Faith

I talk about my Judaism a lot, but I don't often talk with people about my strong and abiding faith, that is to say, my belief in God.  But I was talking this morning with a friend whose belief in God is also deep and abiding, and I felt a little relief.  Talking directly and specifically about my relationship with God, out loud.  Just a little.  I'm posting a fragment of my side of the conversation just so I won't forget:

"The Rabbinic chaplain of the NYPD (an amazing old man, full of what we call "kavanah") came to the wake and held a small service for us.  He chanted the El Malei Rachamim and said Kaddish, and gave a homily.  The ancient words really do give so much comfort to me.  I had felt at sea in traditions that were not mine, as I tried my best to do the right thing for Alex, in the hour of his death.  But I felt so alienated.  The Rabbi helped anchor me so I could continue on, a little strengthened.

I don't know.  My thoughts are all over the place.  I know I need some grief support, especially to help me work through my agony over the moments of death, I mean the details of the sudden horrible dying and my fears and deep guilt and regret over having failed him.  But I also need God.  I'm working my way to Him, I'm almost afraid of Him, I don't want to be rejected and I've never before asked for succor in a situation like this.  I tiptoe up to Him and whisper something, then I run away again, shy and worried.  Do you know what I mean? It's such a strange feeling, to feel shy and frightened of God, but at the same time to need Him as much as I do."

Just a fragment.  That's all for now.

Thy Firmness Makes My Circle Just

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away, 

   And whisper to their souls to go, 

Whilst some of their sad friends do say 

   The breath goes now, and some say, No: 

So let us melt, and make no noise, 

   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move; 

'Twere profanation of our joys 

   To tell the laity our love. 

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears, 

   Men reckon what it did, and meant; 

But trepidation of the spheres, 

   Though greater far, is innocent. 

Dull sublunary lovers' love 

   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit 

Absence, because it doth remove 

   Those things which elemented it. 

But we by a love so much refined, 

   That our selves know not what it is, 

Inter-assured of the mind, 

   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss. 

Our two souls therefore, which are one, 

   Though I must go, endure not yet 

A breach, but an expansion, 

   Like gold to airy thinness beat. 

If they be two, they are two so 

   As stiff twin compasses are two; 

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show 

   To move, but doth, if the other do. 

And though it in the center sit, 

   Yet when the other far doth roam, 

It leans and hearkens after it, 

   And grows erect, as that comes home. 

Such wilt thou be to me, who must, 

   Like th' other foot, obliquely run; 

Thy firmness makes my circle just, 

   And makes me end where I begun. 

Heartbeat

The first time we spent the night together, at Swarthmore, on that silly futon of mine that was not even 3/4 of a twin bed, I put my head on your warm chest and listened to your heartbeat.  It was strong, I mean it was really strong, it was so outrageously bold just like you were.

Call-and-response

In the emergency room, after they called your time of death (which was strange, because I saw the moment when you died with me, and that moment was an hour earlier; I watched as your brain stopped all thought and your eyes became fixed and dilated, though the men continued working to keep a heartbeat for you, that could no longer keep itself), a wail loosened and I couldn't stop calling your name and your epithet: darling darling Alex darling Alex darling

In the waste of cold lights and twisted sheets and metal things, you  couldn't answer me

I took your dead hand in mine and suddenly, beyond the wailing, there began a chorus of voices,  a sea of crumpled people in the curtained beds all around us, reedy thin hesitant voices "I'm sorry" "I'm sorry" "I'm sorry" locked with my voice in the call-and-response of a blues song as old as human memory

Spooked

Leave My Mind Alone Part II

I drew this Ouroboros.  I thought a lot about it, read some Jung, and was going to try for a soul-searching and well-crafted post about Infinity.  Or duality of the soul.  Or Destruction/Regeneration. Or something.  Instead my mind went to a practical place, and an eternal struggle in which I engage: when do I hold forth, and when should I prudently shove something in my mouth and bite down hard, in order to keep my opinions to myself?

This comes up a lot, in Interspace.  It came up recently when I read someone angrily defending the Dog Festivals as legitimately of cultural and historical significance.  It came up when I read someone else lamenting the time wasted, and the boredom they experienced, watching 12 Years a Slave, followed up immediately by a recounting of a lovely day spent at the museum, and the inconvenience of having carpets shampooed.  It comes up when I read people defending nazis, insulting fat people.  It comes up when I see hypocrisies, micro-aggressions, sexism, racism, thinly veiled or outright anti-semitism, cruelty both general and ad hominem.

Some of the things that bother me are objective wrongs (though clearly my definition of "objective wrong" is sometimes different from other people, and vice versa, which leads us to a discussion of Absolute and Relative, and never mind).  Some of the things that bother me are things I think are wrong, but am willing to acknowledge (with some resentment) may legitimately not be everyone's idea of wrong, like political opinions.  Then there are the things that bother me that are so deeply buried in layers of outward okayness that to rail against them would require theses and footnotes and an audience willing to hear me out.  That way lies madness.

But in fact, when you get down to it, all ways lead to madness.  You would think that when people call a plus-size model a "disgusting beached whale," that would be a place someone could speak up.  And yet, when people do, it becomes an ever-increasing frustration of counter-attacks that devolve into meaningless ALL CAPS.  Because who among the righteous can let it go gracefully? I see it all the time.  I feel for them, but it's awful to watch.   The woman who said that "12 Years a Slave felt like 20," well she thought she was being funny.  Do I want to tangle with her and her image of herself as an avocational humor writer? She's not going to let that bit of self-definition go, probably not ever. The woman who defended eating live-boiled dogs as being historically meaningful to her culture of remote origin? Standing up for one's cultural heritage becomes a moral high ground, at least superficially, and no matter how ludicrous.

So when to speak up?

There are those who always do, on both sides of my definition of Right and Wrong.  Those people are, in our current time and place, the cyber equivalent of that old jokey character, the Consummate Letters-to-the-Editor Writer.  For the sake of my sanity, I have to avoid this ever-deepening & widening infinite regress of Holding Forth.  As it is, I come dangerously close to the edge of that abyss.  There are those who choose more carefully.  And there are those who don't speak up at all.  I admire those people.  I kind of love meeting someone whose opinions are so closely guarded that you really have no idea what they're thinking (though of course, that can backfire in the jump-scare of a sudden weighing-in, along the lines of, say, "not only do Jews have no right to their own country, they don't have a right even to exist!").

Good to get this off my chest.  I think when all is said and done, a wise rule of thumb for me is:

"Leah, stuff something in your mouth, bite down hard, and walk away fast."

Genuine Gratitude

Lessons in Journal Writing

The little spiral-bound nature notebook has lived for decades in a corner of the long middle drawer in the tall hutch in the livingroom of the lake house.  I take it out once a year, to admire and remember.   I made this with ma, the summer I was four.  My first journal.  I remember drawing the salamander and dictating my observations.  Ma learned that really regular, clear classroom handwriting at Teachers College.

Ma taught me to read and write, and write things down in notebooks, things I saw and felt and thought about.  She taught me to save the notebooks so I could look at them later and remember the things I'd seen and felt.  She taught me tidy handwriting, so that other people could read it, and I could share what I'd written. She taught me to look closely at details of things and she taught me how to use adjectives.  She taught me to use a good #2 pencil with a good clean eraser so that mistakes could be fixed.  And she taught me how to hold the pencil.  Later she taught me that a writing pen should be a good pen, but a good pen didn't need to be an expensive pen, just a pen whose flow I liked.  She taught me that if I made a mistake when using a pen, to cross out my mistake with firm lines and keep going.

Leave My Mind Alone

In an almost unbelievably prescient scene from The Man Who Fell to Earth, the alien watches 12 tv screens at once, gorging willingly on the visual and aural input until he cannot stand it any longer, and shouts into the overwhelming din, "get out of my mind, all of you! Leave my mind alone!"

These words come to me all the time.   All the time. The bank of fat homely tube t.v.s, so different in their analog nostalgia from my smooth flat little phone, nevertheless deliver the same nightmarish onslaught of arbitrary information.  Other people's photos.  Other people's lives.  Their dinners their politics their purchases their angers hurts fears.  All of music ever.  All of art, science, human tragedy.  Recipes.  Memes.  Hatred.  Bigotry.  Funny dogs.  The dress I want, the shoes my girl wants, Anne Frank quotes, the answer to the question "what movie featured Donald O'Connor on roller skates?" Limitless stores of pettiness and profundity, all piling up in my fragile suggestible mind, edging out me.

The Alien had a reason for staring at the 12 t.v.s.  He was trying to learn about what it means to be human.  I don't know why I do it, is it empty compulsion, is it just like the Tetris bricks that fell in that inexorable way, ultimately even in my dreams? Or is it meaningful compulsion, a way to drown out the noise of personal terror with the noise of a thousand other voices not my own?

...what will happen if they leave my mind alone?

Maya & Leah

My secret relationship with Maya Angelou began when I was a young girl, decades ago. Ours was a troubled friendship, if you could call it that. Maya, of course, never knew Leah.

She was such an obviously grand woman, I know this: someone whose words, whose lovely interesting face, whose very presence on this earth brought comfort and hope to so many people it's almost hard to grasp the meaning of such a multitude. Yet to me Maya Angelou--the name, the face, the words--threw down the gauntlet of a fierce and hurting challenge that I have not been able to meet.

In a middle school English class we were given her autobiography "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." In what seemed at the time I am sure, to the teacher and probably other students, a silly and overly precious move, I took a stand and insisted, along with a classmate, that the book contained material inappropriate for my age, and I refused to read it. My school being what it was, a place where children were listened to and (albeit haphazardly) taken seriously, the teacher agreed that I could substitute another book.

In reality though, my reason for rejecting Maya's book was not silly, though I could not honestly articulate the truth behind this angry and willful rejection, even to myself. Now I know: I didn't want to, I didn't want to discuss in a room full of children, the rape scene that lay at the dark heart of the book. I had, in private, looked through the pages and I had read the words. But I wanted to undo it. Make it unread. I couldn't read it, I wouldn't. I wanted to rip, to burn, that book. I wanted to kill that book. I wanted to stamp my feet in a baby tantrum and cover my ears and eyes and throw myself down on the battered linoleum floor of the classroom and scream, "NO!" And I wanted to keep screaming until someone finally thought to ask me why I was screaming; and at the same time I wanted them to ignore the screams and look away from my terror.

Such was the mind of a child who had herself been raped, who had lived in a trembling silence of gutting shame and fear for years.

I hated that book, and I hated Maya, almost as much as I despised the one who had abused the small me. I hated her confessional, because it wasn't my confessional. I hated her bravery, because it wasn't my bravery. I hated her hope because I had none.

As so often happens, abuse followed abuse. There were other men who took opportunity to hurt me sexually. By the time I was 13, I had been sexually used and abused to varying degrees by more than one grown man. By first grade, I truly saw myself as a seductress. And by early adolescence I knew it had all been my fault.

But I never did tell anyone.

Through the dark secretive years, Maya's words continued to haunt my thoughts, and to fill me with a confused fury. Her luminous and open and generous existence was a living reproach to my own lies, my tiny fearful life, always so tightly controlled and full of self-hatred.

Phenomenal woman, and rainbows, and kindness, grace, courage, self-reckoning and insight. Living the best life possible, ultimately undefeated. A powerful self and a powerful self-acceptance. I have always realized, of course, that for Maya, all this was hard won, and then only through extreme adversity.

But still, painfully, my own story to date doesn't come fully to a place of hope.

I cried, when I read that Maya was dead. She has been my companion for so long, though I can hardly read her words and have to look away from her strong face. But I have a certainty that she would accept the notion of a woman-in-progress, always in progress. As I am.