No matter how loud our voices may get, all arguments begin with silence.
I never did get back to the post I was working on yesterday morning. In the various arguments that I have with myself, or ex-friends, or the world at large, or my ex-fiancee, but mostly with myself…. I had punched myself out. I had gotten tired of it. I don’t know if I’ll return to it. It was/is a long, and winding argument that wonders whether at some point my ex-fiancee had stalker and abusive tendencies. Not because I had experienced any stalker-like behaviors, but because she had bandied about the words stalker and abusive as an accusation towards a couple of different people, her late husband, the guy she dated before me, me, and the guy she dated after me have all been described as either controlling, abusive, or like stalkers. In the “lady doth protest too much” sense, I had to give consideration to the psychological relationship between repression and projection. What we admire in other people we feel is missing in ourselves and what we dislike in other people is what we dislike in ourselves. The guy she dated after me mentioned in a long email to me that one time when he needed space, she blew up his phone with texts and showed up at his place unannounced. I knew she had been the one who proposed in her engagement to her ex-husband, and it seems like she may have followed another guy from city to city. At any rate – the post I was writing was/is a lot of speculation based on such a small understanding of psychology (I’m certainly an over-qualified expert). That is sarcasm, by the way. I haven’t gone back to re-read it, and while I was probably even-handed, I kinda felt…. what’s the point.
It was a consideration inspired by the Alanis Morissette song “You Oughta Know (Alternate Take)” – which has an a cappella piece at the end in which the narrator sneaks in to her ex’s apartment to have one last feel of his space and his life. Creepy, but done in a way that is apologetic and sentimental… and if taken as metaphor, this notion of jumping back in to a person’s life because it was at some point your life – is jarringly effective. Looking at old photos, or the little things around your own house could be very similar to sneaking in to their place. Again, I’m back at the room/house as a metaphor for the self and a relationship.
The post I did publish yesterday morning, very lightly skirted some of the same concepts – mainly the human tendency to analyze other people’s actions and motives (which was clearly what I was doing). There are, I suppose, a few ways we could view those tendencies. The harsh way would be to call people out on it and label them as judgemental. My one friend did this to me – said I was trying to find blame when I felt like I was searching for understanding. It was only after a series of texts that I learned I (and my relationship) had been judged by her many months prior. She accused me and disliked in me the things she had already done. This, to me, seems like a viewpoint that springs from distrust and insecurity.
Most people have a tendency to judge – it makes us feel good about ourselves, most people also deny being judgmental. It’s one of those things nobody likes and everybody does. The fear of being judged is also one of the reasons people avoid therapy and being able to talk without judgment is one of the reasons therapy works. Personally, I try hard to not be judgmental. I fail as often as everyone else does. I try to be aware of when I slip in to it. I’m sure there’s a long history of rebelling against judgmental authority figures in my life that has shaped my thinking on this…. Of course, there are other ways to view this tendency to analyze people and their motives – one that is not born out of a desire to judge bu instead arises out of curiosity and a true desire to understand. I want to know people’s motivations precisely so that I don’t write them off. It’s the difference between demanding “explain yourself” and asking “explain yourself?”
I’ve had a lot of trouble being concise these past few days. I haven’t attempted a new poem in over a week. I’ve skipped a few sky observations. I’ve gotten a little slack in my reading. I have also spent more time looking for jobs, and then feeling a little bummed that there aren’t a lot of jobs. The eight-year-old in me folds his arms across his chest, turns his head slightly up and to the side and says in backwards-hat defiance, work is stupid. I absolutely correlate the increased time spent looking for work with the decrease in reading which leads to a decrease in external stimulus and a decrease in writing creatively. The world of business and jobs is often about a Ben Franklinesque early bird getting the worm type of life. I hesitate to call it soul-sucking, but it’s the word that comes to mind. I have a few behaviors that I’m aware of enough to know how it will play out when I pursue them. If I don’t do all of my push-ups before I go for a run, I will very likely not do them after. If I play a video game, I will probably not follow through on things that require decent concentration (reading or writing). If I start looking for jobs, I will interrupt myself throughout the day to look for new postings. If I find myself in this distracted mood, I will open up things like Facebook and dating apps on and off throughout the day or night, constantly looking for easy stimulus.
While not a major revelation, I started this blog (though deleted it) years ago because I had become more aware of how my attention span does and does not work. There are days when I have to fight to maintain deep attention – or perhaps more accurately, fight to avoid easy stimulation. It’s why sitting outside or on the sofa with my journal, a few books, and either a coffee (in the morning) or a drink (in the evening) has become important to my routine – it’s a deliberate carving out of space for thought and stimulation and a jumping between the two.
This morning I finished the essay on poems of complaint. It was my least favorite essay by far, but perhaps it’s because many of the examples didn’t speak to me. Though the closing example, the poem “Gas Station” by C.K Williams was enjoyable and Dunn’s closing of the essay spoke to me. In the poem, the narrator, a teen, is returning from New York where he and his friends had an encounter with a pimp and a woman (the pimp’s whore, wife, girl, or mother – a good use of ambiguity in the poem). The woman offers to take care of the boys for $2. For me, it’s amazing to be able to turn that phrase on its head in this way. The poet’s last lines are “How pure we were then, before Rimbaud, before Blake. / Grace. Love. Take care of us. Please.” This is both beautiful and ironic. Dunn writes, “And love is that much more meaningful when we’ve experienced those cheap, those rote, imitations of it.” He concludes with a few thoughts on the writer’s temperament. “We might say that this mind is constantly seeking to discover the extent of its involvement in what it’s describing.” He continues, “When a poet sits down to write, it’s useful (to paraphrase Faulkner) for the human heart to be in conflict with itself, and/or with something outside of it.” I still clutch at the thought of calling myself a writer – I feel I haven’t earned the title. And yet, I have this temperament, one in which my heart and mind are often in conflict with themselves. I suspect that we all have this conflict, we all experience these inner squabbles – and that’s what makes art (visual, music, verbal) so important. The creators (and I don’t consider myself to be among them – yet) are the ones who take the time to express what many of us felt at one point or another.
Sometimes as I read, a strange thing happens. Not only do I, occasionally, identify with what’s being said, but I sometimes identify on other people’s behalf. As best as I can tell, this is the locus of the urge to share. Which, in and of itself, is necessarily built on a deep knowing of another. Gifts, when we give them, can be a creative act. They are a way of saying I see you, I know you, I understand the things that you care about and like and need. It’s hard to know people on that level. As a brief aside – when I order food from some of the BBQ joints around here, I’m sometimes reminded of the extremely thoughtful gift my ex-wife once gave to me – which was BBQ from Rendezvous and Central BBQ (two places here in Memphis), and hot dogs from Portillo’s and pizza from Lou Malnati’s, both in Chicago. It will always be one of the nicer and more thoughtful gifts I’ve received. When you care about people, and know them, you think of them when you come across things that you think they would enjoy or would help them. For much of my life, I have not been good at this. I think of what to get the person when it’s the appropriate gift-giving time (Christmas or Birthday). I suppose we all do this from time to time, but imagine if we walked through the world a little differently, if we kept people front of mind more frequently. And sure, we’ve all had those moments when we see something and say so and so would love this or so and so would really relate to this. I suppose it’s the difference between generosity and selfishness. As much as I consider myself to be of a generous spirit, I see lots of areas in life where I could be more so. This too is something I learned from my ex-fiancee. She moved through the world in this manner (often thinking of other people) – at least more so than I did (with maybe one exception – which is how I thought about her – always thinking what she might like or enjoy). Which brings me back to the statement at the top of this long paragraph – quite often when I read, I identify things on her behalf and wish I could share them with her. I believe she has the writer’s temperament. I believe we both struggle with hearts and minds in conflict.
After finishing the one essay, I started in on the next, “A History of My Silence.” If the previous essay was a slog, this one felt like it was speaking directly to me – at least in some aspects. For one, I enjoyed learning that like me, Dunn was a solid C student. Dunn begins the essay by talking about a student who stuttered (who happens to be named Matthew).
I taught myself to wait, no matter how long it took, until Matthew finished his sentences. It was a gesture to myself, to the muted boy in me, as importantly selfish as therapy. Every sentence Matthew finished was a victory for both of us. I did not tell him this. When he wrote, how pleased he must have been that one word immediately followed another.
This is a poignant passage about how giving voice to another also honors our own best selves. It speaks volumes to the virtue of patience. Dunn relates other stories that contributed to his quiet, shy, silent nature and his finding his voice. He talks about his parents. He writes about how his father felt most comfortable at the bar and how the drinking upset his mother. How his father gave all of their money away to help out his father’s (Dunn’s grandfather) mistress and lied about it saying he lost it at the track. Dunn writes, “What happened at home seemed to corroborate what I experienced in books: people had secrets and secret lives.” in an elegy for his father he wrote:
Nights he’d come home drunk
mother would cook his food
and there’d be silence.
Thus, for years, I thought
all arguments were silent
and this is why silence
is what I arm myself with
and silence is what I hate….
Wow – he gets to the duality of himself pretty quickly, but also to the nature of arguments – how much plays in the head and in silence before words are ever spoken. He talks about how “theirs had been a good marriage until their early forties…” As I read these things, I thought about my ex-fiancee whose mother eventually turned to drinking and lost her beauty in her late forties (at least that’s how it was described to me). How her parents stayed together, though in her view it was a co-dependent relationship that she swore she would never repeat. I wanted to share these passages. I wanted to show her that I see her, that she’s not alone in thinking whatever it is that she thinks (about her parents, about her silence, about who she wanted to be before she fell in love, about her desire to find her own voice). These are the types of gifts I wish I could give her.
I haven’t finished the essay – I felt like I needed to get these ideas down. There were other lines / passages I underlined (because I’m allowing myself to write in my books):
I remember feeling especially powerless. Other people – teachers, parents, certainly my stronger peers – controlled the terms and conditions of my life. There was no philosophy behind my silence, no Gandhi-like rigor. What resources do the languageless have? The tantrum? The sulk? The knowing smile? The smirk? I wasn’t even good at those. Mostly my silence had shame in it, and impotence. I would have rebelled if I had been sure the enemy wasn’t myself.
To me, this reads as an amazingly authentic admission. I suspect many people can relate to not having control or agency over their circumstances; to not having the right language to express powerlessness. How many of us have resorted to the tantrum or the sulk or the guilt trip or the passive-aggressive when what we’re trying to say is “not fair” or “I would like more control over this”? Some psychologists believe that shame is the root of most of our negative emotions. We feel a sense of shame when we’re powerless – like we should be stronger or better or behave differently.
Before reading this essay about finding your voice and before comparing the sky to the gills of a shark, I wrote in my journal: How to confront my own feeling of being a fraud. I was part-way through the essay about complaint poetry, and found myself struggling with two of the examples. And when I say struggling, it’s not just in getting the meaning out of the poem, but it’s about properly appreciating the poem (and who defines proper appreciation). It’s an internal struggle triggered when someone in a position of authority, Dunn, tells me something is good, and I don’t quite see it. I suddenly feel the criticism of my father – I’m not well-read enough, I’m not serious enough. Just the other day he was telling me about how he’s reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I’ve never read it. It’s one of those big books I avoid because I’m afraid it will make me feel stupid. I was a decent acquisitions editor, because I knew I wasn’t good or smart enough compared to the academics I was working with and that made me good at faking it. How do we overcome the various manifestations of shame?
By trying to find the authentic voice within, I suppose.
Thanks for reading. I don’t think I’ve ever said that to you – thank you.