Pulled out a seat at Think in the upstairs loft, looking out across the street and into the most beautiful green scaffolding that obscures one of what I guess to be thousands of ongoing construction projects in the city. This morning’s catch is a trippio trimmed to the top of the demitasse lip, served speedily by the summer-gripped ginger girl in the Mets cap.
Think is where I’ve come since my friend Esther told me about it a few years ago. Hidden away on Mercer in the basic center of New York University, I am typically the only one here not to work on a paper due the next morning, or to share heavy-handed opinions about my psychology professor. I’m this odd hybrid of outsider-in(sider-out), and know enough about the city to feel comfortable, and some of its nuance from having tapped to its rhythms for a year; while outside of an understanding of the context as more current than my time living here.
Each time I’ve flown into the city in the past four years, accompanied by the portion of motion sickness I inherited from my mother is an overwhelming shame or desire for reconciliation — to make right what I thought was so wrong, and that in part my purpose in some trips past was that. However, on Wednesday night my plane flew over Citifield near Jamaica, and already I could tell something was utterly different about the hue of this trip as compared to all the cyclically-caustic-carbon-copy colours preceding it.
The appeal of New York is gone for me in so many ways — at least in the ways that relate to my past belief that by moving back here I might be able to fix the failure I considered in leaving. But why did I feel the failure? And why did I let that shit seep into my every thought, trickle down my limbs, and surround every sinew and stem in the obscure corners of my brain?
In the way that the prideful man is at the center of his own universe, the victim too is at the center of his. Made less himself by entitlement, self-preservation, and self-seeking, while misled that it is actually these things which make him more himself. And the deeper one becomes in his entitlement (or misperception of it), the greater the victim he becomes. And through all this, the victim was never a victim at all — though the psychological framework he himself has constructed continually, subconsciously, fortifies it all, and layers and layers build up. And the cycle is terrible, if for the mere fact that none of it is grounded in reality, though for other reasons as well.
In the deep parts of this past fall, something remarkable happened. I began praying again — I began trying to believe that kind of thing was actually effectual, and that it actually had some function in my life. It wasn’t some existential-theological-battle to begin again. I didn’t start for selfless reasons — I started to pray again for therapy. But the activity itself definitely lends itself to a posture of selflessness — of admitting that I myself lack power to fix stuff. I started because it provided me cathartic satisfaction, and I didn’t – at that point – think that it was accomplishing little anything past that.
I’ve sung all the hymns. “My chains are gone,” and the Gospel’s power to do so and such and such and on and on. “But from what,” I’d always thought. Sure, I’d memorized the Answers, but had I ever come into an experience of slavery in need of liberation? From what was my Exodus?
It wasn’t until the fall of 2009, when I started to try to start to try to pray again that I realized how enslaved I was to so many things — of shame, guilt, self-seeking, and the behaviors allowed by all of those, and that also allow for all of those.
On my first night in the city only days ago, I called my dad from the thirty-second floor rooftop, looking out over Lower Manhattan — Wall Street, The East River, & the Brooklyn Bridge. Sipping a Brooklyn Lager, I told my dad about the consummation of these realizations, that I think only could really reach this point with the assistance of another visit, especially since I consider my last trip in August to be the absolute center of that low season.
I told him I was ready to be home, and that I no longer felt like I had to either visit, and, especially, move to New York to truly find the meaning of that word. I no longer have a need to fix anything here — not because anything was repaired, but because my perception of it was.
I want to believe the messy parts of me are being redeemed, and I’m learning that a big part of believing that is, well, believing it.
If appearance is a means to anything, I know little how to compose a piece without a few stripes, some grain and a gaudy gradient. I’ve spent the last six months without the capacity to write like I liked if only for a quite short time of my life. But like I’ve admitted reluctantly in some past post I know it was probably amenable to the types of experiences I was or or had passed through. This is that same admission in a dilly dally way, frivolous, and with some hope, buoyant.
But again now better paired with the color and variety and movement in my late life are the little knickknacks and ornaments and sparkly, glittery toys I hang with a hook to each blog post, tie a little ribbon of a Title to the top (with a little purple Permalink), Categorize and Publish the piece. It’s not called WordPress for a reason. It’s not called reason for a WordPress.
Is this the same “I’m sorry I haven’t written!” or “Excuse my silence” that you’ve read (and from which you’ve subsequently unsubscribed) on every other Starbucks-sipping quaint little Monday morning blog at least once a month? I guess. Is it to tell you I’ve lost the creativity that before made it possible to pen and prod and proliferate with all-too-awful (awesome?) attempts at alliteration? Not as much. In fact when I’ve heard people say something similar to, “I just don’t have a creative mind” I mostly hear is “I need an excuse for the work I’m not willing to put in” and “I just don’t feel creative” means “I’m feeling lazy.”
I am coming to understand better if only in personal rhythm that Creativity is not the result of some monsoon or heavy rain of inspiration, but rather a synthesis of the Rain, the Soil into which it sinks, and the dedicated farmer who bloodies his hands to cultivate it. It is far less a gift freely given and freely received than it is fruit of discipline.
So I’m sucking in my gut, throwing out an obnoxiously loud expletive at myself, rolling out of the figurative bed, ironing my proverbial pleated black chinos, and getting to work by banging the keys so loud my grandma in Victoria calls to complain.
Suddenly I’m sitting in the aisle seat in the Emergency Row Exit next to a man named Barron. He repeatedly calls me a Tall Drink of Water with an aggressive snarl and wink, not stopping with the comment on my jawline.
He orders me a vodka tonic and I drink it down without coming up for air. It is my oasis in the middle of a wilderness with an undesirable companion. Barron leans his head on my shoulder, and fastens his sleep with a snore or more.
A good thing for the Wendy Worriers is that the emergency row (while in some ways building on the paranoia of the possible plane malfunction or air attack or whatever way you want to direct your anxiety) is that the flight attendant during the early-flight-emergency-directions is clearly heard and loudly so through the intercom, directly overhead.
Add or subtract a few rows and, well, who knows. Maybe you’ll miss out on the details of how to use your seat as a flotation device in case you crash into the Bermuda Triangle or your oxygen mask if you exceed the atmosphere and end up somewhere out there.
Intercoms are not evenly dispersed among the passengers, unless you’re on one of those fancier international versions with the headphones and Robin Williams films. No, not everyone gets their own personal pan pizza! But each does get a slice of the whole — even if it’s not evenly cut portions.
In the airplane ceiling, each intercom is placed in seat increments — usually something like 1 for every 6 passengers. What makes it work so that all passengers hear what’s coming from the distant or not-too-distant speaker is cranking the volume in one intercom so that sound waves carry the distance to the passenger furthest.
Seat 3 of 6 of course has the best position because the stereo effect is least lopsided, considering they are sitting just behind and just before a speaker. The person furthest away might have a difficult time hearing while the person closest might have a hard time not covering their ears.
In some ways, the realities which I have been forced to believe or accept (as one whose experiences accumulate and gain or lose meaning) have been much like placement near or far from the intercom, and the ways in which I choose my seat assignment ahead of time for ease and laze — if I could keep the most painful things at a distance by sitting a few rows back from the speaker, the content of what was said might be heard enough for awareness, but, also enough for detachment. And somewhere around row 4-6 is where I’ve been for the last year.
In the cycles it is the way it must be — when tickets are claimed on the flight for everything but the emergency exit row, and the red signs surround and flash, and the voice from the intercom is surly and gregarious and prudent. And suddenly it is all heard more clearly than before — the warnings and the instructions. And just as suddenly I know what I’ve failed to hear in the past (read: what I have ignored), and that it must be time to do something about it.
The rain alone doesn’t give me a thing to reap. I need the soil, the sow of the seed, the rake & hoe, the patience, the humility, consistency, and the confidence that That toward which I am working will yield gain, even if the process itself feels mostly about what’s being lost. It’s time to bloody my hands.