one being that everything changes.

Posted some new photos of NYC, food and me over the years.