January 4, 2008

A GREAT SADNESS WASHES THROUGH ME

A great sadness washes through me, leaving me exposed and slightly bruised at the edge of an achingly familiar yet description-eluding shore. I could leave it for some happier places, but I'm choosing to stay for a while. This sadness expands and reconnects me, simultaneously draining and rejuvenating me; I feel oddly at ease, almost boneless, like an alien assembly of sentient protoplasm. Or a baby draped in tattering adult perspectives.

No regression, here, though; and no transcendence, either. Just being precisely here, in almost unbearable softness and heart-hurt. A great sadness washes through me, wave after broken wave, cleaning me out while plugging me into a more than vast shared sense of exquisitely vulnerable being. And so I rest in both the ache and spaciousness of grief. As the ache eases all by itself, my vision clears...

I see myself drifting by in an old photo. I'm maybe 8 months old, semi-cradled in my mother's arms; we're both gazing cameraward, with her wearing a darkly-lipsticked smile that doesn't include her eyes, and with me looking a bit bewildered. There is clarity in my eyes, but it's fragile, much like my mother. It's 1948. I feel a swell of caring for both my 23 year-old mother and my infant self.

Though it's a clear photo, it seems surreal to me. I was the child of a child, toilet-trained well before I was one, before the pleasant but no-nonsense gaze of Dr. Spock. To unburden my bowels I had to contract my entire abdomen; this tightly scheduled and diligently overseen squeeze, signaled by the unfocused bulging of my eyes and a series of breath retentions, was a triumph for a my mother, a sign of competency in a world that framed her as largely incompetent.

When I was born, dragged out with forceps, my mother reeling from ether, it was a rough and blinding entry into an alien world, with masked figures blurry and hovering around, all eyes and no mouths, moving me around like a hunk of dirty meat, wrapping me up in something before taking me to a nursery while my mother recovered for the next 7 or so days from her medically-induced ordeal. A crude and rude entry. One hell of a welcome. Most in my generation suffered much the same arrival procedure; a bummer of disembarkation painted over with the automated good cheer of being the first wave of baby boomers. Quantity supplanted quality in the popular imagination; more babies being born, year after year, until birth control pills became popular.

I could get into a rant about birthing procedures, but will resist for now. Things weren't much better after my hospital stay. The first nightmare I recall having occurred when I was two or three. I was walking across a hayfield on my parents' farm toward a chicken coop; our dog, a Cocker Spaniel, was with me. Suddenly, I realized that she had blank circles for eyes, as did all the people and creatures I passed in the field, just like Little Orphan Annie (a comic strip that fascinated me long before I could read). It wasn't a terrifying nightmare, but it still scared me. When I was four, I had a nightmare in which I was at a cousin's birthday party; a group of adults had their backs to me, and I found myself looking intently at one of them, an aunt of mine, who slowly turned around to face me. To my horror, I saw that she had not a human head, but rather that of an elephant. I saw the same face as an adult when I came across a picture of the Hindu deity Ganesha.

After that, my nightmares got much darker, sometimes happening while I was awake, as when I'd hear the hallway radio on, telling very frightening stories, which did not decrease in volume when I plugged my ears. I remember sometimes seeing one of my sisters sitting up in bed in the middle of the night; as she'd turn to look at me, I'd realize that “she” was not my sister, but rather something hideously far from human. Other times, awe overrode terror; I remember many nights seeing balls of vividly colored light floating through my room while my body-sense crazily ballooned, often to the point where my intensely tingling hands felt like enormous ten-ton weights and my body extended miles and miles beyond my bedroom. I shared none of this with anyone.

Terror eventually got the upper hand, reflecting the great fear I had of my father, coupled with my mother's unwillingness to protect me from him. There was no safety, other than in the elaborate fantasy worlds I created. But even those worlds could not remove me from my nightmares. Among those that were recurring, one stands out, which I suffered through at least once a week between the ages of four to nine...

I'm in my bedroom, full of dread, knowing what's coming. A damp grey mist chills the room. I feel helpless to alter what I know will very soon happen. The door silently opens, and my mother enters, looking at me. It's her, but not her. I'm terrified. As I stare at her, her face melts, then reforms grotesquely, misshapen beyond anything human. Finally, she moves toward me. I run to my bed, lie on it, and cover my eyes with my hands. I feel her standing over me, preparing to tear my hands away from my face so that I'll have to look at her. My terror is so intense that I awaken.

When this nightmare was over, I on rare occasions ran into my parents' bedroom seeking comfort. I was told that it was just a dream (I never told them what it was about), don't be upset, it's not real. One night, after a particularly frightening replay of my mother nightmare, I stumbled screaming into my parents' bedroom, somehow managing to tell them that I'd had a very scary dream. When I'd finished talking, they sat up and looked at me. There was a long pause, tense as a breath held too long, and then they turned into monsters! I screamed for release from the dream, and awoke.

The next time my mother dream returned, I didn't flee her metamorphosis. I faced her, feeling terrified but not helpless. I fought her, driving her away. Never again did I have this nightmare. I didn't trust my mother (even though she was my sole ally in my early years), and didn't begin facing the monstrousness of this until the time of the final dream. I had desperately wanted to trust her, had desperately wanted her to protect me, and had protected this wanting from the sting of insight as long as possible. And I'd also desperately wanted to protect her from my father, and was devastated and ashamed that I could not do so.

Again, the 1948 photo drifts by, yellowed but still clear. No monsters. Just an insecure young mother and her baby son. I can feel preschool-him hanging on to her, and I can feel her hanging on to him, finding in him a tenderness and safety that she did not feel with my father. More sadness washes through me. So long ago that time was, and yet here it is, right now, as I sit here just a few short weeks after my 60th birthday.

My father is now fading into senility, and my mother, in her mid 80s, is very frail, nearly half a foot shorter than when she held me in that old photo, due to a humping of her back that probably began when she was in her 20s and silently and unresistingly enduring my father's harsh criticisms of her. He was on her back. She never fought back. I wanted her to, and wanted to protect her from my father, and hated my inability to do this until I was in my teens, and as I remember this I feel a far-down sorrow flooding up through me, even as the whole dysfunctional scene draws forth from me a great compassion. My heart is raw. I let it be.

And into that rawness streams the visceral recognition of everything passing, on scales of every size; and my mortality, no longer just an idea, once again awakens me to what I really am. And now my sadness, my grief, my heart-hurt is but potently tender gratitude, gratitude to be alive, to be with Diane, to be able to make good use of my old pains, gratitude for simply being. Now all that's left is a prayer that asks for nothing, a prayer that is but pure thank you, a prayer effortlessly homing me.

JANUARY 12, 2008

SENTIMENTALITY AND CYNICISM

Sentimentality (a mix of overly dramatic emotional nostalgia and unwittingly insincere caring) and cynicism are not so different as they might appear. They are, in fact, secretly married. Sentimentality may play the softy, and cynicism the hardnose, but they are nonetheless under the same covers. They may be on opposite sides of the bed, but it's still their bed, regardless of its width.

Both are pretending to be other than they are, while pretending that they are not pretending: Where sentimentality masquerades as legitimate feeling (especially heart-centered feeling), cynicism masquerades as legitimate insight (especially no-nonsense insight).

Sentimentality produces an illusion of caring, cynicism an illusion of detachment.

Sentimentality is the refuge of a nostalgic child; cynicism is the refuge of an adult erated child. Both are strategies to avoid having to directly feel and be with pain.

What sentimentality clings to, cynicism pushes away. Or so it seems.

But look deeper, and notice how sentimentality, in its artificial closeness, actually pushes away (or creates distance from) what it is so convincingly fussing over. And also notice how cynicism, however indirectly, clings to (and in a sense is dependent on) what it is maligning or mocking; after all, a negative connection is still a connection.

Their marriage vows include not appearing in public together. When they copulate, they leave the lights off and their conditioning on. Both sometimes suspect that all is not well, but ignore such misgivings and merely continue fleshing out their programming, while their offspring moan in soundproof cells, torn between their parents, able to hold both only in guilt's stalemated darkness.

Sentimentality over-romanticizes relational connection, while cynicism mocks it.

Sentimentality is mushy, cynicism cutting. No wonder their common ground is so treacherous. False heart, false clarity, together populating a no-one's-land of unattended suffering.

What both basically have in common is the avoidance of authentic intimacy. Strip sentimentality and cynicism of their self-presentation, and what is left is simply the pain that spawned and underlies them, the pain that could awaken us to a deeper life if we were but to go to its core. To make that journey, we cannot afford to be sentimental (since it sucks the energy out of any forward momentum we may have), nor cynical (since it also sucks the energy out of any forward momentum we may have).

But make that journey we must, reaching through the jaded doubt and aberrated skepticism that animate cynicism, and through the romanticized pseudo-care and excessive emotionality that animate sentimentality, until we can feel, feel deeply and openly and consciously, feeling into and feeling for, embodying an emotional literacy that works synergistically with our cognitive, social, somatic, and spiritual dimensions. And where does this leave us? Where love and awareness function as one, serving the well-being of all.