Saturday, August 15, 2009

what the compass says.

I don't how to dress up what I've been thinking about lately and I'm tired of consciously attempting to make art/music/poetry out of my words, so here it is:

People are hurting. The drunken man leering forward from his bus seat at the two young women who dare not move an inch more than needed, his hot breath burning onto the backs of their necks: people are hurting. An argument between a seated woman with a stroller and the older woman in glasses forced to stand, who's decided she's had enough, who singlehandedly and wrongheadedly tries for a claim at her dignity by lashing out at the person who has her seat, who discovers the seated woman works for the bus company and promptly says "none of you care, you don't care, you're not human, you're not human," and meanwhile holds up hundreds of people on this bus and the twenty buses behind her, everyone losing their temper while going nowhere on a 91-degree day on Nicollet Mall: people are hurting. My dear friend and co-worker arriving bleary-eyed in the morning, cracking jokes and asking in perfect deadpan "Is feeling like you want to kill yourself a sign of depression?" while freeing his eyes from his glasses and resting the bridge of his nose on the unsteady perch between thumb and forefinger: people are hurting.

This pain is not normal nor natural. It is not a scientifically proven characteristic of the human condition. It is something felt more than explained, as though one could feel the weight of centuries. This pain strains our capacity to be civil. It is strange and terrifying, how it operates, where it directs us. Thousands of years of human evolution, indestructible imagination and unimaginable destruction, caught hollow and clear in the briefest of moments--a comment steeped in bile, a macabre dance of bodies, an uncertain silence. People are hurting and the only way we can still claim to be alive is that we have never quite adjusted to it, acquiesced. In our hearts we know something exists stronger than pain. We know it is our responsibility to summon a tidal wave of healing and reckoning on these broken landscapes. But we are uncertain what to say and do, how to start. The inertia of pain cradles us close, still, immovable.

In my hand I hold a compass. Its needle has swayed considerably over the years as its student has grown, but wherever it has pointed, there I have gone, for better or worse. I have started to develop some distrust for it--a compass that points in more than one direction is obviously up to no good--but there are times, such as today, where it has been steadfast in its orientation and has remained that way since October of 2006, and it's then that I think it's hit on something. Three years, glaring at me the same message: people are hurting. It might be serious this time. There might be something here. And so there I have gone, unbundling the mess with relentless hands, sometimes articulate with the careful clever movements of my sociological and political scalpels, other times wrenching and pulling at the bloody tubes, suddenly furious at little things, confused, arms tired. I keep on despite the terror, the long nights with few hours' sleep, not to mention what a sorry sobering ass it can make me in conversations with friends at potluck dinners.

It's good, this is good to be reminded of these things, they say. I pause and weigh the sentiment. Is it? Does it lend any more clarity about what to do next, does it bestow more hope and strength? Does it brighten a person's day, just a titch? No, no, fucken no. And I have to wonder: am I alone in this? I know there are plenty of people out there who are depressed, traumatized, struggling (individually and collectively), trying to remind themselves that to be crazy in a crazy world is a sign of one's good health altho this isn't much consolation. Many of these people are dealing as best they can, blocking it out, or becoming an expert on it and writing a book and giving a tour, or offing themselves or others, or drowning the pain with whatever addictive substance presents itself (meds, TV, certain romantic relationships). In fact, a good number of them become writers. So no, I am not alone in this, and yet, I am. I wake up each day present in the pain, I read it on faces and in words, I feel it on my skin and in my lungs whenever it threatens visibility in the form of violence or breakdown, I wear it home and sing it softly at midnight, and in my dreams it recurs and reinvents itself, wild, exciting, and yet just new accounts and takes on the same thing, that people are hurting and this may be why, when I finally awake, I am so tired and so reluctant to move again in a world that does not reinvent itself so easily.

Am I the only one who lives like this? I keep running into contrary evidence, but I cannot shake the feeling. And so when I meet someone new who has that particular air to them, one they may anunciate in so many words--"I tend to always see the good side in things", "We're going to keep progressing in great ways," "I'm just really optimistic about the future"--I find myself tamping down on my incredulity, and hatred, and jealousy, and yes, desire to be in their place, anything to avoid feeling so alone. I don't know where their compasses are coming from, it could be ignorance, transcendence, love, resilience, or hell they may not have compasses at all--I suppose that's called 'being well-rounded'--but it sounds better than where I am. Sometimes.

Now, I know if Grace Lee Boggs were sitting here next to me as I type this post, she would already be quietly and assertively scolding me for being so self-absorbed. You can't just do it in your head. You do it in practice, in life, in the relationships you have and the communities you sustain. Individuals do nothing in isolation; acting in a web, people are open enough and flexible enough to transform the way they live their lives, while the individual can't do shit.* And I know this--I really, really hope I know this--but I have a hard time picturing it in a society and culture still sold on the individual. And when relationships and community seem extra-fuzzy to me, and they almost always do, then I resort to the compass, and so have ended up here the last three years, with perhaps more clarity than usual but no sense of agency. And maybe this is a trap I'm in, or maybe with enough wading I'll hit on something new, or maybe I'm still very young and very clueless.

But this is where I'm at.


"Doing love is having the audacity to look at past madness and seeing that madness births truth." --Mama Sandra Simmons of Detroit


*Grace Lee Boggs doesn't ramp up her profanity any more than 'hell;' that is my own embellishment.

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