Fighting back with an embrace. Thank you ever so.
And your beauty is just a slap in the face
That's gonna bring me back to life
Back to another sky that's blue
It's gonna turn me into another
Great American zombie
-Mark Eitzel
At some point in twelfth grade it occurred to me that I lack(ed?) sympathy. It was one of those things that suddenly hits you that you repeat over and over again to yourself because it feels profound to you but really isn't much to anyone else. If I remember correctly, I first saw my non-sympathy when interacting with my mother around that time. As I watched her dying as an abstract person I had very little reaction to it. Strangely, it didn't stir anything within me as far as overt sadness or pity, it just made me angry. That anger soon became a bitter type of resignation towards nearly everything. By resignation I mean a gradual acceptance of my impotence to change the constitution of the people (and the world) around me. It started seeming to me that all I could change or help with were physical things, e.g. changing a car's oil or other favors, and that those emotional things, those pillars of a person's personality, could not be altered by myself. The acceptance of that ostensibly made it easy for me to, in effect, give up on other people and push aside their problems as something out of my control, a very good move if I can say so. A savior I am not nor do I want to be. I want to have relations with people already sane, without the need of intensive therapy, people that already come to you changed. Yet, it takes me a little while to find new people and in the interpersonal waiting room, I stood around not feeling for people with problems, not wanting to help them, instead feeling repulsed by them and resigning on behalf of helping them, giving them the choice to change or not independent my desires or hopes. At first my compassionless sentiments felt quite awful. For some reason I considered sympathy some type of higher emotion, but it stopped seeming that way to me the more I considered it.
Mulling over that concept of impotence, I soon convinced myself that I had practiced resignation earlier in my life as well. Hearing at fifteen that my parents were separating did not cause me to feel anything really, I merely accepted it and did feel too much one way or the other. Now that I think about it, that reaction had little to do with lacking sympathy and more to do with my all too constant work of preserving the status quo. Nonetheless, at the time it seemed to me a clear indicator of my surrender and complete absence of sympathy for other people. Compassion existed to me as some type of rare commodity I once had as a child but now too expensive--like an import cd not worth its bloated sticker price. Truly at that time I saw myself as dead inside, without the capacity to feel for another person. But that started to seem incorrect. More and more I started recalling moments when other people's feelings brought out a reaction within myself. What I had been stupidly focused upon were those people I could not feel for because in my notions of the world they did not deserve it--sympathy, whether or not a higher emotion, does not have a blanket application no matter how lonely or miserable they might be. Moreover, it became increasingly important to me to recall those couple of moments when compassion hit me in the way it does after reading Selby or Chekhov but in an even more intense fashion due to personal relevance.
Chronologically the first experience of sympathy I remember happened right after my parents got divorced, right in the beginning of the separation. Someone thought at that time that it would be a good idea if our four-person family unit all went together to a therapist. So, we did. Without thinking about it, without really being honest about the goodness in the idea or the willingness of every person to participate, we went. We went and we played a board game. True, we could have stayed at home to do this but I suppose therapists consider children to be retarded when it comes to expressing emotional concerns so they throw games at them to make them feel comfortable when it leads to anything but comfort. Anyways, we all sat around and played a game in silence except for the occasional irascible remark, "It's your move. Go." My mom sat there on Neurotin not really aware of the world while my dad sat in his hackneyed general notions thereby removing them from the situation. My brother sat there concerned and the catalyst for the meeting while I sat a little alienated, needing therapy for myself, but not for anything related to the divorce which washed over me without any wet stains. So we all just sat there moving plastic pieces until the game finished and the talking began, the superficial discourse that allowed everyone to leave without gaining anything. I do not remember all the details of the conversation (autobiographies must have terrible inaccuracies in their reproduced conversations) but a couple things stand out: our therapist lady refused to argue with my brother, she said something along the lines of "I don't think anyone should be sad," and at one point my brother said something about not wanting to be alive. Right after he said that I decided to compulsively say something after staying quiet for most of the visit. I believe that I asked, "Why does he have to stay alive if he doesn't want to?" I really could not think of why my brother needed to be miserable and alive if he did not want to and I wished I could let him leave the world in peace, but all I did was ask my question, love my brother a little more, and cry. I immediately cried uncontrollably after asking my question.
Next in my list of compassionate episodes comes the one with the lonely Asian girl I talked to all the time in ninth grade and then not at all after that year. She was raised by her grandparents (always a sign something went wrong in childhood with the parents) and she had many restrictions on her life. And, the easiest way to tell she was damaged happened when you'd try to touch her, not in a sexual way, just in a joking around way, which caused her to completely freak out and give off all kinds of nutty don't-touch-me-i've-been-abused energy. We had about four classes together so for one reason or another we talked all the time. I will not regale anyone with what we talked about except to relay the words in one e-mail she sent me. Right now it proves quite difficult to really relay back what she wrote for I only have a semi-vivid recollection of my reading of the e-mail. Mainly I remember my reaction to it. God, what the hell did she write? (Way to fuck things up Garrett.) Ah yes, she wrote about how rejected she felt by her parents and her grandparents and males and a duck. Once I read about how she found a nearly dead, injured duck in the La Ballona Creek and brought it home to nurse it secretly I fucking broke down. Once again I cried immediately and uncontrollably. I sat there at my computer screen with my ugly face contorted into a grimace of compassionate tearfulness while I quietly spoke to the gods asking them, "Why?" And as I sit here thinking about that, I doubt it, but I hope that my temporary lonely Asian friend found something worth living for.
Much more recently I met a girl whose life story made me weep for her, but even starting that sentence makes me need to stop it. Writing proves too incriminating: it lies right on the page in all its blank absoluteness. It leaves one without the possibility of saying, "No, I didn't say that, I really meant..." Very sadly I must refrain from speaking about experiences that occurred recently out of fear and out of slightly tactful considerations. Also, the person I will not discuss, now that I think of it, sounds an awful lot like my Asian friend. Eerily similar in fact. Lovely how that works out, how most of the people in your life have similar stories and experiences. Let me hope I do not become to her the people she has known in the past.
Being out in the world always elicits a remembrance of those aforesaid episodes. Whenever I feel alone within a group the thoughts come to me. Especially I wonder if everyone has a place in the world. Thoughts come to me about whether or not everyone will have a job for them, will have something fulfilling, will have other people to care for them; I wonder if everyone, especially the lowly, find life worth it. Eleanor Rigby plays in my head as I look at other people. It always surprises me that everyone will have a job, that the world, the uncaring world, will provide a spot for everyone to live on. How, I wonder, did all this develop, how did the system we operate under get accepted by enough people to make it something referred to as the "real world"? How does that happen, how do systems form so indistinctly but so forcefully and widely? How come the arbitrary values and practices of something like capitalism are not easier to alter even though they are not natural facts of life? Most work seems very unspecialized and interchangeable as far as labor goes so it all seems that what you give as far as a job is your time. You give away your free time, you offer it to someone else who doesn't care about you so that you can have something needed for functionality in society. They take away your time in order for you to survive out here. I want to give people back their time. But I hear people take their way of life seriously, and their playing into the system, their participation in society as an earnest endeavor. Why do I want it differently, why do I feel that it's not worth it many times to do what I don't want to so often? How did depravity become so enmeshed in who we are as social beings? I feel like I might be so wrong about everything. I want to know everyone has a place in the world. I want to know the world will hold everyone, but I know that it won't do so kindly, that sordidness lives with everyone but that many can find convincing convictions about the value of their existence. Please have that everyone. And then I see children. Aside from their laughter making me free I look at them and think about how they will die one day, how they will move to the loss of consciousness and how they will be disappointed by what reality provides as compared to what they hope for. I want no one to have anymore of them. I want the world to stop, I want to have the time to know something although I know that I probably never will and that nothing will stop for me. And then I see old people and I think about how close they are to death and how waking up everyday must be one terrible living paradox. I wonder if they have anything to tell and wistfully ruminate that they probably don't and that most people will tell you to find other people to love. So I fall in love with the world and I want to cry and then I am insulted on behalf of everyone I want to cry about and I hope that the goodness missing in the world will explode into the earth and kill us all. But I stop then. I have to stop--my thoughts only go so far before they reach nothing and fall away.
When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.
Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired - though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it's just
A compensating make-believe.
Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on - in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.
Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
--"Best Society" by Philip Larkin--
That's gonna bring me back to life
Back to another sky that's blue
It's gonna turn me into another
Great American zombie
-Mark Eitzel
At some point in twelfth grade it occurred to me that I lack(ed?) sympathy. It was one of those things that suddenly hits you that you repeat over and over again to yourself because it feels profound to you but really isn't much to anyone else. If I remember correctly, I first saw my non-sympathy when interacting with my mother around that time. As I watched her dying as an abstract person I had very little reaction to it. Strangely, it didn't stir anything within me as far as overt sadness or pity, it just made me angry. That anger soon became a bitter type of resignation towards nearly everything. By resignation I mean a gradual acceptance of my impotence to change the constitution of the people (and the world) around me. It started seeming to me that all I could change or help with were physical things, e.g. changing a car's oil or other favors, and that those emotional things, those pillars of a person's personality, could not be altered by myself. The acceptance of that ostensibly made it easy for me to, in effect, give up on other people and push aside their problems as something out of my control, a very good move if I can say so. A savior I am not nor do I want to be. I want to have relations with people already sane, without the need of intensive therapy, people that already come to you changed. Yet, it takes me a little while to find new people and in the interpersonal waiting room, I stood around not feeling for people with problems, not wanting to help them, instead feeling repulsed by them and resigning on behalf of helping them, giving them the choice to change or not independent my desires or hopes. At first my compassionless sentiments felt quite awful. For some reason I considered sympathy some type of higher emotion, but it stopped seeming that way to me the more I considered it.
Mulling over that concept of impotence, I soon convinced myself that I had practiced resignation earlier in my life as well. Hearing at fifteen that my parents were separating did not cause me to feel anything really, I merely accepted it and did feel too much one way or the other. Now that I think about it, that reaction had little to do with lacking sympathy and more to do with my all too constant work of preserving the status quo. Nonetheless, at the time it seemed to me a clear indicator of my surrender and complete absence of sympathy for other people. Compassion existed to me as some type of rare commodity I once had as a child but now too expensive--like an import cd not worth its bloated sticker price. Truly at that time I saw myself as dead inside, without the capacity to feel for another person. But that started to seem incorrect. More and more I started recalling moments when other people's feelings brought out a reaction within myself. What I had been stupidly focused upon were those people I could not feel for because in my notions of the world they did not deserve it--sympathy, whether or not a higher emotion, does not have a blanket application no matter how lonely or miserable they might be. Moreover, it became increasingly important to me to recall those couple of moments when compassion hit me in the way it does after reading Selby or Chekhov but in an even more intense fashion due to personal relevance.
Chronologically the first experience of sympathy I remember happened right after my parents got divorced, right in the beginning of the separation. Someone thought at that time that it would be a good idea if our four-person family unit all went together to a therapist. So, we did. Without thinking about it, without really being honest about the goodness in the idea or the willingness of every person to participate, we went. We went and we played a board game. True, we could have stayed at home to do this but I suppose therapists consider children to be retarded when it comes to expressing emotional concerns so they throw games at them to make them feel comfortable when it leads to anything but comfort. Anyways, we all sat around and played a game in silence except for the occasional irascible remark, "It's your move. Go." My mom sat there on Neurotin not really aware of the world while my dad sat in his hackneyed general notions thereby removing them from the situation. My brother sat there concerned and the catalyst for the meeting while I sat a little alienated, needing therapy for myself, but not for anything related to the divorce which washed over me without any wet stains. So we all just sat there moving plastic pieces until the game finished and the talking began, the superficial discourse that allowed everyone to leave without gaining anything. I do not remember all the details of the conversation (autobiographies must have terrible inaccuracies in their reproduced conversations) but a couple things stand out: our therapist lady refused to argue with my brother, she said something along the lines of "I don't think anyone should be sad," and at one point my brother said something about not wanting to be alive. Right after he said that I decided to compulsively say something after staying quiet for most of the visit. I believe that I asked, "Why does he have to stay alive if he doesn't want to?" I really could not think of why my brother needed to be miserable and alive if he did not want to and I wished I could let him leave the world in peace, but all I did was ask my question, love my brother a little more, and cry. I immediately cried uncontrollably after asking my question.
Next in my list of compassionate episodes comes the one with the lonely Asian girl I talked to all the time in ninth grade and then not at all after that year. She was raised by her grandparents (always a sign something went wrong in childhood with the parents) and she had many restrictions on her life. And, the easiest way to tell she was damaged happened when you'd try to touch her, not in a sexual way, just in a joking around way, which caused her to completely freak out and give off all kinds of nutty don't-touch-me-i've-been-abused energy. We had about four classes together so for one reason or another we talked all the time. I will not regale anyone with what we talked about except to relay the words in one e-mail she sent me. Right now it proves quite difficult to really relay back what she wrote for I only have a semi-vivid recollection of my reading of the e-mail. Mainly I remember my reaction to it. God, what the hell did she write? (Way to fuck things up Garrett.) Ah yes, she wrote about how rejected she felt by her parents and her grandparents and males and a duck. Once I read about how she found a nearly dead, injured duck in the La Ballona Creek and brought it home to nurse it secretly I fucking broke down. Once again I cried immediately and uncontrollably. I sat there at my computer screen with my ugly face contorted into a grimace of compassionate tearfulness while I quietly spoke to the gods asking them, "Why?" And as I sit here thinking about that, I doubt it, but I hope that my temporary lonely Asian friend found something worth living for.
Much more recently I met a girl whose life story made me weep for her, but even starting that sentence makes me need to stop it. Writing proves too incriminating: it lies right on the page in all its blank absoluteness. It leaves one without the possibility of saying, "No, I didn't say that, I really meant..." Very sadly I must refrain from speaking about experiences that occurred recently out of fear and out of slightly tactful considerations. Also, the person I will not discuss, now that I think of it, sounds an awful lot like my Asian friend. Eerily similar in fact. Lovely how that works out, how most of the people in your life have similar stories and experiences. Let me hope I do not become to her the people she has known in the past.
Being out in the world always elicits a remembrance of those aforesaid episodes. Whenever I feel alone within a group the thoughts come to me. Especially I wonder if everyone has a place in the world. Thoughts come to me about whether or not everyone will have a job for them, will have something fulfilling, will have other people to care for them; I wonder if everyone, especially the lowly, find life worth it. Eleanor Rigby plays in my head as I look at other people. It always surprises me that everyone will have a job, that the world, the uncaring world, will provide a spot for everyone to live on. How, I wonder, did all this develop, how did the system we operate under get accepted by enough people to make it something referred to as the "real world"? How does that happen, how do systems form so indistinctly but so forcefully and widely? How come the arbitrary values and practices of something like capitalism are not easier to alter even though they are not natural facts of life? Most work seems very unspecialized and interchangeable as far as labor goes so it all seems that what you give as far as a job is your time. You give away your free time, you offer it to someone else who doesn't care about you so that you can have something needed for functionality in society. They take away your time in order for you to survive out here. I want to give people back their time. But I hear people take their way of life seriously, and their playing into the system, their participation in society as an earnest endeavor. Why do I want it differently, why do I feel that it's not worth it many times to do what I don't want to so often? How did depravity become so enmeshed in who we are as social beings? I feel like I might be so wrong about everything. I want to know everyone has a place in the world. I want to know the world will hold everyone, but I know that it won't do so kindly, that sordidness lives with everyone but that many can find convincing convictions about the value of their existence. Please have that everyone. And then I see children. Aside from their laughter making me free I look at them and think about how they will die one day, how they will move to the loss of consciousness and how they will be disappointed by what reality provides as compared to what they hope for. I want no one to have anymore of them. I want the world to stop, I want to have the time to know something although I know that I probably never will and that nothing will stop for me. And then I see old people and I think about how close they are to death and how waking up everyday must be one terrible living paradox. I wonder if they have anything to tell and wistfully ruminate that they probably don't and that most people will tell you to find other people to love. So I fall in love with the world and I want to cry and then I am insulted on behalf of everyone I want to cry about and I hope that the goodness missing in the world will explode into the earth and kill us all. But I stop then. I have to stop--my thoughts only go so far before they reach nothing and fall away.
When I was a child, I thought,
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not specially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.
Then, after twenty, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired - though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, to be expressed
In terms of others, or it's just
A compensating make-believe.
Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on - in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.
Viciously, then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
--"Best Society" by Philip Larkin--