Stepping into the Next Spotlight

I have been very angry recently.

My therapist says this is a good thing, that being angry is an essential part of the human condition. I argue that it violates logic and reason. He agrees. I argue that it violates my spiritual philosophy. He agrees. "Not very spiritual," he says. "Ridiculous even. But necessary nonetheless."

I agree with this even if I don't understand it. After all, I just finished forcing someone I care very much about into a position where the only thing he could do was hurt me, and I did it just so I could work up a fit of righteous indignation against him. So he hurt me, just like I knew he would, and it did hurt, hurt bad. And then the pain burned into fury, incandescent. Bright. I rode that for a while, took energy from it. And then the next day it all melted into embarrassment, finally coagulating into this soggy lump of guilt. I am now looking back on the whole episode with puzzled quiet sadness.

But that fury part sure felt good. Oh how violent and right it felt, like moonshine going down.

I can't imagine Jesus doing this. But then I remember how he went ballistic in the temple, knocking over stalls, yelling at merchants, probably sending small children and chickens scurrying for cover. I imagine he muttered hot bad words, maybe even kicked things.

It's a comfort, this.

Of course anger accomplishes nothing. It's just pain made manifest and hurled at the world, or at one specific part of the world. But you can learn from it. Anger empties. It takes the pain and directs it outward, unlike hurt, which turns it inward. True anger is clean. It keeps us dynamic, takes us out of ourselves and our pain. Eventually we see clearly again. And then we act. And that is why anger is necessary. But it only works if we keep it in motion. Kept inside, it just mutates into hurt again, like a cancer, and begins to eat away at the center of things.

I forgot the motion part of anger. I saw it as something that needed tamping, so I stamped around it very virtuously, tried to put it out it with love and patience and hope and -- and this is the unfortunate part -- this niggly sense of duty, like a Girl Scout going for her enlightenment badge. I grieved, yes, with an intensity that took me to my knees some days, literally. But I tried to cool the anger, since I'd heard so often that anger is a coverup for a more authentic emotion, and I wanted to get to that so that I could move on with this letting go business. I wanted to get to the next phase, since this one didn't seem very Buddha-like. It was like being told that you had to be Denis Leary before you could be Ghandi.

Which, I guess, is true.

Anne Lamott describes it as being in darkness and seeing one spot of illumination just beyond your feet, a circle of light into which you can step. So you do. And it disappears. And then another appears, just ahead. "We in our faith work," her pastor Veronica says, "stumble along toward where we think we're supposed to go. bumbling along, and here is what's so amazing -- we end up getting exactly where we're supposed to be." (from "Mountain Birthday" in Traveling Mercies)

I thought I could get there from here, on my own. It didn't work. I could only get there from there. Anger was the next spotlight, and once I stepped into it, it disappeared. And now I can just see the glow of some new circle, right at the corner of my eye, right at the edge of my peripheral vision.

Why I Don't Wear My Glasses

I have to put them on occasionally -- to work at my computer, to read subtitles at the movies. I'm fine to drive without them, and I don't need them to read, so most of the time, my life proceeds in a gauzy haze, soft around the edges. Substituting rose-colored glasses for real ones.

The world is too sharp and unpleasant with them on, when I can see so clearly all the dust on the bookshelves, the little mosquito bodies on the window ledge. When I look at myself, I seem thinner in 20/20, but my skin looks much worse, like I have a hangover. And I can't figure out why my hair looks frizzier when it's not blurry. Shouldn't it be the other way around? The only thing I've found that improves with clarity is a cloudless, moonless night sky. Stars should be pricked against the dark, cut and polished along cosmic cleavage planes, faceted. Properly magnificent.

But I'd still miss the soft fuzzy darkness of my everyday nights, the milky lights running together. The friendly sky that's been my companion for so long.

I read this poem once about a woman glimpsing a burst of white flowers along an otherwise barren roadside, the hope she felt as she passed in her car, to think that even in desolate abandoned nothing, there can be beauty, springing up. But when she mentioned the incident to her husband, who had been driving, he informed her that the flowers had been a bunch of dirty diapers somebody had thrown out.

I wonder what I'll miss today, with my glasses tucked in my purse. And I wonder what I won't miss at all.

Losing, Losses, Letting Go

I just gave my sofa away.

It was a spur of the moment idea, one of those wild-hair things. Some nice people had come by the house to collect an old bed, a chest of drawers we no longer needed. And I said, hey, how about a sofa?

I should tell my husband. I moved the other furniture around, gave the end tables a little breathing room. Vacuumed the floor and picked up all the ancient change. Corralled the dust bunnies.

He's still gonna notice.

Right after my grandmother's funeral, I gave away a bunch of her dishes to a distant relative. I didn't ask anybody, just pulled them out of the cupboard, wrapped them in newspaper and put them in the backseat of this cousin's car. My family was horrified and bewildered. So was I. I loved those dishes.

So I know I am feeling bereft today. I know that I am trying to jettison something that's hurting me. I keep thinking of this poem that my friend David wrote. It's called "Vanishing Acts." This is the last stanza:

Everything happens for no reason but
what we reduce it to, depending on
our losses at the deeper end and how
we face the vanishing of all we meant
to keep: from flesh and blood to love and more
than love. My students understand the seeds
of conflict necessary for a tale
that's worth the telling, worthy of their time.
What gets them, though, are tales that end without
an end, with only loss, when loss is just the start.

Losing is not the same as letting go. So they tell me. It feels the same from this end, though, in the empty place, so this is not wisdom I can validate.

So much that we cannot hold, so many endings and never agains. Why, then, are we so careless with what we do have? Why do we -- in the name of pride or protection or just desserts -- let good things slip through our fingers?

I don't know why feeling lost makes me want to give things away, things like furniture and plates. I don't know what kind of wound I'm trying to balm. I just know that I'll be sitting on the floor tonight, on fluffy carpet that feels like new. And that's the closest thing to understanding I'll get.

The Three of Swords

Heartbreak.

It’s obvious when you look at the card -- three swords piercing a tender bloodied heart. Disappointment. Upheaval. Endings. Rejection. Betrayal. Isolation. This is the Tarot at its most visual and visceral. It evokes physically what its symbolizes metaphysically.

I’ve only seen it once before, in a spread of cards so full of anguish that I didn’t even read it at the time. I just wrote each card down, noted the positions, closed my notebook. A friend came in, saw the cards laid out on the bed and asked me what they said. I just swept them clear, wrapped the deck back in its cloth and tucked it away. “Pain,” I said. “Lots of pain.”

And so here it is again, today. And it gives me that same sinking feeling.

I don’t believe in fortune-telling. Fate and destiny lie in our nature and our nurture more than in our stars. But I believe that our intuition hides the truth from us, sometimes, and that certain images and metaphors tease that meaning from the shadows that our psyches throw. I believe we see things, and we know, if we allow ourselves that knowledge.

Maybe I believe the universe sends us little hints now and then, this card or that, falling into place, making a pattern. Maybe not. But I believe in the power of those messages, even if they’re coming from my own head.

Heartbreak. Our one undeniable birthright.

Penguin Love

Today at church, the visiting minister read the children's story. All the little ones gathered at his feet, and he passed out stuffed penguins for them to fondle and moon over. "This," he said, "is a story about penguins. And love. And families."

It was a sweet story, much better than March of the Penguins, which a friend claims should have been called The Sad Life of Penguins. No frozen corpses, no ravenous sea lions. This book was set in the Central Park Zoo.

"Now," the minister read, "It was that time of year when all the boy penguins started to notice the girl penguins. And all the girl penguins started to notice the boy penguins." And my first thought was, how sweet. A coming of age story, with feathers. And my second thought -- and this is a fine testament to just how much of a proud knee-jerk liberal I really am -- was all about the heterosexism of that statement. Surely there were some gay penguins, I thought.

And there were. Their names were Roy and Silo. And this was a book about them and the chick they raised that the zookeeper named Tango, because, as we all know, "it takes two to make a tango."

It ends with the sun going down on sleeping families all through the city. No snow. no ice. Warm all around. Just the kind of ending I needed today.

Why I Hate Happy Endings Now -- A Mild Existential Rant

We’re making an attempt at church to laugh more. Hence, Friday Movie Night. For our debut, we screened Something’s Gotta Give. Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Keanu Reeves. Love triangle. Clever dialogue. Mild inoffensive symbolism and metaphorical subtext. Some partial nudity with energetic overacting.

Funny, yes. Which surprised me. My sense of humor is usually skewed toward biting and vulgar, sweet and vulgar, cerebral and vulgar. I mean, I’m the girl who confessed that my sacred moment this Christmas was watching a Santa suit-clad Billy Bob Thornton -- drunken and half-dressed -- crawl up a driveway in a hail of gunfire to deliver a blood-splattered stuffed elephant to this kid he’d been trying to rob for most of the movie.

So surprised, yes, that I laughed. Until I got pissed off. And what pissed me off was the Hollywood ending. See, Diane falls in love with Jack against her better judgment -- against her will even -- and even though he’s in love with her too, he can’t admit it, articulate it, express it. They separate. She gets involved with Keanu (smart, funny, adoring) Jack has an anxiety attack/faux heart attack and changes himself into a man worthy of her. Tracks her down to Paris, finds her with Keanu. The three share dinner -- lots of flirtatious bonding and emotional poignancy between Jack and Diane -- and then, THEN, Diane kisses him goodbye -- awkward and tender -- and she gets in a cab and he stands on a bridge as the snow falls in the Paris night and says to himself, “Now who’s the girl, huh?”

The end.

I wish.

No. Of course not. Diane screeches back in her cab and says I never really stopped being in love with you and he says you have just made my life. Big embrace. Cut to warm-hearted montage six months in the future -- family dinner, granddaughter on knee, laughter and Italian food. Tasteful rich furnishings. Paul Simon playing.

The end.

Phooey. The whole point of the movie was that pain makes you. It beats open your heart, beats it bloody, and in that empty broken space -- tilled now, fertile -- something grows. And that something is you. And you are finally true then. That’s the gift of pain, that cracking open. And to suggest that that’s not enough -- that somehow there must be a happy ending -- is a violation of the principle. It cheapens the experience, makes it about the feel-good and not the feeling.

I remember disagreeing with a friend once about the movie Garden State. He wanted it to end with the girl sobbing in the airport phone booth, the love of her life on a plane back to California. I liked the real ending better -- the guy rushing back down the escalator, saying no, I’m not going, that was a stupid idea and I’m not doing it. I told my friend it had grown on me, that ending.

It think it was because THAT ending was about the rejection of big ideas that sound really Wise and Profound but are, nonetheless, stupid. There is no template for life, no script. Stay or go. Win the girl, lose her forever. It’s a moment, not a scene. It may not make sense or be fair or foreshadow a significant epiphany. It may not be part of something bigger. It may just be, but that’s the most important thing of all.

So maybe I've changed my mind about Garden State too. Maybe I want him on that plane, tears behind and tears before.

I’ve grown disillusioned with stories as ways of making meaning. Life has no arc. Its symbols are accidental and haphazard. The character development isn't clear, isn’t progressive, isn't always satisfying. Our brains crave stories, have evolved to process patterns and linear narratives and make meaning from them. We get confused and lost without our stories.

But sometimes life refuses to make a story.

I wanted that movie to end with beautiful black night and new snow and all alone with nowhere to go. I wanted that to be enough, I really did.

It's Not Giles Goat Boy, but still . . .

"Technique in art . . . has about the same value as technique in lovemaking. That is to say, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity."
-- John Barth