(no subject)
"I place a great deal of emphasis on people really listening to each other, to what the other person has to say, because you very seldom encounter a person who is capable of taking either you or himself seriously…
Getting to know someone, entering that new world, is an ultimate, irretrievable leap into the unknown. The prospect is terrifying. The stakes are high. The emotions are overwhelming. The two people are reluctant really to strip themselves naked in front of each other, because in doing so they make themselves vulnerable and give enormous power over themselves on to the other. How often they inflict pain and torment upon each other! Better to maintain shallow, superficial affairs; that way the scars are not too deep. No blood is hacked from the soul.
But I do not believe a beautiful relationship has to end always in carnage, or that we have to be fraudulent and pretentious with one another. If we project fraudulent, pretentious images, or if we fantasize each other into distorted caricatures of what we really are, then, when we awake from the trance and see beyond the sham and front, all will dissolve, all will die or be transformed into bitterness and hate. I know that sometimes people fake on each other out of genuine motives to hold onto the object of their tenderest feelings. They see themselves as so inadequate that they feel forced to wear a mask in order continuously impress the second party…
I was twenty-two when I came to prison and of course I have changed tremendously over the years. But I had always had a strong sense of myself and in the last few years I felt I was losing my identity. There was a deadness in my body that eluded me, and though I could not exactly locate its site. I would be aware of this numbness, this feeling of atrophy, and it haunted the back of my mind. Because of the numb spot, I felt peculiarly off balance, the awareness of something missing, of a blank spot, a certain intimation of emptiness. Now I know what it was. After eight years in prison, I was visited by a woman, a woman who was interested in my work and cared about what happened to me. And since encountering her, I feel life, strength flowing back into that spot. My step, the tread of my stride, which was becoming tentative and uncertain, has begun to recover a definiteness, a confidence, a boldness which makes me want to kick over a few tables. I may even swagger a little, and as I read in a book somewhere, “push myself forward like a train”. ~ Eldridge Cleaver, “Soul on Ice”, Folsom Prison, October 9, 1965
Hot damn.
Why can’t it be that simple?
The past week has been a blur. In a good, very sweet way. My whole summer’s been a general blur but it’s all been good and sweet.
When my grandpa died life hit me hard. I felt totally smacked upside the head.
And it wasn’t that he passed. He was old.
It was the way in which he passed. Surrounded by his family, under a big tent, sharing food and drink with the people he loved. Jeez, what are the odds of that?! He didn’t die in his Connecticut home, alone, days passing, his body decomposing. Instead he was with all of us. It was a wedding. We were all there. So was he. That night I held my pop’s hand, I smelled his old, I heard him praise me. I took great pictures that night; I focused on him specifically, I have no idea why, but it was perfect when I uploaded the pictures a few weeks later. And again, I got smacked by life.
I believe in serendipity. I believe the human condition to be, at its deepest, most intimate core, nothing but a mix of ferocity and fragility. I believe so many of us are scared. We live in fear of ourselves. We live in fear of other peoples’ perceptions of us. Of the people we care about. We act too modest. We carry our guilt and shame like a badge. We end up distorting the human condition into some grotesque display of false intimacy and generalized quick fixes.
I stopped being scared after my nephew was killed. I'm not even sure what that means, but I did. It was conscious. I felt it happening.
I've always worn my heart on my sleeve *. It got pretty moshed. For a while there I thought I just might bleed to death. It was a slow, seeping bleed and an even slower heal, but four years later I'm happy to state that my heart's still hanging out there, fully intact. I feel little fear.
Other people will continue to baffle me, bedazzle me, touch me deeply, make me long and yearn, disappoint me. There will always be fraudulant pretention. And there will always be people whom I can only admire from a far, sadly, because although they could never be classified as fraudulant or prententious, they just might be classifibly petrified.
But god damn, I clean up pretty good.
* yeah yeah, cliché cliché, I know. I also have a tendency to over-romanticize everything and even be a tad trite and sentimental, too. But fuck, that’s the way I feel it. I can't help it that I got double smacked with whatever gene makes you feel and hear and see the world at an obscene volume. I just do my best.
Getting to know someone, entering that new world, is an ultimate, irretrievable leap into the unknown. The prospect is terrifying. The stakes are high. The emotions are overwhelming. The two people are reluctant really to strip themselves naked in front of each other, because in doing so they make themselves vulnerable and give enormous power over themselves on to the other. How often they inflict pain and torment upon each other! Better to maintain shallow, superficial affairs; that way the scars are not too deep. No blood is hacked from the soul.
But I do not believe a beautiful relationship has to end always in carnage, or that we have to be fraudulent and pretentious with one another. If we project fraudulent, pretentious images, or if we fantasize each other into distorted caricatures of what we really are, then, when we awake from the trance and see beyond the sham and front, all will dissolve, all will die or be transformed into bitterness and hate. I know that sometimes people fake on each other out of genuine motives to hold onto the object of their tenderest feelings. They see themselves as so inadequate that they feel forced to wear a mask in order continuously impress the second party…
I was twenty-two when I came to prison and of course I have changed tremendously over the years. But I had always had a strong sense of myself and in the last few years I felt I was losing my identity. There was a deadness in my body that eluded me, and though I could not exactly locate its site. I would be aware of this numbness, this feeling of atrophy, and it haunted the back of my mind. Because of the numb spot, I felt peculiarly off balance, the awareness of something missing, of a blank spot, a certain intimation of emptiness. Now I know what it was. After eight years in prison, I was visited by a woman, a woman who was interested in my work and cared about what happened to me. And since encountering her, I feel life, strength flowing back into that spot. My step, the tread of my stride, which was becoming tentative and uncertain, has begun to recover a definiteness, a confidence, a boldness which makes me want to kick over a few tables. I may even swagger a little, and as I read in a book somewhere, “push myself forward like a train”. ~ Eldridge Cleaver, “Soul on Ice”, Folsom Prison, October 9, 1965
Hot damn.
Why can’t it be that simple?
The past week has been a blur. In a good, very sweet way. My whole summer’s been a general blur but it’s all been good and sweet.
When my grandpa died life hit me hard. I felt totally smacked upside the head.
And it wasn’t that he passed. He was old.
It was the way in which he passed. Surrounded by his family, under a big tent, sharing food and drink with the people he loved. Jeez, what are the odds of that?! He didn’t die in his Connecticut home, alone, days passing, his body decomposing. Instead he was with all of us. It was a wedding. We were all there. So was he. That night I held my pop’s hand, I smelled his old, I heard him praise me. I took great pictures that night; I focused on him specifically, I have no idea why, but it was perfect when I uploaded the pictures a few weeks later. And again, I got smacked by life.
I believe in serendipity. I believe the human condition to be, at its deepest, most intimate core, nothing but a mix of ferocity and fragility. I believe so many of us are scared. We live in fear of ourselves. We live in fear of other peoples’ perceptions of us. Of the people we care about. We act too modest. We carry our guilt and shame like a badge. We end up distorting the human condition into some grotesque display of false intimacy and generalized quick fixes.
I stopped being scared after my nephew was killed. I'm not even sure what that means, but I did. It was conscious. I felt it happening.
I've always worn my heart on my sleeve *. It got pretty moshed. For a while there I thought I just might bleed to death. It was a slow, seeping bleed and an even slower heal, but four years later I'm happy to state that my heart's still hanging out there, fully intact. I feel little fear.
Other people will continue to baffle me, bedazzle me, touch me deeply, make me long and yearn, disappoint me. There will always be fraudulant pretention. And there will always be people whom I can only admire from a far, sadly, because although they could never be classified as fraudulant or prententious, they just might be classifibly petrified.
But god damn, I clean up pretty good.
* yeah yeah, cliché cliché, I know. I also have a tendency to over-romanticize everything and even be a tad trite and sentimental, too. But fuck, that’s the way I feel it. I can't help it that I got double smacked with whatever gene makes you feel and hear and see the world at an obscene volume. I just do my best.