Addendum: Giving Use (H)

I’m reading Cornell West’s Race Matters, and find a passage I want to copy. I pull out a notebook, and a piece of paper is falling out, edges crinkled, and I almost toss it aside. I pause, smooth the creases, put my pen to it. When I am done, I tape it to the wall. This is what I mean when I equate loving and giving use to–to make use of, to allow someone (or something) to be of use, of service, is to acknowledge the person’s (or thing’s) worth. This is not treating someone instrumentally, but giving him or her the space to work to capacity–what bell defines as joy. We are loving by not allowing emotions, skills, capacities, objects, to go to waste.

And being of use affirms and can even create our belonging to or with another person or community. Giving use in the name of creation or rest to land, paint, mugs and chairs and hammers and pencils and beds and foot trails, creates belonging between us and the inanimate world.

***

This was the passage from Race Matters, p. 29:

Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must by conquered by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through one’s own affirmation of one’s worth–an affirmation fueled by the concern of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion.

Occupation (H)

(Ian, WTF, I can’t get the line spacing to work… Help?)

What I Learned From My Mother

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.
I learned to attend viewing even if I didn’t know
the deceased, to press the moist hands
of the living, to look in their eyes and offer
sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember is that we came.
I learned to believe I had the power to ease
awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor, I learned to create
from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once
you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,
the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

–Julia Kasdorf

My working definition of healing is the dissolution of pain, and the increase in freedom, ability. I believe in the healing power of love, because it’s  healed me. And I believe in it because I’ve seen my love heal people.

Memory: We’re on the couch and we’re talking the way he likes to, movie-style dialogue, intuitive, dangerous for the likelihood of misunderstanding. His scarcity with words comes in part from the cultural myth that mystery makes love; the delusion that knowledge spoils wonder. But the scarcity, his disdain of my love of language, also comes from his fear of exposure.  And I fear it too, yet I careen towards exposure, towards intimacy, relentlessly, at times wrecklessly. I know that only three things in the world can save you: love, work, and sense. Love–to encounter. Work–to be of use. Sense–story-making  and story-telling.
“What are you?” he asks, without preface. And he’s trained me well enough that I know what he means.
“A healer,” I say, after a pause. It’s the first time I’ve put a word to it. “What are you?”
“A healer,” he says, “And a leader.”

But what of this, now? How does a healer interact with people who are intact, who don’t need your chaste touch, or your compassion, or your ability to be present with their pain? People who render your skills irrelevant; whose integrity leaves you impotent? I don’t want to relate solely with people who are in need of  immediate mending, or those of us who walk the world raw, particularly permeable. I must learn to be of use to the well, too.

To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

–Marge Piercy

8 Months Later (H)

Ed Brown reads this poem in my favorite talk of his:

A land not mine, still

A land not mine, still
forever memorable,
the waters of its ocean
chill and fresh.

Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine,
late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pinetrees.

Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.

- Anna Akhmatova, translated Jane Kenyon

addendum: Scab-Picking (I)

I said a while back that the way I dealt with painful memories was to bring them close and see how much they still hurt. Like picking a scab to see how much skin has grown back underneath. It’s an exploratory prodding of flesh, and mostly stems from curiosity about how I’m healing.

Sometimes I catch myself bringing the same thoughts into my head again and again, no matter how many times I’ve made peace with them. It feels pathological until I remember what I’m doing: I’m trying to see if these old thoughts still hurt. Anxieties I’ve had about people I love not caring about me anymore, being forgotten, being replaced, I put words like these in the mouths of people just to see how much they hurt. I vaguely remember a time when I knew I was solid, because thoughts like these didn’t carry any weight.

I’m starting, now, to see how it gets neurotic when I’m not healing. That I keep ripping the wound back open. Making sense of a situation and then jumping back into nonsense again.

Too much scab-picking causes infections. That’s when it’s time to get my ass a shrink before what used to be a scab is just a festered bile pit.

_{(ps – RICBT technically means Rhode Island Center for Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, but it sure as hell looks like Rhode Island Cock and Ball Torture… aren’t they missing a C?)}

Addendum: Humiliation (H)

Sharon Salzberg talks about how in our culture, when we’re in pain we feel humiliation. As though we should be able to control (and stop) it at will.  As though pain means we’ve failed.  As if it is weak. And Buddhism (not to mention common sense) teaches that pain and pleasure are simply part of life, not your fault, often not in your control, and even when it is–sometimes it just means you’ve got your heart open.

Yet–there it is. To be seen really suffering can make you feel small, ashamed, seen in all your failure. There is a sense that these things are not to be shared, that suffering is a kind of weakness one should only indulge in in private. Andwhen when you are in pain and someone receives you with kindness, that kindness can feel humiliating. In The Problem of Pain, Jack talks about “the intolerable compliment” of being loved unconditionally:

“God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.” (p.33)

“That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.”(p.47)

Something about being loved generously, openly, is at times shameful. Maybe it’s that we know we don’t deserve it, and the fact of the kindness, the glare of it, only reinforces the knowledge that we aren’t big enough to be kind like that–which only makes it more difficult to be gracious enough to accept. I write that and have  a flash of my favorite (okay, and only) hymn, “The Servant Song”. I always liked the line, “Pray that I may have the grace to let you be my servant too.”

As Kierkegaard notes in Fear and Trembling:

“He has not even grasped the little mystery that it is better to give than to receive, and has no inkling of what the great mystery is, namely that it is much harder to receive than to give, that is if one has had the courage to go without and did not prove a coward in the hour of need.” (p.129)

I don’t have any neat synthesis of this yet; but I think of P. telling me, “No one can blame you for taking a drink when you’re thirsty.” I remind myself that I don’t think less of people when they’re suffering, that they aren’t belittled in my mind. In fact, knowing the depth to which someone can feel can give me a sense of awe for the person, and makes the person seem like a comrade, and trust-worthy. Humiliation can only come from pride, so my guess is that the thing to do is figure out exactly what that pride is, or is about, so that it can be let go of.

Poverty (I)

Orwell, on living for 6 francs a day in Paris:

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty – it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.

[...]

You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Elsewhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyére cheeses like grindstones. A snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and you refrain, from pure funk.

You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the jeune squelette in Baudelaire’s poem. Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

-Down And Out In Paris And London, p.16-17, 18-19

Then, on having no food at all:

This was an ugly experience. There are people who do fasting cures of three weeks or more, and they say that fasting is quite pleasant after the fourth day; I do not know, never having gone beyond the third day. Probably it seems different when one is doing it voluntarily and is not underfed at the start.

The first day, too inert to look for work, I borrowed a rod and went fishing in the Seine, baiting with blue-bottles. I hoped to catch enough for a meal, but of course I did not. The Seine is full of dace, but they grew cunning during the siege of Paris, and none of them has been caught since, except in nets. On the scond day I thought of pawning my overcoat, but it seemed too far to walk to the pawnshop, and I spent the day in bed, reading the Memoirs orf Sherlock Holmes. It was all I felt equal to, without food. Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition more like the after-effects of influenza that anything else. It is as though one had been turned into a jellyfish or as though all one’s blood had been pumped out and a luke-warm water substituted. Complete inertia is my chief memory of hunger; that, and being obligated to spit very frequently, and the spittle being curiously white and flocculent, like cuckoo-spit. I do not know the reason for this, but everyone who has gone hungry several days has noticed it.

-Ibid., p. 37-38

I know from this past year what Orwell calls the suburbs of poverty. I lived on dry grains and canned beans, did freelance animating 70 hours a week, slept nocturnally, dropped 5 pounds (at 5’9″ and 120 lbs, dropping to 115 is visibly gaunt). I know what it’s like to abandon all luxuries; there is rent and there is food and there is nothing else. And I understand how it’s so much less terrifying to be there than it is to be just a few rungs above it. It makes sense to me why all those studies show that the poorest families in third-world nations seem so much happier than middle-class Americans; being very nearly broke is like being suspended over a 3 foot drop. There’s just not that far to fall. There’s nothing terrible about the ground at the bottom of a cliff; what’s menacing is when you’re high above it looking down.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the feeling of being impoverished in another way. I want to talk about being starved of intimacy.

Reread these passages and replace “look into the shop windows” with “walk around College Hill in the spring.” Replace “fasting cures” with “vows of celibacy.” Fishing for dace is going to a bar when you don’t have a friend to come with you and you don’t even drink. You starve for contact, and your stomach shrinks for want of it. You’re almost afraid of finding it again, because the hunger is so much sharper after you’ve been recently fed, and maybe it’s best not to incite your appetite because it will be so fierce if you let it. A broken heart with a few accessory organs.

It’s something that many people, I think, don’t comprehend. The people who talk of low months without sex, can they fathom a year without? Can they understand that a year between partners is normal for others? Especially the polyamorous, who go through the same pains and heartbreaks as anyone but can at least have the comfort of overlap. The naturally charismatic men who have always known they can get sex whenever they look for it, who have insomnia whenever they sleep alone which is a rare case; the beautiful women who have to spend so much of their energy turning down unwanted desires, who always have a string of suitors as soon as a relationship ends, where every day they spend single is a choice – do they have any idea how it feels?

The questions that come flooding in, the anxieties, asking “will I ever be desired again?” Not “will someone on the street think I’m pretty?” Not “will someone I don’t really like have a crush on me?” But having one’s back clawed, flesh bitten, sustained eye-contact, gasps. “Will I be in the presence of mutual desire ever again?” Months go by, years go by. You can’t help but ask. Nothing feels more important, and no lack makes you feel weaker. You cope with how long it’s been by forgetting the way a first kiss makes your face tingle. Forgetting what sex feels like.

“There are only so many ways to fuck myself.”

I want to stress: everyone has their suffering. Everyone woman getting cat-called, every man prowling the singles bar, they all have awful pains. No one has it easy. Navigating romance is painful just as navigating solitude is.  And this isn’t a rational state for the mind that asks these questions, it’s a starved state. And you’d like to think this is the world of weak-willed men and homely women, but it can happen to almost anyone.

Chip, who was used to several casual encounters a day, a well-fed man indeed, speaks of the appetite for love, sex, and desire. He’s a lucky one, who’s had many stretches of his life where it has been very easy to satisfy. He thinks of the need for regular sex being the same as the need for regular oxygen.

I can’t imagine what it must feel like to know you can find intimacy. It’s terribly hard when you’re looking for it, but to not look means there is a certain security that it’s there, a fullness of the belly. So exhausting to look on an empty stomach. And how hard to not devour whole the first person that offers you some closeness.

And the absolute stupidest thing is the way your hunger melts away completely after one good meal and knowledge of where the next one will come. It’s instantly familiar and calm.

Jeff (I)

I posted this on my old blog a long time ago. It’s the last public release Jeff Mangum ever made. All spelling and typographical oddities are his.

hello everyone

i think its time that i made a few things clear.
first of all, i am not in hiding, as some have said. where i am i supposed to be hiding? behind the coach? in the cat box? under the bed?

i wake up everyday, i walk out into the world and i say hello to the people i meet. the sun shines, the birds sing, the dogs birth out of the old womans eyeball, the afterbirth overwhelms me, swimming with strange creatures, etc. living in the great mystery is enough for me right now. also it has been said that i dont like people listening to my music, that i dont like playing live, that i stopped playing because people heckled me at my shows, called me names, etc. if you really think im that pathetic, then you should burn my records, and forget about me. but its not like that. not that i thought every aspect of being in a semi popular rock band was totally healthy, but im not knocking it either. but when i hear people bitching about being famous, i always wonder why they keep doing it. if you dont like doing interviews anymore, then dont. its that easy. but anyway, im getting off track here. what happened to me comes down to two things.

1.immune system breakdown. i was getting sick every two months for a year, and finally in the spring of 99 i got hepatitis and mono at the same time, which turned me into a vomit tornado with yellow eyeballs for two months, and gave me chronic fatigue for the next two years. which led to number two.
2.spiritual breakdown. this little nervous breakdown, which lasted about two years, was one of the best things that ever happened to me. it turned out great in the end, even though it was a living hell for a long time. in our society, we are supposed to feel ashamed of ourselves when we breakdown, were supposed to go to the shrink to “fix” the “problem”, so that we can come out as smiling productive members of society.
what a load of crap.
we must live in the loneliest society on earth, one that has taken the spiritual aspect out of becoming a healthy person.
in other cultures, spirituality, human phycology, physical health and meditation are all one thing. you cant separate them into compartments. i didnt know any of this a few years ago, and my breakdown forced me to begin to see through the horrible mental boxes that our society imposes on everyone.
two years ago i was a mess, every belief i had was disintegrating, everything i had based my life on seemed shaky. i was tired, confused, and i just didnt think i could simply sing my way out of it this time. and i was right. the songs i did write were confused, very dark and not anything i thought anyone needed to hear. they were more for myself, to help me to work through my mental problems. so, doing shows seemed inappropriate, since anything i would sing would instantly end up on the net, for everyone to hear. im not knocking people sharing my music on the internet, but
at that point, it didnt seem right.

so where am i at now? well, all my belongings are in storage, and i am leaving for spain in a week. dont know whats going to happen. life is better that way. my attitude has always been to remain open to all possibilities. maybe i’ll write a song, a story, a tape piece, learn meditation, capture a beautiful event on tape, make a friend, see something i’ve never seen before. and if at some point, if it all adds up to be something worth releasing to the world, i will do it gladly. i dont give a fuck if it “tops aeroplane” or not. thats just another mental prison. anyone waiting for an album to top the last one should look somewhere else, because you’ll inevitably be disappointed.

when i wrote aeroplane, i spent 90 percent of my time screaming nonsence into my little tape recorder, or chopping up sounds with my sound blender, or just making noise, and 10 percent of my time writing songs. it was very liberating, because i never thought about what i was doing, and a week before we went to record i didnt even think we had a half finished album. but i didnt care. i figured if we went the studio, and only recorded one finished song, then that would be fine. creating just one minute of something inspiring is an incredibly fun thing to do. so next time you hear that neutral milk is recording, dont get your hopes up. it may only be one minute of music.
and if i ever release my korena pang peices for you to hear, you’ll soon find that its just liberated dada to free the mind. if you want more neutral milk, dont buy it. you’ll hate it. i for one love music that makes my brain freeze, like the shags, or art ensemble or maybe some chanting and banging and confusion from bolivia that makes me forget myself for awhile.
major organ was just a bunch of friends putting music together for fun. it was a project that changed hands at least a dozen times, and most of the time you didnt even know who was working on it,and you never knew where it would go.
released mostly to inspire other dreamers and home recorders to do the same with there friends.
we weren’t trying to create a masterpiece. trying to do anything is the of death of creativity, and if we can encourage people to not try, but to just do, then we have accomplished our goal.
the jittery joes show should be out in august or september. it was a show i did in 98 before going to denver to record. i think the video footage makes it worthy of release, since lance bangs did such a good job. we’re putting it out to encourage people to stop paying alot of money for second generation live shows. but again, dont get your hopes up. its really not a big deal.

so thats it. thanks to everyone for listening to my music. now i need to forget myself again, so you may not hear from me for awhile. forgetting yourself is freedom, and i need to be free.
happy travels. jeff

Jeff played for the first time in about 8 years during an Elephant Six special tour, at the end of the night, in the middle of the audience. One song. “For I am an engine and I’m rolling on, the world is all bending and breaking from me, for sweetness alone who flew out through the window and landed back home in a garden of green.”

(I don’t know if I really agree with what Jeff says about trying being the death of freedom. I only know that I agree with him sometimes. And I have no idea what his concept of spirituality is, only that’s it’s probably bizarre and personal and fucked-up and involves Siamese twins starving in Siberia, so I can’t say I agree with that either.)

Addendum: Dancing (I)

Cure for persistent blues:

(1) Download this song. *

(2) Follow this vegan pancake recipe. **

(3) Dance while your pancakes are frying. ***

(4) Eat. ****

_{* it would be best if you could retroactively give yourself my emotional attachment to it.
** remembering that you can trust the people love even when you can’t trust your own mind.
*** sometimes you dance because you’re happy; sometimes you dance to make yourself happy (you’re probably only depressed because you’re tired).
**** any advice about how to feel good should end thus.}

How to Help (H)

Alternative subject heading: Massive Confusion, as usual.

I touched on the subject of encouragement yesterday, and I’ve been thinking on it a lot over the last few months. In part because of experiences I’ve had in the last year that were very helpful and very harmful in that arena, and because I want to learn how to help other people. What helps? Pushing? Encouraging? Sympathy? I tend to think: people know when they’ve made a mistake, and my job isn’t to beat them up with it, but encourage them to make wiser choices in the future, see what those choices could be, perhaps see what was behind the choice so they can address what compelled them to it in anothwer way.

But are there times it is helpful to be harsh? To not say something in a friendly tone, a warm tone, with kindness, with compassion? Is it ever helpful to be cold? Is it ever helpful to say, “You stupid fucking idiot”? I’m a pretty sensitive person, and if someone’s unhappy with something I did or thinks I made a bad choice, I don’t need any harshness to make it so I can hear them saying it. But are there times or certain people who just aren’t going to hear it unless you beat them over the head? This is not a skill of mine, and some people would say–offer what you have. But that’s not enough. I want to be able to help people in the ways that are helpful to them, not just in the ways that are easiest or most natural to me. And if I’m ever a parent, or a life partner (I think there are similarities between the roles)–well, then I’ve got to be more versatile.

Nick talks about the “bad news sandwich” – say something nice, say the thing you want to kick their ass about in a firm way (I think harshness varies by person and seriousness of offense) and then say another nice thing. Ian’s mentioned something along these lines too, though, Ian, I’ve never got anything but nice from you!

But I think about what helps me, and I don’t think it’s ever the harsh approach. I don’t think it’s often that I’ve royally or horribly fucked up without knowing it, and if I have, just telling me that gently is enough for me to automatically provide the harshness. I don’t need someone else to beat me up about just about anything–I’ve got that down all on my own. So what helps me? Encouragement. Last fall, for the first time in my life, or at least the first time that meant something, the first time that got through, the first time that had that sincerity, the first time from someone all the way, someone told me they believed in me. I felt believed in. Someone was proud of me. It blew my mind. It was empowering. It was the most encouraging thing ever.

Recently, I had a difficult exchange with a friend. I disappeared at a party and he sent me a text, something about worrying about me doing something self-destructive. I wasn’t, and I was offended–he’s never seen me do anything particularly self-destructive, and why would he think that of me, and yeah I’ve got those kinds of demons but I work damn hard at killing them, and he couldn’t see that? It bothered me so much because it hit a sore spot, because it was too close to being true. But I realized it also hurt because I need him to believe in me. I need him to think the best of me, so I have someithng to live up to. I need someone who thinks the best of me, because it’ll help me bridge the gap to getting there. A lot like that Dan Savage video Ian posted.

I learned a bit about this in February and March too, days that the pain was so severe, that it relented so little, that I didn’t know how or if I could make it through the day. And having someone who knows me well and whom I trust say, “I know you can get through today,”–and I feel some shame admitting this, but it is no worse for it to be true than to say it (in this case), and it’s a good exorcise in the arrogance of the myth of independence–helped me to actually do it. It’s like I borrowed their belief in me, and it helped me make it through those endless, endless days. And this is a beautiful gift to give someone. And I want to do this for other people, help them in this way, because I know how powerful it can be.

It is true that we are terrible and that we are wonderful. But for me, thinking on the terrible part gets me stuck in it. Focusing on the better part–that helps me get there. It’s a practical move more than anything else. It wouldn’t be justifiable any other way.

You could argue, people only get mad when you fuck up if they expect more of you, that it is an implicit expression of belief in you. This is like Jack’s God:

“As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished.” – The Problem of Pain, p. 32

And I’ve certainly heard, “I’m only angry because I care enough to get angry.” But I want something a step past it. I’m greedy. I want someone who can see past their own anger and try to figure out what’ll help me, who sees that acting angrily is only going to beat me down, and that what I need is encouragement, is someone to say, oh sweetie, what happened? Why did you do that? Can I help? And is that weak of me? Should I be able to just “take it”? I don’t crumble under criticism that’s given harshly instead of kindly, but it hurts like fuck, it knocks pieces of me down, it feels stormy.

But is that what is helpful to other people to? Do I just want to be treated like a child? Am I trying to make up for the encouragement I never got? I think this often, that the way I am trying to treat my mind is like how you treat a child. But maybe the combination of gentleness and firmness and encouragement is useful for most adults too, not just kids. What, we get taller and stop needing to be encouraged? Or maybe the point is to get taller, and learn how to encourage yourself? I think this may be right: you get it while you’re young, see how it’s done, and learn to do it for yourself. You still need it from other people, but you become one of your own primary sources of it. Well, I’m a little late on all those fronts. But better late than never.

And because that’s what I want, because that’s what helps me, I’ve been trying to do this for other people. But then, is it an arrogance, or more importantly, a falsehood, to assume that what is helpful to me is helpful to other people? Is it an arrogance, or more importantly, a falsehood, to assume that I’m so different from everyone that what helps me is just as likely as not to not be helpful? Do people act towards  others the way they want people to act towards them–I read somewhere, years ago, that you should take the cues on how someone wants to be kissed by how they kiss you–and take my cues from that? Have the people that have been harsh with me wanted that in return? Does it only feel like caring, to some people, if you get mad? Does softness seem like saying you don’t expect more, do you need to show disappointment rather than compassion to show your belief in someone? Or do people just act the ways they’ve been treated, whether or not it’s actually useful to them?

And this all implies questions about human nature. Are there parts of ourselves that, as Mike Doughty says, “the only way to beat is to bat it down”? I picture that alligator arcade game: vigilance and as soon as the head starts to show you smash it in. I never used the paddle; I found my own two hands worked much better. But then, we’re talking about yourself here–is beating parts of yourself just doing damage? Are there parts of ourselves that need killing, or just parts that need healing? I like to think the latter way, my mind is inclined towards it, but more important than my inclinations is: is it true?

I think on a series of fucked up choices I made the winter and spring before those that just passed. And I still can’t understand it. What I know is that no one could judge me more harshly for it than I judge myself, that no one could say something harsh about it that was worse than anything I’d thought already. And that that doesn’t work. I knew it was wrong; there was never any question about it. I beat myself up about it while I was making those choices, and kept making them. Does harsh judgment change anything? Does it work to change behavior?

And why the fuck did I do it anyway? I still have no fucking clue. Someone told me: I don’t think we do things that go against our own moral codes just for the fun of it; I think it means something else is going on, I think what you did was somehow touching some deep need of yours. And she’s right in some sense: overall, it certainly wasn’t fun. I was in a state of shock at myself. And sleep: my god, “God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won’t”–I slept so badly for so long that I was dizzy, physically off-balance, started dropping things and misestimating where doorframes were. And the nightmares that have been harrassing me for the past year and a half started then. It wasn’t about fun. But what was it about? I still don’t know. She says: don’t hang on to the guilt. Guilt is meant to be quick and aversive enough that we won’t do the thing again, and then the guilt gos away. The best thing you can do from here is  figure out what that need was so you can figure out better ways to meet it and deal with it, so when you come up against it again, you’ll be able to handle it better. Is that how we should approach all fucked up choices? Do we ever just need ‘more discipline’? How do you tell the difference? Is ‘more discipline’ what we do to avoid doing harm while we heal? How do we get it? How much does using will use it up, and how much does it build it up?

re: Being Good (H)

An important topic, and an interesting post, and I will respond in full in the next couple days, but Ian! I adore you, and I appreciate your thinking so hard to answer me, and this is not really my question! My question(s) is(are), I think, even more basic, and more practically relevant: how do you know what to do? How do you know what is true and untrue, correct and incorrect, wise and unwise, moral and immoral? How do you gain that wisdom? What rubrics do you use to make those determinations? Most of us are both wonderful and terrible–I know I am. What I want to know is, how do you know when you’re being which? And how do you move, get any footing, when you have profound knowledge of your own capacity to act immorally, or recklessly, or ineffectively, or whatever else your particular brand of failing is?

It’s not a self-doubt that is a luxury. It’s not the same, for me, as the way I cannot be a mess if someone I love needs me–somehow the need creates a mirrored capacity (thank God!) to be steady and giving. I’m not talking about the pain of self-doubt, or even the painful thought patterns of self-doubt, but a deeper sense of at sea-ness that can be under everything, even action. Deeper than thought, and not quite the same as emotion. It’s a physical sense, almost, that sure, that unshakable. Like discovering that when you open your hand, the glass in it won’t always fall, but sometimes floats upwards like a helium balloon. Then what? And a million times opening your hand around a glass and seeing it shatter like you expect doesn’t undo the absolute unnerving knowledge that it can go up.