Feeling brotherly
Let me tell you about a little panic attack I had yesterday.
*
I was on the Amtrak heading to New York, and had spent much of the ride writing a long post about music and religion which I decided not to post because it got too long and my thinking got too complex and I didn't want to rush it. I was heading home to Kate's (FN 1) apartment, where I'd spent the summertime and part of the fall. Kate's housemate, who might be reading this and should know that I still think v. highly of her and am not writing this in order to air grievances about her or her position, confessed in a phone call to having some, um, reservations about my return for the night to this apartment. I will be the first one to confess that this past summer I'd failed to heed the wisdom in Ben Franklin's adage about fish and houseguests beginning to stink after 3 days. By that measure, I'd begun to stink indeed. So I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of coming home to Kate's apartment, where my presence could conceivably become a point of contention between the two otherwise best friends. I loathe to rock boats when it comes to the well-being of others. So, and not to speak ill of Kate or Kate's roommate, I didn't feel welcome.
The opposite prospect was going straight home to Brooklyn where, as readers of DJ know, the living situation is not ideal. It has to do with thin walls, an absence of housemates who know me, and an abundance of sub-5-yr.-old children who scamper about ceaselessly. Living there has been possible mainly because of my strategies for dealing with the noise, which have been to
a) Listen to loud dense ambient noise rock like My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, even in the way A.M.;
b) Go on runs whenever the noise gets bad at around the 10:30 A.M. mark;
c) Pound on the ceiling with a Frisbee - the best tool I've got for the job - as I stand on the arm of my sofa;
d) Go upstairs to use my limited Spanish to remind those families that, yes, I still live below them and yes, I can hear them.
As a) and b) are avoidance techniques, and as c) and d) are only intermittently successful, it isn't too much to say that I wasn't feeling welcome in Brooklyn either.
*
Add to these two thoughts of homelessness the fact that I've been haunted (FN 2) by two images. One of them is a digital photo of Jon's room where the Event happened, and the other being of Jon's basement apt, taken from the living room and focused on the island counter and the front door. On the island is a black shotgun which I assumed when I saw it (correctly, it turned out) to be the shotgun Jon used. The photo of Jon's room was taken sometime in early December or late November - I don't remember what the yellow timestamp said - and can therefore be taken as an accurate representation of what the room looked like that Saturday morning. A desk free of clutter. A new Dell computer (FN 3). Shelves on the rear wall containing a safe, a black shoebox, other stuff. The effect is one of stark order (FN 4).
These were the two images that kept popping into my head during this train ride. I dozed for a little while, and they were the last things I saw before losing consciousness for those few minutes.
*
I also have rattling around in my brain a few details regarding what happened that Saturday morning that, when given the visual spatial context of Jon's room and apartment, seem all the easier to animate and replay and replay in my mind, especially when I don't want to.
*
And finally there was the comment that my dad shared with me that morning when we spent a hard few minutes glancing at these pictures. He said - I hope you don't mind Dad - that he felt an intense feeling of depression on walking into that apt, that he could see how someone in it could be given over to despair, and not only due to the circumstances in which he was entering it. It was a basement apt., with only window-wells and no proper windows. Kate says that a physical environment is only the reflection of its occupant's inner life. That's true. So I can take that fact and see that Jon might’ve turned even a gorgeous cabin with hardwood floors and gardens outside into a depressing kind of place, if that’s what was inside of him.
*
All of this added up in me: my feeling of New York City unwelcomeness, my doubt that I should even be coming back to the city so soon, the images of the place and the means of Jon’s final moments. I felt as though Jon had felt the way I was feeling as I sat on the Amtrak as it pulled into Penn Station, the travellers around us who'd been prepared for arrival all sweeping onto the platform. I felt more Jon's brother in those moments than I have in a long time. I felt as though I was beginning to feel what he felt out there in Colorado, alone if and when he and E- were fighting. I had begun, there on the train, to draw a line between the images of his home and the unknown heart of him and the shotgun on the island counter and my slightly-more-known heart and my unwelcome home (FN 5).
*
Next time you're on a train, take some time and notice which people linger in their seats and wait for the bustle of the eager-to-depart to subside. You'll see some older couples with white hair and plain shirts. Perhaps a person who's differently abled, and their partners or aides. I felt a great affection for these people yesterday, as we remaining five or six got to our feet and worked the luggage that had been snug overhead free and set it all down.
*
Hereupon follows a lot of conscious effort to not break down in Penn Station as Kate and I made our way to K-Mart and to the 1, and generally failing in that effort. Part of the overwhelming quality of being around so many people again was straight-on sensory overload, but I suspect that part of it was seeing so many faces with private thoughts and private concerns... The true scale of the Communication Project I've set forth on this blog revealed itself to me in Penn Station as one of the more daunting projects I've set forth for myself. And I'm always setting out on daunting projects. Short version is this: the sight of so many people going about their individual lives drove home for me anew the fact that meaningful communication between people - the sort of communication that can keep a person from doing what Jon did - is v. v. hard work. It's hard work already, no matter what you do, but when you consider the amt. of people in the world whom you will never get to know, and all of the troubles that they might be going through, it begins to seem, well, a little bit hopeless. I know that it isn't hopeless. The fact that I'm even writing this proves that it isn't. Still. It seemed so. Thus, panic.
*
One of the most upsetting things about leaving home yesterday was that I didn't want to leave. There was more work to be done there - that work still remains – and this issue of work there vs. work elsewhere in the world I have to do is one that’ll have to be parsed out at more length soon and in another post. But more upsetting even than that was the fact that Jon felt so disconnected and homeless that coming home didn’t occur to him that Saturday morning as an option. It’s an error to think that Jon’s mere return to our home in Camillus – which is a preternaturally-homey environment, with fires and Golden Retrievers and a big-screen TV on low volume and portraits of us kids everywhere, a fridge full of food and Tupperwares full of cookies, a just stellar home environment you want to take a warm nap in – would have solved anything in a long-term, emotionally-healthy sort of way. Jon’s problems must’ve run much deeper than that. Still, he had been thinking with E- that he’d pack up his truck and come home. He’d come home. This thinking was current even as of the Friday before that Saturday morning. Something we, esp. my mother, can’t understand is what changed such that our home didn’t seem viable as an option for him. Did he just not think of it? Did he think of it but judge that it wouldn’t’ve helped?
*
I want to bring him into the house one more time: it’s New Year’s Day: Kate and I have come back from Williamson, NY: Melissa and Emily are there as well: Mom doesn’t have to work: we’re all tired from the previous night’s wedding: the lights in the kitchen are on: Dad’s sauteeing onions in butter for the piroghies he’s boiling and plans on searing: I am helping him: Melissa is finishing her coconut & caramel cookies: Mom assembles a salad: the dog is an angel behavior-wise: she trots around from one side of the island to the other, holding vigil at the sides of various family members in hopes of a handout: conversation needs to be directed around the pots that hang from the ceiling rack: conversation therefore has a funny I-can’t-see-you, neck-craning joviality to it: all of this did happen on New Year’s: we’re telling stories about him: he could be there to correct us in our misremembering: he should be there to embellish and tell stories of his own: he would feel a part of the family again and still.
FOOTNOTES.
FN 1. A pseudonym. Whenever I remember to, I use a pseudonym for talking about this person in written productions of mine.
FN 2. "Haunted" isn't overdramatic here. I think that "haunted" is warranted by the fact that these two images recur without warning in contexts that are wholly incongruous.
FN 3. Which was the computer my dad brought home and set up on the floor of the den. It was the computer on which I first saw these photos. Which is an interesting set of circumstances: seeing the computer in Jon’s room on the very same computer in another room 1700 miles and some weeks apart.
FN 4. Jon's rooms were often like this: bare bones, Spartan. Even as he became more interested in technological trinkets, he divested himself of most other creature comforts. For example, he gave up sleeping on beds sometime in his late teens, and opted instead for an inflatable mattress that could be easily propped up against the wall once morning came.
FN 5. Please remain assured that this brand of spectral affinity I seemed to have with Jon in this moment DOES NOT MEAN that I'm thinking about doing or am capable of doing what he did that Saturday morning. It just doesn't.
*
I was on the Amtrak heading to New York, and had spent much of the ride writing a long post about music and religion which I decided not to post because it got too long and my thinking got too complex and I didn't want to rush it. I was heading home to Kate's (FN 1) apartment, where I'd spent the summertime and part of the fall. Kate's housemate, who might be reading this and should know that I still think v. highly of her and am not writing this in order to air grievances about her or her position, confessed in a phone call to having some, um, reservations about my return for the night to this apartment. I will be the first one to confess that this past summer I'd failed to heed the wisdom in Ben Franklin's adage about fish and houseguests beginning to stink after 3 days. By that measure, I'd begun to stink indeed. So I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of coming home to Kate's apartment, where my presence could conceivably become a point of contention between the two otherwise best friends. I loathe to rock boats when it comes to the well-being of others. So, and not to speak ill of Kate or Kate's roommate, I didn't feel welcome.
The opposite prospect was going straight home to Brooklyn where, as readers of DJ know, the living situation is not ideal. It has to do with thin walls, an absence of housemates who know me, and an abundance of sub-5-yr.-old children who scamper about ceaselessly. Living there has been possible mainly because of my strategies for dealing with the noise, which have been to
a) Listen to loud dense ambient noise rock like My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, even in the way A.M.;
b) Go on runs whenever the noise gets bad at around the 10:30 A.M. mark;
c) Pound on the ceiling with a Frisbee - the best tool I've got for the job - as I stand on the arm of my sofa;
d) Go upstairs to use my limited Spanish to remind those families that, yes, I still live below them and yes, I can hear them.
As a) and b) are avoidance techniques, and as c) and d) are only intermittently successful, it isn't too much to say that I wasn't feeling welcome in Brooklyn either.
*
Add to these two thoughts of homelessness the fact that I've been haunted (FN 2) by two images. One of them is a digital photo of Jon's room where the Event happened, and the other being of Jon's basement apt, taken from the living room and focused on the island counter and the front door. On the island is a black shotgun which I assumed when I saw it (correctly, it turned out) to be the shotgun Jon used. The photo of Jon's room was taken sometime in early December or late November - I don't remember what the yellow timestamp said - and can therefore be taken as an accurate representation of what the room looked like that Saturday morning. A desk free of clutter. A new Dell computer (FN 3). Shelves on the rear wall containing a safe, a black shoebox, other stuff. The effect is one of stark order (FN 4).
These were the two images that kept popping into my head during this train ride. I dozed for a little while, and they were the last things I saw before losing consciousness for those few minutes.
*
I also have rattling around in my brain a few details regarding what happened that Saturday morning that, when given the visual spatial context of Jon's room and apartment, seem all the easier to animate and replay and replay in my mind, especially when I don't want to.
*
And finally there was the comment that my dad shared with me that morning when we spent a hard few minutes glancing at these pictures. He said - I hope you don't mind Dad - that he felt an intense feeling of depression on walking into that apt, that he could see how someone in it could be given over to despair, and not only due to the circumstances in which he was entering it. It was a basement apt., with only window-wells and no proper windows. Kate says that a physical environment is only the reflection of its occupant's inner life. That's true. So I can take that fact and see that Jon might’ve turned even a gorgeous cabin with hardwood floors and gardens outside into a depressing kind of place, if that’s what was inside of him.
*
All of this added up in me: my feeling of New York City unwelcomeness, my doubt that I should even be coming back to the city so soon, the images of the place and the means of Jon’s final moments. I felt as though Jon had felt the way I was feeling as I sat on the Amtrak as it pulled into Penn Station, the travellers around us who'd been prepared for arrival all sweeping onto the platform. I felt more Jon's brother in those moments than I have in a long time. I felt as though I was beginning to feel what he felt out there in Colorado, alone if and when he and E- were fighting. I had begun, there on the train, to draw a line between the images of his home and the unknown heart of him and the shotgun on the island counter and my slightly-more-known heart and my unwelcome home (FN 5).
*
Next time you're on a train, take some time and notice which people linger in their seats and wait for the bustle of the eager-to-depart to subside. You'll see some older couples with white hair and plain shirts. Perhaps a person who's differently abled, and their partners or aides. I felt a great affection for these people yesterday, as we remaining five or six got to our feet and worked the luggage that had been snug overhead free and set it all down.
*
Hereupon follows a lot of conscious effort to not break down in Penn Station as Kate and I made our way to K-Mart and to the 1, and generally failing in that effort. Part of the overwhelming quality of being around so many people again was straight-on sensory overload, but I suspect that part of it was seeing so many faces with private thoughts and private concerns... The true scale of the Communication Project I've set forth on this blog revealed itself to me in Penn Station as one of the more daunting projects I've set forth for myself. And I'm always setting out on daunting projects. Short version is this: the sight of so many people going about their individual lives drove home for me anew the fact that meaningful communication between people - the sort of communication that can keep a person from doing what Jon did - is v. v. hard work. It's hard work already, no matter what you do, but when you consider the amt. of people in the world whom you will never get to know, and all of the troubles that they might be going through, it begins to seem, well, a little bit hopeless. I know that it isn't hopeless. The fact that I'm even writing this proves that it isn't. Still. It seemed so. Thus, panic.
*
One of the most upsetting things about leaving home yesterday was that I didn't want to leave. There was more work to be done there - that work still remains – and this issue of work there vs. work elsewhere in the world I have to do is one that’ll have to be parsed out at more length soon and in another post. But more upsetting even than that was the fact that Jon felt so disconnected and homeless that coming home didn’t occur to him that Saturday morning as an option. It’s an error to think that Jon’s mere return to our home in Camillus – which is a preternaturally-homey environment, with fires and Golden Retrievers and a big-screen TV on low volume and portraits of us kids everywhere, a fridge full of food and Tupperwares full of cookies, a just stellar home environment you want to take a warm nap in – would have solved anything in a long-term, emotionally-healthy sort of way. Jon’s problems must’ve run much deeper than that. Still, he had been thinking with E- that he’d pack up his truck and come home. He’d come home. This thinking was current even as of the Friday before that Saturday morning. Something we, esp. my mother, can’t understand is what changed such that our home didn’t seem viable as an option for him. Did he just not think of it? Did he think of it but judge that it wouldn’t’ve helped?
*
I want to bring him into the house one more time: it’s New Year’s Day: Kate and I have come back from Williamson, NY: Melissa and Emily are there as well: Mom doesn’t have to work: we’re all tired from the previous night’s wedding: the lights in the kitchen are on: Dad’s sauteeing onions in butter for the piroghies he’s boiling and plans on searing: I am helping him: Melissa is finishing her coconut & caramel cookies: Mom assembles a salad: the dog is an angel behavior-wise: she trots around from one side of the island to the other, holding vigil at the sides of various family members in hopes of a handout: conversation needs to be directed around the pots that hang from the ceiling rack: conversation therefore has a funny I-can’t-see-you, neck-craning joviality to it: all of this did happen on New Year’s: we’re telling stories about him: he could be there to correct us in our misremembering: he should be there to embellish and tell stories of his own: he would feel a part of the family again and still.
FOOTNOTES.
FN 1. A pseudonym. Whenever I remember to, I use a pseudonym for talking about this person in written productions of mine.
FN 2. "Haunted" isn't overdramatic here. I think that "haunted" is warranted by the fact that these two images recur without warning in contexts that are wholly incongruous.
FN 3. Which was the computer my dad brought home and set up on the floor of the den. It was the computer on which I first saw these photos. Which is an interesting set of circumstances: seeing the computer in Jon’s room on the very same computer in another room 1700 miles and some weeks apart.
FN 4. Jon's rooms were often like this: bare bones, Spartan. Even as he became more interested in technological trinkets, he divested himself of most other creature comforts. For example, he gave up sleeping on beds sometime in his late teens, and opted instead for an inflatable mattress that could be easily propped up against the wall once morning came.
FN 5. Please remain assured that this brand of spectral affinity I seemed to have with Jon in this moment DOES NOT MEAN that I'm thinking about doing or am capable of doing what he did that Saturday morning. It just doesn't.
posted by Wil at
8:35 AM
5 Comments:
Surprised By Joy (W. Wordsworth)
Surprised by joy--impatient as the Wind
I turned to share thee transport--Oh! with whom
But thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind--
But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss!--That thought's return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.
Just a little Wordsworth, to go with the other poem posted below, by K.A. I meant to privately email you this particular poem last night, Wil, but I'm glad I didn't because I suddenly felt the need to share it with anyone and everyone else who may be seeing this. I'm also glad that I'm posting it now, and not last night--I have to say that these 14 lines seem even more appropriate having read these newest posts. I think the poem speaks for itself on the painful issue of breathlessness and ghosts and panic attacks, but I also know that it's provided me more comfort than any poem I know...and that's saying a LOT. In fact, I'm (only halfway) embarrassed to admit that I carried it, literally, in my back pocket, for nearly a year. Somehow, keeping it so close to my physical body allowed me to know that I wasn't alone in those attacks. It also provided me more courage than I thought I had...to trust in the details, to trust my memory, to speak my own truths, to find even the smallest of moments of recovery of those said ghosts in words, even when I thought words had no meaning. Read this against an elegy like Milton's utterly emotionless "Lycidas," say, and this poem makes him look like a bonafide amateur. In sum, all I can wish is that this poem may reside deep within you, Wil, and anyone else who needs it...and may it bring you even half of the fulfilment that it's brought to me.
By
Anonymous, at 12:35 PM
Emily: Thanks for the poem, and the gloss. Eerie how the two poems sound like such close kin. I went and read "Lycidas" (by John Milton, you non-poets) after you mentioned it, and while much of it did leave me cold - why use the death as a "foretelling of the ruin of our corrupted clergy"? And how does that work again? - parts of it work well.
He asked the waves, and asked the felon winds,
"What mishap hath doomed this gentle swain?"
And questioned every gust of rugged wings
That blows from off each beaked promontory;
They knew not of his story... (lines 91-95)
And this:
For so to interpose a little ease,
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise (152-53).
But in the main I agree with you.
By
Wil, at 7:13 PM
W. -
Let me know if you need a friendly (mostly quiet) place to crash in the city. I'm always at your service, and, anyway, I'm never home.
-Bobh
By
Anonymous, at 10:05 PM
Bobh: Thanks so much. I appreciate the offer. But, if you're never there, what possibly good could there be in it? By the way, for the record: I love that "h".
By
Wil, at 5:31 AM
Alright, Wil, quickly back to what I said yesterday and then I'll quit:
I do see this morning that maybe the word amateur was a little harsh for good old Milton.
I guess I just have a *really* hard time swallowing a Pastoral Elegy that seems to be written only for the sake of writing a Pastoral Elegy...The Poem (I'm usuing capital T, capital P, as "Lycidas" seems to be The Poem M. was banking on to make him famous, and maybe it can encompass too all of those formal/traditional elements implied by the choice of Pastoral Elegy...) seems to overshadow any and all emotional connections or complications resulting from the death of the poor 14 year old kid. And I find that, well, crazy. I guess I feel that the kid should be center stage in the poem, not the act of the poem itself...? I don't know; I guess that's complicated and we can continue that discussion later.
BUT. I suppose I should let M. off the hook too, in the sense that these were the rules of the elegy for Milton's time. The problem seems to be that it's just so far removed from me poetically that I can't really make sense of it. No one was really free to be as intimate and self-centered poetically until Wordsworth & co. rolled in, and well, we're much closer kin to W. than M., so that's probably a large part of why I understand and love "Surprised By Joy" much better than "Lycidas." I, too, was struck by how similar the sentiments of "Surprised by Joy" were to those in Kim A's poem, but really, it makes sense because W. is arguably a much more integral part of our lineage than M.
And yeah, I suppose I can't fault young Milton for trying to find out where he fit in within his own poetic tradition...isn't that what we just did for two years out in Oregon? Isn't it what we will continue to do as we grow into our lives of poetry?
Anyway, I'll shut up now. I'm still going to keep working on making sense of "Lycidas," so thanks for making go back and look again. You're right, there are some great lines. Personally, I like these:
"It was that fatal and perfidious bark
Built in th' eclipse, and rigged with curses dark,
That sunk so low that sacred head of thine" (100-03).
By
Anonymous, at 7:16 AM
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