INTO THE FEN
I often wonder how the very next essay will form or coalesce in mind, how I will stumble-slosh through the reeds into the marsh and maybe end up on a slippery embankment not even imagined before entering the bog. In a few minutes I will go to the local community gym to meet with a physical fitness trainer which is my attempt at remaining mortal for the time left to me. With walking an hour a day and incorporating strength training perhaps my cardiovascular disease will ease, but that is a self-taught aspiration which has no basis in fact. What will be, will be. The doctor did tell me I was at risk. I have been at risk, philosophically, since I bumped and slid from out my mother’s vagina, the neonate’s chute. Harold Bloom has opined wisely that we all are “near-death experiences.” I think the idea here is to be in the best physical shape one can be in when the Grim Reaper strikes. After all, I don’t want his dull blade to strike flint but the side-thickened wizened slab that I have become.
A few moments ago I looked up an old classmate from 1958(!) on Facebook and found her and her hubby with grandchildren in a Florida town. I did this for a welter of reasons, not to be shared, but redolent of poignancy and adolescent suffering still with me. What age has done to that remarkable beautiful face she had in the spring of 1958. Growing old and aging sadly creases us into leathery cocoons, but I am sure that the young woman I knew then has something of the fire within, although I had admired her only from afar. In fantasy I want to rescue that maiden from all the years, slap her heart-shaped tush onto the back of my snorting black steed bedecked in medieval armor and garb, and spur away like Scott’s Lochinvar:
O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west,
Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;
And, save his good broadsword, he weapon had none,
He rode all unarmed, and he rode all alone.
So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,
There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.
If she were to gaze upon my now-baggy face, if she tried, she might see the young man who asked her – in fear, in fright, under pressure – out to the prom, which she refused. This kind of rejection is never forgotten, just filed under miscellany. Computers ping one another. Humans pang one another. All of this is amusing or poignant for me, like the dusk on a pastoral summer’s day which ends and is forever gone. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may….”
The remembrances of things past are oftentimes piercing arrows to the heart. Oh, Christendom flee my mind! Too many icons come to mind from Western Civilization. Christ figures with torture scars, impalements, brows with thorns seeping blood. The morbidity of it all makes me move on. Jews say “To Life” when they toast; Christians are into raising Lazarus.
To look back to my senior year in 1958 speaks more of poignancy, shyness, male ineptitude, adolescence, the abysmal lack of social skills, the inhibitions and the fears of intimacy, of touch, of sweet opportunities missed because of the failed internal assessment of who I was and what I could do or be. Freud somewhere wrote that nothing is forgotten, and that is a telling observation. We often lie to ourselves in such ways to deny that maxim. On some levels we choose not to recall. We camouflage ourselves like the hunter in the blind. “Blind” is so apt.
As I look back, as I think of 1958, I am a child in a young man’s body. Retrospectively I cringe at who I was; retrospectively I have compassion for who he was. If I had him in treatment as the therapist I became, I would have helped him visit who he was, to mature, to enter the world. I also have learned that if I were not who I was, I would not have had the compassion I hopefully evinced as a therapist. Much should be said about a healthy dose of adversity in each of our lives. The cliche is not a cliché. As we come closer to our end the beginnings of our life loom large, become sharper and sharper, each living crystal so very telling, like Kane’s snow globe.
I enter the mood, I feel the anguish and I resolve to come out of it, for life would be onerous if we spent our days repairing old brickwork. I associate to a story about Winston Churchill who suffered periodically throughout his life from depression, what he called his “black dog.” What he did was to, using a trough filled with mortar, construct brick walls. Metaphorically this anecdote is imbued with all kinds of Freudian hypotheses, but it worked for him. A strong measure of fantasy comes to mind, the what ifs, in which I construct little scenarios: if I had married this one or that one; if I had at least dated this one or that, I might have grown up sooner if I had been in a relationship of any kind. But it was not to be. Those years are beyond indelible. The sexual, emotional and psychological frustration cannot be expressed by words, although I can feel them even now, a substrate in my being. We must admit as writers that words cannot say it all.The best we can ask for is an approximation of the felt truth. Krishnamurti said it best, “The word is not the thing itself.”
As I reconnoiter the undiscovered territory I lived in, who I am has changed so much that distortion is the rule and illusion the axiom. I had a friend all through high school and into college, and then we just drifted away from one another as often happens. His life was fairly regular if not routine; he may or may not be dead. However, I fantasize that he lived the bell curve and probably is retired someplace, perhaps in Florida. In my imagination I don’t think he has cheated on his wife as I have done; nor has he expressed much discontent in his life. I don’t think he has questioned authority profoundly in his life; I think he has been contented with being an elementary school teacher, perhaps going on to be an administrator (whoopee!). I hear the envy in these words. All this is an unfair put down of him. For I have led a life of disarray and discontentment. No need to compare. I just feel I have had the more arduous task and I have paid the highest costs in terms of relationships and deaths of loved ones, too soon in their lives, and in my own. And I have made a significant contribution to my own misfortunes. I feel shame rather than guilt at my character flaws, Japanese shame. I rarely let myself off the hook.
If the prisoner flees his cell, the cell is always with him. [The Jewish people still remember their slavery at Passover after 56 centuries.]My days of yore are always with me. I can only say that I have grown comfortable with my cell and I would not exchange it for anyone else’s. That’s a happy closing which doesn’t make me too happy, but there it is.
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