Only love can do that.
Only love.
But love costs. Does it not,
and is that not why I still find myself struggling?
Struggling in a bizarre sort of struggle I want to be free of, because it seems
pointless, not to mention a little (a
lot) disturbing.
Why am I unable to oust these
thoughts? They’re not hate exactly, though I sometimes find myself trying to
whip up a storm of hate to drive these thoughts OUT of my head. But then my
favourite King quote came back into my
mind.
I’ve gone over it and over it
until I want to just push the entire thing away forever. Someone died under
horrible circumstances, more than twenty years ago now. It was a tragic, even
macabre death. It was someone I thought I knew, though we never met. We
corresponded for about ten years, and no doubt I saw only an idealized version
of him (and vice-versa), though at times what he said to me was very dark indeed.
So is it working, this trying
to work it out, to address it directly rather than keep trying to shove it into
a black closet at the back of my mind and bolting the door?
He was too good at words. It
was a smokescreen, sometimes a swagger. He was playing a role that wasn’t
really him. From his early photos, I’ve pretty much determined he was not so
much bipolar as schizo-affective, his bouts of
mental illness so extreme he heard a cacophony of voices jabbering in his head in different
languages, believed his mother was a German spy, and at one point thought the
Mafia was after him.
And he ran, and ran, and ran,
from job to job, relationship to relationship, always trying to outrun
something in himself, or some awareness of who he really was. Are these
guesses? Maybe, but based on something I sussed out, both from those expressions (like Brian
Wilson, in his own little internal universe, and Howard Hughes at the end, a
scarecrow out of his mind whose reality bore no relation to anyone else’s).
Does this help? Of course it
doesn’t, but what can I do? We first “met” (never did meet in person) on the phone, and that was more than forty
years ago. Forty. Is it the fact that
everyone I knew from that time in my life is now dead? Or something else?
Only love can do that. Do what? Isn’t love more killing than hate?
Sometimes. It does strange things to the mind. It can blind you to certain
things. More macabre than the manner of his self-imposed death was the fact
there was a police report I somehow found online (HOW? Where? How did I even
know he had died?) It described someone
I barely recognized, a skeletal, even spectral version of himself, emaciated, a
front tooth knocked out, eyes glazed and staring. This wasn’t the same man, or
was THIS the real man, and all those other incarnations the imposters?
As I write this, I listen to
Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, an
exquisite, sylvan meditation which you would never know on first listening was
meant to commemorate the tragic deaths of six of his dearest friends, cut down
in their prime in World War I. The pieces are wistful, playful, tender,
sometimes downright jubilant, with a sense of birdsong and morning dawning
against the odds. And this, to mark all those deaths, those irrevocable losses.
So I listen to this, to try to do what?
I don’t want to be taken
over, I don’t want to think about things that happened or didn’t, forty years
ago, or thirty, or twenty. This is NOW, and hard as now is, and it IS hard or I
wouldn’t be writing this – so why is my now
so polluted by memories or images or
even words he wrote, the words I read so
many times they’ve become seared into my consciousness? Isn’t it bad
enough I often think I’m going to die fairly soon, that the cancer they think
they “got” is just lying in wait? Must it be compounded by this – what? His bizarre,
even grotesque means of suicide – why do I even allow ONE such thought in my head?
Why can’t I turn this off? I
have tried everything. This is just the latest exercise in futility. I don’t know now if the man was ever truly
well, for as a boy he was already experiencing bizarre, frightening symptoms,
and was given unanesthetized shock treatments at the age of fifteen, a barbaric
practice which never should have been allowed. Then they did it again when he
was sixty, all wrong for very similar reasons, and it could not possibly “work”
the way he insisted it did the first time.
Worked, meaning – what? Even
in his letters, he constantly fantasized about running away. Hitting the road.
Hiding out. He literally used the word “hide” a lot. From what? From something
in himself? He wrote a tell-all about
his mental illness and these shock treatments, which was gruesomely
graphic and probably not helpful to anyone. It was almost ludicrous in its
first-person, present-tense, “you are there” approach, grabbing the reader by
the lapels and forcefully pulling them into the story until your face is right up against his. like
it or not. A way of capturing your audience and forcing them to bear witness.
Horrible, really, but that’s how it was.
And by rights, as with so
many other people I’ve loved and lost, this story should have faded by now, and
I have no idea why it has come back with such force. What is it trying to tell
me? If I was still into the spiritualism I now see as incredibly naïve and even
self-serving, the answer to that would be unendurable. I DO NOT want to be “haunted”
by anyone or anything. The thought of it is beyond horrible.
Then what? Why can’t love
drive out hate, or hate drive out love, or however it actually goes? About six
times an hour, the thoughts break in or just appear. I try hard to push them
away, to banish them, and sometimes they seem to actually, physically recede
into the distance, always on the left side – and what is that about? When I was in therapy trying to deal with a childhood
and adolescence of unspeakable traumatic abuse, I felt like there was a wall,
almost an actual, physical barrier on my
left side, almost right up against my face, and on the other side of that wall
were the horrors. I had thought the wall had been dismantled decades ago after
a hell of a lot of hard work and expense. But here it is again.
This sense it all dwells in an actual, physical location.
I am haunted by what it was
like for the family, being told he had literally run away from a psych ward,
full of pills and (very sadly, but it also makes me angry) booze. He just
wanted to be found in a very public way, so that it would be written about and
published. As a newspaperman, he knew that was how it would go down. His
macabre attempt to drown himself was
similar, and that left him in a coma and
with brain damage. He wasn’t even very good at dying, obviously, though in the
end of course, it gets us all, whether we’re good at it or not.
So did I love him? I thought
I did. That song by Stephen Sondheim repeats and repeats in my mind: “The sun comes up. I think about you.
The coffee cup. I think about you. I want you so, it’s like I’m losing my
mind.” Then the melancholy chorus: “All afternoon doing every little chore, the
thought of you stays bright. Sometimes I stand in the middle of the floor, not
going left, not going right.”
Immobilized, and by what?
Surely this can’t be “love”, though I thought I loved him, or loved his words,
which I now see were another kind of hiding place. It was writing which calls
attention to itself: fireworks, ooooh,
ahhhhh, verbal pyrotechnics guaranteed to impress the audience with its
vividness. I call bullshit here, because I know all the writer’s tricks and see through them all. I want to say: GET TO THE POINT. I wonder, have always wondered, what exactly
happened to him when he was a 15-year-old
boy doing manual labor in the far north with a bunch of drunken grown men. I don’t wonder at all,
actually, but I do about his orientation, and if his doctors or (more likely)
his parents were actually trying to shock him straight. Such things happened
then, probably still do in more primitive parts of the world such as the United States. If it’s true
what I suspect, it was a futile attempt to cure his attraction to men, which
never left him and manifested in furtive anonymous sex in men’s rooms rather than any sort of
actual relationship.
He never gave me a home address through at least five changes
of job in ten years, never once spelled out his living arrangements except to
refer, very rarely, to a “companion” (female, I assume, because he could not
face who he really was). Was he with someone at the end? How did he end up
emaciated and with a front tooth knocked
out? A fall, a fight, sheer neglect? Those are horrible details. He was 65, and
he wanted to die outside and be found and be written about in the papers, as if
his family had not been through enough
of an ordeal. It was all publicly aired, and he knew it would be, like those
Morningside pieces I now see as ludicrously swaggering and even full of
contempt for everyone around him.
So what are you to say, what
am I to think, was he so far gone he didn’t even know what he was doing, or –
something else? A piece he wrote in tribute to Peter Gzowski was called, bizarrely, In the Spirit of Eros
(as in “erotic” – the two had a sort of weird bromance going on), but in
reality he was living in the spirit of Thanatos, on a death march that went on
for a very long time and ended with a frozen body beside the railroad tracks.
Then the family had to be told that, yes, they had finally found him, but the news wasn’t good.
But I must think of me now. I
have worked so hard to be free, to be well, and physical limitations have
dogged me for more than a year and a half. I make a conscious decision every
day not to allow myself to be depressed. I get myself out, I move, I walk, I
eat and breathe. NO DEATH MARCH for
me! Life has never been, will never be that. So why won’t this dreadful memory
just recede into the grey zone of the deep past?
It’s not happening, and force
won’t work, and hate won’t work, but even love won’t work, because it’s tinged with so much anger
and horror. I am appalled at it now, the
selfishness, even if he WAS so sick he barely knew what he was doing. He knew.
That sort of death took planning, and
timing, and cunning. It took secreting enough pills to kill him – and beer, for
Christ’s sake, where did he get THAT? – and somehow getting all this past the
people who were watching him like a hawk on a psychiatric ward.
He wrote an awful poem about being in a psych ward,
wrote it “at” me because he was angry at
me for having a loving family, accusing
me of not appreciating them enough. I wish I could get it out of my mind. It’s
his usual poesy, overdramatic, first-person and present-tense, dragging the
reader right into the centre of his appalling tragedy. It was as if he was
shaking us by the shoulders and screaming that he was in pain, but what the hell were WE supposed to do about
it?
I keep telling myself: OK
then, if love won’t drive it out and
hate won’t drive it out and I can’t get away from all this horror no matter how
fiercely I battle it, can I just accept that it’s there and try to live with it? I have to do that with
so many things, including my own
addictive tendencies and my bipolar condition. I have to put myself first.
I don’t have friends now,
which sometimes shocks me – they are, quite literally, all dead. All the people
I cared most deeply about are gone. Stroke, heart attack, cancer, suicide.
There’s that word again. A horrible word. Even saying the word makes it
thinkable.
So what is the point of all
this? Is there one, or did I just
feel I had to put this down to give me a sense I have some sort of control
here? What will it be like, anyway – dying? Will it just be like going to sleep,
or will I go to hell for all eternity for not being the person I was supposed
to be – or just for being at all?
Now as I listen, it’s Satie’s
Gnossiennes on the piano, sultry,
almost sinister, a heartbreak on the keys. But healing somehow, as it acknowledges
just what life can be like in extremis.
Death can seem preferable, but when I get those sinking feelings, that shadowy
feeling I can’t even try to describe, I don’t want to do anything but get away
from it. In my better moments, I can even convince myself I’m going to live, after all. For how
long is not so much the question – just “how”. I’ve seen enough beloved people
through their own harrowing ends to know
it can be a horrible, horrible thing to
die. You deteriorate and become a bad parody of yourself, until finally
you are no more.
So how will it be? And will
this wraith, this spectral presence, ever bugger off and leave me alone?
Bohdan, if HE wasn’t dead also, would say it’s probably his spirit coming back
or whatever, but I cannot live with even the possibility of that.
So I have the music, and my
life, such as it is, still precious to me simply because it is mine. It has
been a long time coming. I don’t need a reason now. I live, and I suppose I
will die, sooner or later, and sometimes I even hope it’s sooner or I will just
die in my sleep (and right now, it’s my main ambition and goal). I would rather
not be the one to survive, as everyone seems to fear I will and become a burden
on everyone. I know that’s what they’re thinking. It’s a subtext in the family.
Not so much that they care about me, but that they will be stuck with me.
These aren’t great thoughts,
but they are honest, and mine. I did NOT choose a macabre death, at least not
so far, though I suppose there were times I wanted to. When he actually died,
when he was found and I somehow or other found all those articles in the paper
(how?? How did I get hard copies of papers from New Brunswick? How did I find that police report online?), I was
barely coming out of my own hellscape, a maelstrom of mental illness that very
nearly finished me. My life was about to begin again, but I did not know that then.
That won’t happen this time.
So I am left with the quote,
and my doubts about it. Love, hate, aren’t they all the same thing? And the
opposite of love isn’t hate anyway –
it’s indifference. Something I have rarely felt about anything.
But that glazed mental
patient in the final photo, eyes like blank staring discs, seemed indifferent
to me, hollowed out. The opposite of caring is the absence of caring.
I can’t end this with any
sort of fanciful amen. I can’t find
images to salt it with to break up the monotony of all these paragraphs. I
don’t think anyone is going to read it anyway. The only blog posts that get attention
now are from ten years ago, when someone stumbles on something I wrote then.
Gratifying, but why feed something I should have wound up years and years ago?
Life isn’t a performance,
except it is, because those around you can’t help but see. But they are busy
performing as well. Busy with their own grubby little problems, their
pettiness. Mine is to take care of myself as well as I can, for as long as I can. To try to have a reasonably good
day, or if it’s a bad one, tell myself that tomorrow will be better.
Which it usually is.
Confounds me, but that’s just how it is.
