Tarot Creativity Challenge, Day #5

The Nine of Swords.

My mother was never one to experience much worry, guilt, or anguish. I think she was largely free from those emotions. Certainly when she followed her brother/boss into that shopping mall and pulled an automatic handgun on him and his young son and made a series of incoherent demands concerning the family business while gesturing with the gun into the faces of the brother/boss and the son and screaming onlookers, she seemed to be free from worry, guilt, and anguish. She told me that divine voices expunged all doubt from her mind, that they urged her on, giving her confidence and courage. She told me she felt inspired. Perhaps she felt less inspired when the police stripped the gun from her hands and found it empty, and when her brother/boss howled in laughter, the hot breath of it singing her face. But on those few occasions that I've spoken to her about it, I detected no worry, guilt, or anguish in her voice, except perhaps over the fact that she failed to kill brother/boss, as the divine had told her to.

I don't ever remember her exhibiting much worry, guilt, or anguish on her own part. On mine, yes. But that was different. When upon leaving our second grade talent show she pulled me aside in the dark parking lot and punched me twice, once on each side of my head and the diamond on her wedding ring breaking the skin on my scalp while my father looked on, for not being as pretty as the other girls in my dance group and for being the second best dancer and not the best, she was worried about me. She was guilty because of me, and she was anguished for me. But not for herself.

She didn't show much worry, guilt, or anguish when she rolled her eyes in that exaggerated way—the muscles of her entire face rolling with them and her head lolling on her neck like a broken thing—and flung her arms out and screamed at the ceiling when her daughter brought home a report card with a B and a C+ on it. That is to say that she showed a lot of anguish over my grades, yes. I don't dispute that. But did she show any worry about overgoing the melodramatic theatrics in a way that would embarrass even the most hysterical of her daytime dramas? I don't think she ever did.

She did feel some worry when she confronted me one day about the fact that I went to school with known terrorists and murderers, which was news to me. When she asked me if I was ready to do the right thing and defend our family if we were attacked, or to prevent our family from being attacked in the first place, I really got the sense that she was worried from the way her hands and voice were trembling. And when the disgust rose up in me and I shouted a refusal, and she slapped me to the ground, I know she did so because she was worried. Again, for me, not for herself.

When she woke me up in the middle of the night, pulling me from the covers and making me kneel next to the bed and pray for forgiveness for being ugly and lazy and stupid, because ugliness and laziness and stupidity were sins—it was right there in the book—and the divine hated me and I had to beg the voices for mercy, I do think she felt guilty about having given birth to me. I do think she felt worried about having a daughter who was such a failure, and about how she was going to have to deal with that fact for the rest of her life, and I think she felt anguished about everything that I was. Anguished would be a good word for it. Still, again, I would argue that that anguish was misplaced.

In any case, that anguish was a temporary thing. She got over it. She found a cure for her worry, guilt, and anguish. She was a bit anguished when, while taking me to my first day of college in the distant southern part of the state, she tried to drive the car into the center divider, screaming that I was utter shit and worthless and had done nothing, nothing, nothing with my life and promising she would destroy us both. I say she was anguished because I saw her crying, and I assume that action is indicative of anguish. But the anguish would end with our mutually assured destruction. Or it would have, if I hadn't grabbed the wheel away from her, barely able to see for my own fear and my own tears but somehow managing to steer the car back into the lane. Again, she might have experienced some anguish over her failure, and some guilt.

No, no “might have” about it, that time. That time I know. When she made her tearful apology a few days later, saying something about changing her meds and saying “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry” until the words had lost their meaning, I expect that was real guilt. Real anguish. I didn't quite know what to do with it at the time. I sat and listened, the muscles stiff and hot around my eyes saying “Yeah, I forgive you,” until the words had lost their meaning. Not that my words had much meaning in the first place. I felt guilty about lying. Not anguished, though. I felt a little anguished, maybe, about the fact that I didn't rip my mother open with my words, that I didn't make the air thick with accusations and drive her in that sobbing state to strangle herself or swallow all her pills at once out of overwhelming feelings of worry, guilt, and anguish. I felt a little anguished over my failure. But I got over that.

Now I go to see her and she is calm. No worry, anguish, or guilt. Whatever medication she is on is working well. It is as though the past never happened. She is still abrasive; she tells me how to interact with my boss, tells me how to do my work, tells me how I need to present myself in the office, how I need to dress. She feels no anguish over saying these things, though. It is as a light-hearted ribbing, the kind that men do, and it's not worth my feeling anguished over it, even though every time she tells me these things I feel like some vital organ inside of me is shriveling. She does not tell me how I should be with my husband, and for that I am thankful. Nor does she insist that the divine voices tell her that I am failing in my great purpose, a purpose which was only ever known to them and to her. The last time I went to see her to show her how my belly was swelling, she didn't offer me any mothering advice. That was good. If she had, I think I might've gone into the kitchen, got a knife, and cut her throat open.

My mother shows no worry, anguish, or guilt at all now. She picks up her cat, kisses it and talks baby talk to it. She watches the news and complains volubly at the daily betrayals of our nation. She waters the plants in her garden, and she smiles while doing so. These are the actions of a person with a clean conscience. These are the actions of a person who has been absolved. She meets each day—each day diminished now down to mere human scale—with courage and with confidence.
My mother shows no worry, anguish, or guilt at all. And that's fine. I have enough worry, anguish, or guilt for the both of us. Especially when I place my hand on my stomach and feel that small heart beating beneath my hand. The worry and anguish and guilt threaten to split me open.

A Fire on One End and a Fool on T'other

It's been twenty-one days since I last smoked a cigarette. This is less of an accomplishment than it might sound; it's relatively easy for me to go a month or more without smoking. I was up to five or six weeks back in February before I un-quit again. I'm sure there have been spaces of six months or a year since that I have gone without smoking. Everything in moderation, including moderation itself; I quit smoking, and then I quit quitting.

It's not as if I can't see the benefits of being a non-smoker. When I smoke, I tend to be more nervous. Smoking raises my blood pressure, which is already too high as it is. When I smoke, there is this feathery feeling in my lungs that comes whenever I breathe hard, and while I know it's not lung cancer, it's always difficult to convince myself that it's not. Concordant with this is my even-more reduced capacity for exercise such that I am incapable of walking up a single hill without wheezing. And I swear, although I've never heard of this being a normal side-effect of smoking, that smoking contributes to my migraine headaches. I bet I could accept all the other consequences, aside from this one, because if smoking does cause me to have headaches--and it definitely seems to me that I get a lot more migraines when I smoke than when I don't--it would be downright idiotic for me to voluntarily inflict that kind of torment on myself.

But it's not as if I can't see the benefits of being a non-non-smoker, either. I don't get pronounced withdrawal symptoms when I don't smoke. Even when I do smoke, I rarely have more than three to five cigarettes a day, which doesn't seem to be enough to cause me to physically addicted to nicotine. No; the withdrawal is mental more than anything else. When I smoke, I have a need that must be satisfied every few hours. I can satisfy that need, and then I'm good for a while again. I think it's the regularity and ease of satisfaction of this need that attracts me most to smoking--I should wish that all of my needs should be so scheduled and so simply met. And when meeting this one need, it's possible to ignore other needs--like my needs for companionship, comfort, reassurance, and touch. Those things, in my experience, are very hard to get. A pack of my preferred brand of cigarettes, on the other hand, is available at most gas stations and grocery stores for about five dollars.

Given my very moderate tobacco use, and given that brief, dizzying rush of stimulants to the brain that allows me to forget, for thirty seconds, whatever else might be bothering me, it's been difficult for me to convince myself that smoking is really harmful to me. I *know* that it is, but it's difficult to do the assessment and find that smoking is more of a drawback than a benefit.

Do you know, gentle reader, what the best part of quitting smoking is? It is, most assuredly, that first cigarette after you unquit again. True, the experience is tainted by guilt, but the physiological sensation of those pathways in the brain that have gone extinct coming crackling back to life in a minute of intense sensation not unlike orgasm--it almost makes it worth it. Repetition deadens the sensation as the brain becomes accustomed to nicotene, but if one can leave off the chase for the dragon for a few days or a week or a month or a year and then resume the chase, it's as if you've got the dragon by the tail all over again. After a day or three of repeated exposure, though, the experience becomes mere mechanics--no real rush, just a feeling of irritability and dullness without the drug.

And that small, stupid, completely legal high is only a single smoke away. And it's sad that'd I'd throw away three weeks of sobriety--or better to call it three weeks of relative calm, with clothes that did not stink and a tongue that did not taste of tar and stale ash--for a minute of craving satisfied. But I would.

I guess I'm waiting for some definitive, conclusive experience to forever purge me of the desire to smoke--because that desire still persists, even if I do my best to deny it satiety. I don't know if it's possible to hit that fabled "rock bottom" with respect to cigarettes, though. In faith, there have been moments when I felt the muscles in my neck constrict and red pain seared through my skull like some breed of contained organic lightning, and in these moments I swore "Never again." There have been a number of such moments. And, with the possible exception of the most recent iteration, I have broken that vow every time. I am apparently very bad at being operantly conditioned. (It should be noted, though, that it only required three or four such comparable incidents to forever purge me of the desire for being very drunk). Will this time be the last time I need to quit? Hell if I know. I think maybe keeping track of the individual days as they pass by might be helpful; it's harder to throw away twenty-one days of progress than it is to throw away some while of progress, and it's easier to congratulate oneself on resisting that temptation that comes multiple times a day if one reminds oneself that one has been clean for twenty-one days, rather than clean for a good while now. Ticking off that calendar in my head does seem to have both a positive and negative reinforcing effect.

Nietzsche says something about resisting temptation that I wish I could find now, but I can't. But I remember the essence of the quote being something like "There are two ways to conquer temtpation: the first is through regular indulgence, and the second is through surfeit." Oh, Hell, I don't know if Neitzsche said that, but it sounds like him. Anyway. I wonder if the means for conquering my addiction to smoking would not be to smoke so much as to make myself so absolutely sick that I can never ever want to smoke again, or to accept that occasional indulgences are less costly than the stress of spending a significant portion of my day thinking about not smoking. Or else, if there is some switch I switch I can find and then flick that will make me want to smoke no more forever. Until then, instead of enjoying the satiety of a cigarette, I content myself with the much colder comfort that it's been twenty-one days since I last lit up.

Tomorrow will be twenty-two.

Loneliness is Such A Drag

One of the many songs I have floating around in my head half-formed and never really written is entitled "Long Cold Summer." The chorus goes like this:

It's gonna be a long, cold summer
As cold as I've ever known
I could not feel any number
Chills me to the bone
These things I've not outgrown
History has shown
It's gonna be a long, cold summer
When I spend it all alone

A lot of the songs that come to me never get farther than the composition of a refrain or an initial melody, which I suppose is why I'm not much of a songwriter these days. And maybe that's for the best if I'm going to be producing such forced rhymes in my songs as "summer" and "number" or invoking the grand cause of history to describe something that would be strictly personal.

At any rate, these coming months promise to be a long, cold summer like the one years back that inspired me to come up with the fragment of song. I've known a lot of long, cold summers in my time. That's not to say that the cold is external. Growing up in the desert (even if we try to paint it green with borrowed water), I've known weeks of waking up in a tangle of sweat-soaked sheets, of having a sheen of sweat burst forth from my forehead the moment I take a step outside with no consideration for the fact that I have miles yet to walk, of having the blood run so hot beneath the skin that it feels like fever even when it isn't, of breathing air that burns the lungs and scorches the throat and seems evacuated of oxygen. And, physically, I expect this summer to be like those other summers.

Internally, though--internally, it will be cold. So cold that I'll be able to sit and sweat and think for hours on loneliness, for want of anything better to do or anywhere else to go.

I've been on a school schedule for most of the years of my life now, and that brings with it a boom-and-bust cycle of socialization. I meet people during the school year, and that's good. I even form something like friendships with those people after many weeks of forced proximity and sometimes forced cooperation on obnoxious group projects and the unforced but still automatic bitching about instructors and their methods after class. But then summer (or the change of a semester) comes around, and before I've managed to build those friendships into ones that would warrant socialization outside of the class (or, alternately, the office), those nascent friendships are lost to me. There's a big difference between being tossed together by chance and unified in the amicable dissing of a common enemy (be he boss or professor) and achieving that point where I could comfortably ask a person "Hey, you want to come over to my place some time and hang out?" By which I also mean to say "We could watch a movie or maybe play a board or card game, if you didn't think that was too socially deviant, but I don't know you well enough as yet to know whether you'd consider that deviant or not. Or maybe we could just talk, because you know, there are times when I need to hear another human voice. I'm trying to minimize the amount of pressure I'm exerting on you here, knowing full well that you'll probably say no, or maybe say yes just to be polite and even feign enthusiasm but that doesn't imply any kind of follow-through. Please? I could really use a friend right now."

I've got a girlfriend now to act as a buffer against these boom-and-bust cycles. Call her social insurance, if you will, though I know that sounds callous and overly-mechanical. She keeps me away from the worst of the loneliness. But when I am otherwise lonely outside of my relationship with her, it shows, and then she gets impatient with my feelings of alienation. Not that I blame her, really. But if I am otherwise lonely, then my relationship with her becomes lonely, too. And anyway, she's going to be gone in Europe for much of this summer. So going to her for some small amount of human contact won't really be an option.

And I have other friends. I have friendships that I have cultivated for years, which is the normal course of things for me. It takes me probably one or two years to feel fully comfortable around another person, and to reach that aforementioned level where it's okay to ask for some kind of intimacy beyond the casual interactions that occur when disparate persons are placed essentially haphazardly into close physical proximity (maybe the sorting is guided with respect to intellect and social class, whether at work or in an academic setting, but the factors of emotional compatibility and personality are still essentially random). I form friendships but slowly and carefully, and I can only maintain a few at a time. And when those carefully-laid friendships begin to crumble, as they are for me now, I have no immediate other recourse.

It's gonna be a long, cold summer

Previous summers such as these have given me ample opportunity--no, more like need--to write, and to read. In the silence that comes from a dearth of human voices and the stillness that comes from a dearth of human interaction, I am clacking away at my keyboard, trying to populate my barren universe with fictional characters. Or I am glutting myself on books or films or video games, trying to invite those characters into my desolate life, allowing their stories to take over my own, which is sad and boring. But it doesn't really work. The characters I create are all fragments of me, and I know it, and they can't provide me with real company any more than I can pretend that the person in the mirror is a friend rather than my own reflection. And while other peoples' works can be a balm for a time (see the entry on WoW), I can't allow hide my mind behind other peoples' fictions indefinitely, any more than I could ask another person to dream for me. None of it, really, is a replacement for real human contact. The history of literature has shown that lonely men like me have tried, throughout the ages, to replace the volatility of relationships with the constancy and predictability of books, and it's never really worked. We've got exponentially more media now to distract us from that loneliness than Dante did when he wrote verse for dead Beatrice or Catullus did when he said love is like being crucified. But media can only mask loneliness, it can't really take it away. It's a change in appearance, not in essence.

So maybe I should be grateful for a summer that will demand that I write even if only to keep emptiness from crashing in on me, but it's hard to feel grateful for that.

Another fragment gestated into a full song:

I'm going nowhere
And no-one's waiting there for me

Oh, I will have time this summer. I will have time in abundance. And when I am socially-integrated, I am always regretting the loss of that time I have when I am going nowhere and no-one's waiting there for me. Time to think, and reinforce the same dark tracks of my thinking until they are so deep that I do not know how to extricate myself from them.

The therapist tells me that a painting shut away in a dark cellar where no-one can see it still has value. He tells me that a flower blooming on a distant and desolate mountainside where no-one will ever find it and where it has no chance of producing seed still has value. That these things are not to be disparaged for their lack of connectivity and value to others, but still cherished in and of themselves. He tells me that even if a man should alienate his friends and his love, he still has value. Maybe he's right, but what he says seems damn alien to me a lot of the time.

I know I hate feeling like I can go anywhere or do anything, because nobody really cares what I do, and nobody is waiting for me or wanting me to come back.

It's gonna be a long, cold summer
When I spend it all alone

On Johnny Cash, Existentialism, and Self Esteem

Today I was reading a text concerning co-dependence and self-defeating behavior. In it, the author says that people with low self-esteem rely on what she calls other-esteem; that is, that they define themselves in terms of how others see them. They evaluate themselves based upon their actions and the reception of those actions, rather than believing that a person has inherent worth and value, as imbued by a creator (a "Higher Power," as she calls it). She makes a distinction between "human beings" who have a sense of self-worth independent of their actions and "human doings" whose self-worth is dependent upon their interactions with others.

I am not a "human being" in accordance with this definition. Indeed, there have been many times in the past when I thought about membership in a species, including homo sapiens sapiens, as being conditional. One scientific definition of a species is that its members are capable of true reproduction--that is, mating and producing viable offspring of the same species as the parents. In the many years in which I had no access to sexual intercourse I questioned my own validity as a member of the human race. I wondered many times whether this lack of access was biological or psychological or social...but in the end, I concluded it didn't matter. If I couldn't mate with another human being, for whatever reason, I wasn't fully human.

I struggle, really seriously struggle, with the idea that people are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Quakerism posits that all people have access to the divine, and that all life is worthy. This leads to the Quaker prohibition against violence (how can one person use force on another when all are equally worthy?), and the Quaker tendency away from absolute doctorines and towards Testimonies that have their root in human experience and not abstracted ideals.

It's not that I cannot see the value in such an approach. But it's difficult for me to accept and believe.

I think people are defined by their actions, not some innate quality of being. Or at least, that's how I define people. When I have to summarize somebody, I think of him in terms of profession: he is an engineer, a soldier, a singer. I think of him as doing these things well or poorly: he is a competent engineer, a poor soldier, an excellent singer. Maybe I think of him as being a good person or a bad person, as expressed by his actions that tend to be either towards a general good or towards a destructive selfishness. I might think of him as a friendly person, or a rude person, a giving person or a cruel person, but again these evaluations are based on expressions of these qualities. I rail against that easy conceit whereby somebody is said to have a "stern mouth" or "intelligent eyes" or "kind hands," and all that can or needs to be known about him is expressed in his innate physiology.

I am obligated to be re-reading Tess of the D'urbervilles, and Thomas Hardy does this kind of thing a lot. You can tell all you need to know about a person just by looking at him; Alex D'urberville has sensuous lips and a long moustache which he tends to twirl; only Tess can recognize the cruelty and crudity of him, but that's because the other characters in the novel are simple and stupid people with broad cheeks and big hands, while Tess has the delicate and transcendent beauty of Innocence and Intelligence Wronged. So fuck *that* shit.

I am a writer, an ethical person, a boyfriend. I am a friend, and a member of my family. If I fail at these things--if I write poorly, if I have a lapse in ethics, if I am a disappointing boyfriend or friend--what am I? Do I have some value outside of my failures? If I do, I cannot see it.

I don't pay much attention in any serious way to defining myself in terms of nationality, sex, or race. I don't think of such definitions as being valid. I am an American...but what is that? Either it is expressed in my actions and in my way of thinking about reality, or it doesn't matter. A person is a competent engineer or an excellent singer; does it matter if he is black or she is Indian? Not really; not to me. I know these definitions are very important to others. But I only think of them as being important in their act of expression, in their capacity for shaping choices, not in their "beingness."

I don't even like to think of people in terms of names. I forget names; I never pay attention to them in the first place. Titles have meaning; they are indications of achievement. Quakers are against titles. But I am against names. Especially American names, which are a mish-mash of Hebrew and European traditions and which are usually chosen for their sound or popularity and so evacuated of their true meaning. My first name means "Beloved;" beloved of whom? Of God? Of my parents? If so, then my name is more of a lie than a truth. Is it a reference to the Biblical King David, that singer and sinner and giant-killer? Did I express some analogous qualities in utero that caused my parents to pick that name for me? Or do I just have that name because my father had it, and his father before him, and should I believe that there's some kind of inherent "Davidness" in me?

Another thing I rail against is someone saying "You're such a David" or "I never met a Tim that I didn't like." What the fuck is this essential "Davidness" or "Timness" by which the individual is being compared? It cannot be anything more than the comparer's composite experience with Davids and Tims, and thus is an expression of experiential qualities, not essential ones.

My middle name is Michael. Michael is a question: "Who is like God?" in the Hebrew. It's the battle-cry of the right angels as they go to fight against the fallen. I've been thinking a lot about this question of late. There's no answer to it. No one is like God; no one can do what God can do. Anyone who is like God would be spared the angel's wrath. But no one is like God. And so anyone would deserve to be spit upon an angel's flaming sword.

What is physical beauty, but an admiration for the potence and potential in a person? Muscularity is beautiful in men, fertility is beautiful in women. Men are beautiful based upon their expressed capabilities as providers and defenders, women are beautiful based upon their expressed capabilities as lovers and mothers. Why do you think it is that men are drawn to a woman's breasts, if not as an implied promise that she will be a good provider for children? We admire youth and health--the capability to act, and express one's will upon the world. We do not admire sickness and impotence. We exalt athletes. Capability is attractive. Confidence is attractive. Ineffectuality is ugly. I am ugly, because my body is largely ineffectual, and reflects years of poorly chosen actions.

Wisdom is beautiful in those who are older, but even that has a relative quality; would wisdom have worth if it could not guide the young? Wisdom is beautiful, but senility is awful. Or, at best, tragic.

Does a person whose actions have no value to others have worth outside of those actions? Does a serial rapist have worth? I don't know. I wouldn't think so. Does a person who is bound to a wheelchair and who exhibits no brain function have worth? I wouldn't think so. I wouldn't think of such a person as much of a "person" at all. Maybe the serial rapist or the invalid have value to their families or friends, if such are available, but would that value be the valuation of some inherent quality in the loved one, or a projection and creation of value on the part of the loving one, and so an action and a subjective assertion of value?

I would think any person would have the right to be free from inflicted pain and suffering. But this isn't really an estimation of a person's value. It wouldn't be right for me to stab you with a knife or steal from you or poison your dog, whether you were an average person or a great humanitarian or a serial rapist. The prohibition to not cause pain to people does not show that people have worth. It just shows that pain is terrible in the infliction and in the receipt. I am not obligated to go around preventing other people from being stabbed or robbed or having their dogs poisoned because all people should be free from these things. I am only obliged to not do it myself, because the power in the action of inflicting pain on a person is overwhelming and negative and can cancel out whatever else that person has done. Simple acts of cruelty can destroy whatever worth a person has. Else why the tremendous prohibitions against violence? It is action used unfairly and unconscionably.

I can act to prevent other people from being stabbed or robbed, but that is a choice I can make--an action I can take--and isn't required or expected of me in the way that not stabbing and not robbing and not caniciding are expected and required.

We exalt the fireman who rushes into the crumbling tower to try to save a life, and so taking action. He is a hero. We don't exalt somebody who stands on the sidelines, and is merely being there. He does not matter.

History remembers Alexander, the conqueror of the world. History even remembers Alexander's horse, Bucephalus, so essential to that conquest. Does history remember the soldier who was assigned the ignominious duty of sweeping the shit out of Bucephalus' stall? It does not. His actions did not matter. Now he does not matter.

How do we assign value to non-human organisms? We value those which are useful to us--apples, cats which at first killed rats around Egyptian granaries and were only later seen as pets or gods, aesthetically-pleasing trees. We do not value weeds or parasites. The biologist might, because she can see things that the rest of us can't, but often that is a respect for the capabilities of these organisms and their success in their respective fields or the value of their genes, not because something just "is." If there was something inherently valuable in life, we would value Rhinovirus cells as much as we would value the life of a beloved pet, or the President of the United States. But we don't. At least, I don't see many people boycotting anti-biotics because we believe that the billions of cold virus cells have as much claim to life as their human host.

Increasingly, people put a value on animal life in accordance with its intelligence--its capability to understand, and to act upon that understanding. Certainly most of us would think it abhorrent to kill a gorilla that could speak in sign language, or a parrot that could speak in complete sentences. I think back on a National Geographic article from some months back in which it was described how a family of gorillas had been killed by guerillas (the verbal irony was quite funny to me) in the Congo. When rangers found the "murdered" gorillas, the rangers carried the great apes out of the jungle on biers and gave something akin to a funeral. Villagers *mourned* the loss of these animals. We would feel no such compunctions about jellyfish or tapeworms. When was the last time you saw a funeral for a maggot? There are those among us--many among us now--who extend the valuation of awareness and capability far beyond its traditional limits, but even then it is largely circumscribed by a recognition of human-like intelligence in the animals so valued, now that intelligence is evaluated in differences of degree, rather than absolute differences of kind. One of the commonest arguments I hear from people decrying the consumption of meat is that pigs are intelligent animals, as intelligent as dogs, and suffer under their living conditions and experience terror when they know they are to die. I hear no such arguments about plants, which are assumed to be immune to feeling and fear. So it is intelligence, then--the capability to assess, and to act upon that assessment--which is valued. Being, in itself, has little meaning or worth.

All this is to say that I see every interaction with another person as a performative interaction by which I will be judged. If I am praised, then I feel validated. If I perform poorly, earning scorn or even ambivalence or disinterest, then I question where my worth as a person might be found. I do not believe, as the author of this psychiatry book does, that existence preceeds essence and that I have value outside of my actions and interactions.

The concept of unconditional love is so surreal to me. I've often thought of unconditional love in terms of being that which is given freely, and hence that which has no worth. I don't think I had much of that in my own experience. Even now, among the people who care about me most, I am just one or two offenses away from alienating them utterly. I am ever only one or two offenses away.

The concept of a God who loves unconditionally is perverse to me. A God who evaluates and hates his creation, finding it wanting, hating humans for not being able to live up to impossible standards even as He created them to be inadequate, a God that banishes people to the darkness beyond the wall where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth--that God is also perverse, and yet He seems more real to me. More believable. I reject Him now; I hate Him. I reject that Father so like my own father, who would punish His creation for His own inadequacies. I reject that God who would hold sinners in his angry hands just barely out of the reach of a destroying fire. And I cannot believe in a universe that would have such a cruel organizing principle. Or I refuse to, anyway, even if I suspect all the while that it might in fact be actual. At the very least, I can refuse to adore and validate such a God, even as all the while I scramble to please him and dread the utter anihilation that will come with His pleasure as I writhe in fire forever and ever after I am dead.

But a God who would love and forgive me for my failures--even unto such things as rape and murder--does that God make any more sense? A God who blindly loves, rather than blindly hates, is still absurd, even as the person who tries to hug everyone is as mad as the person who lashes out and bites anyone who comes close. Or maybe divine love is just beyond human reckoning, in which case I am an idiot to try to fathom it, and I should spend no more of my effort on it. Certainly I find no evidence of divine love in my life--or divine anything--nothing I can touch or taste or see or hear or feel or measure and objectively know. I interpret this emptiness as an absence most times, when I do not interpret it as contempt or as that dreadful anticipatory silence in which the cop need only wait for the criminal to fuck himself over with his babbled lies and contradictions and so prove himself the guilty party (See the ending of Til We Have Faces for exactly this). I cannot accept, then, as the author of this book asserts, that I have worth inherent in my being created by a Higher Power.

She says that forming a healthy sense of self-esteem is contingent upon believing that I have inherent worth. Certainly, I can see that my tendency to constantly question my own worth in so many things and to rely almost entirely on feedback from others to be able to guage the efficacy of my being is extremely hazardous. But I will have a great deal of difficulty in accepting that I somehow am worthy and even loveable simply by being.

I was thinking about all this in the lonely hours of last night after a writing workshop that had exposed flaws in my work to which I had been oblivious, and left me feeling as though I had little worth as a writer, and hence as a person. I turned to probably my greatest spiritual guide in life, Johnny Cash. In his songs, he posits that people have value and dignity independent of their actions. The first song that came to mind was "The Man Who Couldn't Cry." The protagonist of the song fucks *everything* up.

To wit:

"The Man Who Couldn't Cry"

There once was a man who just couldn't cry
He hadn't cried for years and for years
Napalmed babies and the movie love story
For instance could not produce tears
As a child he had cried as all children will
Then at some point his tear ducts ran dry
He grew to be a man, the feces hit the fan
Things got bad, but he couldn't cry

His dog was run over, his wife up and left him
And after that he got sacked from his job
Lost his arm in the war, was laughed at by a whore
Ah, but sill not a sniffle or sob

His novel was refused, his movie was panned
And his big Broadway show was a flop

He got sent off to jail; you guessed it, no bail
Oh, but still not a dribble or drop

In jail he was beaten, bullied and buggered
And made to make license plates
Water and bread was all he was fed
But not once did a tear stain his face

Doctors were called in, scientists, too
Theologians were last and practically least

They all agreed sure enough; this was sure no cream puff
But in fact an insensitive beast

He was removed from jail and placed in a place
For the insensitive and the insane
He played lots of chess and made lots of friends
And he wept every time it would rain

Once it rained forty days and it rained forty nights
And he cried and he cried and he cried and he cried

On the forty-first day, he passed away
He just dehydrated and died

Well, he went up to heaven, located his dog
Not only that, but he rejoined his arm
Down below, all the critics, they loot it all back
Cancer robbed the whore of her charm

His ex-wife died of stretch marks, his ex-employer went broke
The theologians were finally found out

Right down to the ground, that old jail house burned down
The earth suffered perpetual drought

See, the protagonist is forgiven all his sins and errors. Note that he gets his dog back before he bothers to retrieve his arm. His worth is not in what he has done--all of which has failed--but is inherent in his being. Johnny Cash songs are full of such forgiven failures--indeed, if anybody could actually make me believe in a Jesus who forgives people for their errors and finds worth in human beings independent of their actions, it would probably be Johnny Cash. I think he sincerely and seriously believed in such redemption.

But can I believe in such things? It might be healthy--or effective--for me to do so. And yet it is such anathema to me.

The writing of this blog entry was a performative action. I don't think anybody reads this blog; therefore, the action will fail. Funny, that. Or not funny. Tragic, maybe; tragedy is about an actor going beyond his capabilities, and that actor being brought to task and punished for his transgressions. But even in that punishment, does not the actor prove his worth in trying to
do what other men do not dare to do? Yes, he must be blinded and exiled and murdered, but what wonderful and terrible things he has done. If Oedipus had never been king and taken up that forbidden bed and tried to cure the plague, Oedipus would not matter. If Achilles had never raged against Hector and the sons of Atreus, Achilles would not matter.

My God, I love tragedy.

"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."--Philippians 4:8

Arete.

If I am not excellent, I am not anything.