Fire At the Top of the Fire-Escape
That was a question I considered for somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes.
I find myself asking, so often, what's at the top. I think I'm not the only one.
There was melted ice cream slicked across the sidewalk. It tastes no different after falling to ground. It tastes no different after it liquifies. But no one eats it. It's not enough just to say "I like ice cream." You should probably say, "I like ice cream that comes in some kind of container."
So many ideas are just different packagings for ignorance, no matter how their various proponents argue.
What's my packaging, or what's inside, I do not know.
J. saw me going past and hollered from across the street. I stopped and he showed me around his castle. He was sleeping in the courtyard of huge church down the way. I knelt down on the grass and listened to him talk about it for a while. The place was immensely calm, and serene, in the embrace of massive stone walls on three sides. The ground was level, and the grass was soft, and thick, almost like a thin mattress. "What are you going to do after school?" he said. "I have some friends in the research business I've gotten mixed up in." "Can you do me a favor? Can you research a way to re-grow hair?" J. pointed to the balding spot on the top of his head. "I'm going to get a tattoo there of a little man with a lawn mower."
I'm strangely apprehensive when I say "research." I said the same thing to Dr. K. "For so long, I just wanted a regular job, like regular folks," I sighed, in the shadow of the stairs. Dr. K. quoted Joseph Campbell's famous line, "Follow your bliss," but added, "people take that to mean that everything along the way is going to be pleasant and easy. But that's not what it means. You're far too brilliant, B__." This made me feel oddly sick to my stomach. "It puts you only a few notches above 'freelance artist' which is only one or two notches above 'beggar,' and I have nothing against beggars, but I feel I am too much of one already," is what I said. "You can face it, or you can try to avoid it," Dr. K. said. I looked up the stairwell and sighed very deeply. "I know. But sometimes I stop and ask myself, 'Why did it have to be this?'"
I have been asked several times lately how old I am. What I usually say is, "too old to be doing most of the things I am doing." Which, I think, is a good answer because that is what my age means to me these days: "Too old for this." I am only just now scraping my life together. Really, I am only just now, in this recent time, getting myself together. The rest of life is still in disarray. I still have not finished my undergraduate degree. I still share a house with my parents, which is a source of constant shame and frustration to me, even as I work up figures and means to finally provide a modest place of my own. I still spend my time alone, with myself, even after a very long, and very difficult, and very heartfelt friendship and partnership and love affair and engagement went horribly wrong. It doesn't matter to me how far I've come. It doesn't matter to me that I've done battle with so many devils, climbed up from a hell of blindingly brilliant psychoses and morbidly obscure doubts, that I've done things I never thought I would do, that I never thought I would myself here, today, even if that place seems to close to where I was before. Something pushes me onward, grueling.
If you arouse practice as if climbing the steps of enlightenment, not even a speck of dust will support your feet; you will be as far from true practice as heaven is from earth.(Eihei Dogen, in Guidelines for Studying the Way)
And I quietly tell myself, over and over, "It's easy. Don't strain. Just don't settle."
I give myself a lot of advice. I listen carefully, and follow all of it, as best I can.
"You know me. I'm a very peaceable, and mild-mannered person. The notion of competitive violence does not sound appealing." But then, also, "I know I've got some fight in me, and I want to see how much." I've got far more fight in me than I ever imagined. "But you are doing better," Sifu said. "But I want to keep doing better," I said.
I'm going to the sansho fights in Tulsa, Oklahoma at the end of June.
These are strange times. I enter competitive fights and admit to having holes in my heart. I'm demon-faced, dull and violent. I'm forlorn and teary-eyed and all touchy-feely. I'm sharp and square and efficient and bookish. I'm lax and idle and grinning and careless. I just assume that having holes in your heart is part of getting old. I never thought I would find myself having them, or admitting to it. You learn new things all the time.
"I'm going to get a tattoo of a little man pushing a lawnmower."
Old enough for the holes, but too old for the doubts, and the voids.
My bench in the park ticks like a clock with no regulation. The carpenter bees return to their holes at dark and keep burrowing through the night, clicking, ticking, chewing, drilling somewhere inside the planks, behind the small memorial plaque for one of the University's old groundskeepers.
What's at the top of the ladder? What's at the bottom of the hole? What do they do, inside the planks, beneath the ground, beyond the clouds?
I stood and looked up there, for a long time, up to the top of the ladder of the fire escape, but I couldn't see anything. There was a time in my life when I may have climbed up there to see what there was. Tonight I did not. What bothers me a little is that I don't know why, but for some reason I didn't wonder.
Perhaps I am just too old to know what's at the top.
I keep thinking of an unexpectedly moving account of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, which happens to be the second-worst industrial disaster in U.S. history. (The worst was the Texas City Disaster, in which a freighter loaded with ammonium nitrate exploded in the harbor, effectively destroying a large portion of the town.) I once read a haunting first-hand account of the fire, and sometimes I still go back over it.
"[...] As I looked up I saw a love affair in the midst of all the horror. A young man helped a girl to the window sill. Then he held her out, deliberately away from the building and let her drop. He seemed cool and calculating. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. Then he held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were as unresisting as if her were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity. Undoubtedly he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and his was only a terrible chivalry.
"Then came the love amid the flames. He brought another girl to the window. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upward-the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head.
"Thud-dead, thud-dead-together they went into eternity. I saw his face before they covered it. You could see in it that he was a real man. He had done his best."
I'm not much of a romantic. Sometimes it seems as if we all live our lives as if we were just plummeting from a window, trying to escape the flames. Maybe someone helps us, maybe we do it alone. But somehow, I'm not satisfied with just rhapsodizing tragedy, or with imagining that a few seconds of falling is the same as flying.
But it all ends with a quiet admonition to myself, "do your best."
Perhaps this is all far too candid for the Internet. But to be more candid still, I have no one to talk to. I think of this as if I was shouting into a deep well. At the very least, I don't think I've said anything that would hurt anyone's reputation, make me any enemies, or blemish my resume.
"... one blade of grass whispered to another, 'the king of Toga-Toga has two horns ...!'"
So I stood up on the concrete pillars and watched the storm blow in. I've never stood up on one of them before. I always looked down at the ramp, or down into the crevice that extends all the way to the ground level, and decided it was best to stay down. But tonight I stepped up and put my feet just about one meter higher than they've ever been and watched things come in, the brutish clouds brooding fast and angry beneath the base of the storm, cut quick and dark by the bolts of lightning. Powerful storms appear suddenly. Powerful storms make everything turn suddenly cold. Powerful storms are dark, too dark to see into.
"Don't look for the answer somewhere else!"
There's fire at the top of the fire-escape.
I find myself asking, so often, what's at the top. I think I'm not the only one.
There was melted ice cream slicked across the sidewalk. It tastes no different after falling to ground. It tastes no different after it liquifies. But no one eats it. It's not enough just to say "I like ice cream." You should probably say, "I like ice cream that comes in some kind of container."
So many ideas are just different packagings for ignorance, no matter how their various proponents argue.
What's my packaging, or what's inside, I do not know.
J. saw me going past and hollered from across the street. I stopped and he showed me around his castle. He was sleeping in the courtyard of huge church down the way. I knelt down on the grass and listened to him talk about it for a while. The place was immensely calm, and serene, in the embrace of massive stone walls on three sides. The ground was level, and the grass was soft, and thick, almost like a thin mattress. "What are you going to do after school?" he said. "I have some friends in the research business I've gotten mixed up in." "Can you do me a favor? Can you research a way to re-grow hair?" J. pointed to the balding spot on the top of his head. "I'm going to get a tattoo there of a little man with a lawn mower."
I'm strangely apprehensive when I say "research." I said the same thing to Dr. K. "For so long, I just wanted a regular job, like regular folks," I sighed, in the shadow of the stairs. Dr. K. quoted Joseph Campbell's famous line, "Follow your bliss," but added, "people take that to mean that everything along the way is going to be pleasant and easy. But that's not what it means. You're far too brilliant, B__." This made me feel oddly sick to my stomach. "It puts you only a few notches above 'freelance artist' which is only one or two notches above 'beggar,' and I have nothing against beggars, but I feel I am too much of one already," is what I said. "You can face it, or you can try to avoid it," Dr. K. said. I looked up the stairwell and sighed very deeply. "I know. But sometimes I stop and ask myself, 'Why did it have to be this?'"
I have been asked several times lately how old I am. What I usually say is, "too old to be doing most of the things I am doing." Which, I think, is a good answer because that is what my age means to me these days: "Too old for this." I am only just now scraping my life together. Really, I am only just now, in this recent time, getting myself together. The rest of life is still in disarray. I still have not finished my undergraduate degree. I still share a house with my parents, which is a source of constant shame and frustration to me, even as I work up figures and means to finally provide a modest place of my own. I still spend my time alone, with myself, even after a very long, and very difficult, and very heartfelt friendship and partnership and love affair and engagement went horribly wrong. It doesn't matter to me how far I've come. It doesn't matter to me that I've done battle with so many devils, climbed up from a hell of blindingly brilliant psychoses and morbidly obscure doubts, that I've done things I never thought I would do, that I never thought I would myself here, today, even if that place seems to close to where I was before. Something pushes me onward, grueling.
If you arouse practice as if climbing the steps of enlightenment, not even a speck of dust will support your feet; you will be as far from true practice as heaven is from earth.(Eihei Dogen, in Guidelines for Studying the Way)
And I quietly tell myself, over and over, "It's easy. Don't strain. Just don't settle."
I give myself a lot of advice. I listen carefully, and follow all of it, as best I can.
"You know me. I'm a very peaceable, and mild-mannered person. The notion of competitive violence does not sound appealing." But then, also, "I know I've got some fight in me, and I want to see how much." I've got far more fight in me than I ever imagined. "But you are doing better," Sifu said. "But I want to keep doing better," I said.
I'm going to the sansho fights in Tulsa, Oklahoma at the end of June.
These are strange times. I enter competitive fights and admit to having holes in my heart. I'm demon-faced, dull and violent. I'm forlorn and teary-eyed and all touchy-feely. I'm sharp and square and efficient and bookish. I'm lax and idle and grinning and careless. I just assume that having holes in your heart is part of getting old. I never thought I would find myself having them, or admitting to it. You learn new things all the time.
"I'm going to get a tattoo of a little man pushing a lawnmower."
Old enough for the holes, but too old for the doubts, and the voids.
My bench in the park ticks like a clock with no regulation. The carpenter bees return to their holes at dark and keep burrowing through the night, clicking, ticking, chewing, drilling somewhere inside the planks, behind the small memorial plaque for one of the University's old groundskeepers.
What's at the top of the ladder? What's at the bottom of the hole? What do they do, inside the planks, beneath the ground, beyond the clouds?
I stood and looked up there, for a long time, up to the top of the ladder of the fire escape, but I couldn't see anything. There was a time in my life when I may have climbed up there to see what there was. Tonight I did not. What bothers me a little is that I don't know why, but for some reason I didn't wonder.
Perhaps I am just too old to know what's at the top.
I keep thinking of an unexpectedly moving account of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, which happens to be the second-worst industrial disaster in U.S. history. (The worst was the Texas City Disaster, in which a freighter loaded with ammonium nitrate exploded in the harbor, effectively destroying a large portion of the town.) I once read a haunting first-hand account of the fire, and sometimes I still go back over it.
"[...] As I looked up I saw a love affair in the midst of all the horror. A young man helped a girl to the window sill. Then he held her out, deliberately away from the building and let her drop. He seemed cool and calculating. He held out a second girl the same way and let her drop. Then he held out a third girl who did not resist. I noticed that. They were as unresisting as if her were helping them onto a streetcar instead of into eternity. Undoubtedly he saw that a terrible death awaited them in the flames, and his was only a terrible chivalry.
"Then came the love amid the flames. He brought another girl to the window. Those of us who were looking saw her put her arms about him and kiss him. Then he held her out into space and dropped her. But quick as a flash he was on the window sill himself. His coat fluttered upward-the air filled his trouser legs. I could see that he wore tan shoes and hose. His hat remained on his head.
"Thud-dead, thud-dead-together they went into eternity. I saw his face before they covered it. You could see in it that he was a real man. He had done his best."
I'm not much of a romantic. Sometimes it seems as if we all live our lives as if we were just plummeting from a window, trying to escape the flames. Maybe someone helps us, maybe we do it alone. But somehow, I'm not satisfied with just rhapsodizing tragedy, or with imagining that a few seconds of falling is the same as flying.
But it all ends with a quiet admonition to myself, "do your best."
Perhaps this is all far too candid for the Internet. But to be more candid still, I have no one to talk to. I think of this as if I was shouting into a deep well. At the very least, I don't think I've said anything that would hurt anyone's reputation, make me any enemies, or blemish my resume.
"... one blade of grass whispered to another, 'the king of Toga-Toga has two horns ...!'"
So I stood up on the concrete pillars and watched the storm blow in. I've never stood up on one of them before. I always looked down at the ramp, or down into the crevice that extends all the way to the ground level, and decided it was best to stay down. But tonight I stepped up and put my feet just about one meter higher than they've ever been and watched things come in, the brutish clouds brooding fast and angry beneath the base of the storm, cut quick and dark by the bolts of lightning. Powerful storms appear suddenly. Powerful storms make everything turn suddenly cold. Powerful storms are dark, too dark to see into.
"Don't look for the answer somewhere else!"
There's fire at the top of the fire-escape.