What an extraordinary time to be alive in the United States of America.
For the past few days I’ve been sporadically weeping with elation, relief, and another sensation that doesn’t have as ready a name. Think of it as the sweet agony of relaxing the heart muscle into receiving kindness and respect after countless humiliations and cruelties have left it armored and tight. Or as the raw, painful reawakening of joy after thousands upon thousands of deadening disappointments. You receive kisses where you were braced for blows; bread where you expected a stone. I’ve experienced this exquisitely poignant sensation before on a personal level, and my country has heaped humiliations, cruelties, and disappointments upon its black citizens on a collective level for centuries — so when I saw the tears in Jesse Jackson’s eyes Tuesday night, forty years after he watched Martin fall, I crumbled with empathic overwhelmment. Could it really be? Could we, as a nation, have so resoundingly exalted a member of his perpetually embattled and subjugated race? Can we, dare we let ourselves believe it’s real?
Yes. Yes. Yes we have. Yes we can. The impossible dream of Dr. King has come true. Barack Obama, a brown-skinned man with an unabashedly African name, has just been elected as our forty-fourth president.
And he is clearly the best man for the job.
How can we not weep?
**
Over the weekend preceding the election, I committed an act of radical personal catharsis. My idea was to finally release my own obsolete, failure-ridden, profoundly unhappy past, and clear the way for transformation, at least on a microcosmic level. In other words, to do what I would have my dysfunctional country do. After all, as goes AlienBaby, so goes America! But seriously: over the space of two days and almost fourteen hours, I destroyed bales upon bales of old journals and writings, some of which dated back twenty-five years. I surrendered my history, my so-called “life story.”
I had wanted to burn them all for more than a year, ever since reading The Power of Now had led me to discard, recycle, or give away most of my belongings and reams of old files in an act I called “the purge.” I knew that those yellowing notebooks were packed full of miserable ruminations and regurgitations that had served only to aggravate and cultivate the chronic depression and self-loathing I had suffered throughout my adolescence and young adulthood. I saw them as relics of a dead past I had no desire to keep alive any longer. (Besides which, I knew that if anything were to happen to me, they were the last thing I’d want my family to read.)
As I still hadn’t found a convenient and legal place to incinerate them, they had been sitting in two heavy boxes gathering dust in a corner of my apartment. Charged up with optimism after voting on Friday, I decided that there was no better time to dispense with them. On Saturday afternoon, armed with nothing more than a pair of kitchen scissors, I began pulling off the cardboard covers and shredding the pages into vertical strips. By the time I was finally finished Sunday night, I had filled six large shopping bags with recyclable materials.
Along the way, I read passages here and there, revisiting the memory of my younger self. At times I felt shame at her naïveté and utter self-absorption; at others I was embarrassed by her ill-informed grandstanding. What surprised me most about the writing, however, was how much of the content was redundant, and how little of the style was as good as I had thought at the time. This was no great loss to the literary canon, believe me!
Its greatest value, I would have to say, lay in its ability to demonstrate the extreme acrobatics of a deeply insecure and thoroughly hyperactive ego. “The tongue caresses these exacerbations,” wrote Wallace Stevens, “…like a hunger that feeds on its own hungriness.” That more or less sums up my collected works.
**
There were only a few things I found worth salvaging. Some of what I pulled out I’ll reproduce here, starting with a Walt Whitman quote I’d all but forgotten, but which is still entirely relevant:
Why are there men and women that while they are
nigh me the sunlight expands my blood?
Why when they leave me do my pennants of joy
sink flat and lank?
What was I just saying last time?
Speaking of such men and women, I got to rediscover my first impression of my college boyfriend (and first love) León Arenas at our freshman orientation assembly.
A young man stands up. His stance is slightly slumped, head and pelvis thrust slightly forward, hands in pockets, with what could be called a cocky air. Adding to this is his distinctive clothing — a black T-shirt and light yellow pants with white suspenders. His brown hair falls above his ears by reason of its wave, but he has a sort of forelock tumbling rakishly over his right brow. His jaw is lean and wolfish. He has a lanky attractiveness about him.
“Yes…I was wondering…for those of us who plan to go to graduate school, and are worried about grades…”
Here, an appreciative chuckle from those in the audience worried about grades; confident of his audience, he continues, smacking of wiseguy/class clown: “I know math isn’t my best subject, and I’m sure there are people here wondering whether it’s their efforts that are going to be recognized…or just what they produce.” He strokes his chin for dramatic effect. Students are tittering at the weaselly question, and the asker’s awareness of its weaselliness.
Across the aisle, I’m thinking: Oh, Lord, and I thought I’d gotten away from this kind when I left high school. Stay away from this hotshot, he’s annoying, and probably full of himself.
Yellow suspender pants perpetuates this image at convocation: students traverse the stage to shake the president’s hand and sign a registry. He not only shakes the president’s hand but at the same time gives a little bow and clicks his heels together, eliciting titters yet again.
He was an attention whore, sure, but I loved him. And after spending fourteen hours reading over my own obsessive self-dissections, I know I’ve got no business calling anyone else narcissistic. (I used up a couple of volumes suffering excruciatingly and verbosely when my Argentinian smartass broke up with me and affixed himself to one of my best friends.)
**
Also among those thousands of pages were some of my sophomoric attempts at erotica. Much of it bodice-ripper-grade, and fueled largely by my vast frustration. Back in the days of the first Clinton term, when Kurt Cobain was still alive and everyone was wearing flannel, I scribbled this R-rated paragraph. It isn’t as graphic as some of my other passages, but it’s better written.
I confess: I respond to beauty in men. Beauty of a particular — perhaps peculiar — sort, but beauty nonetheless. I want them. All of them. I want a smorgasbord of slackers. I want a grunge buffet. Pure pleasure, to run my hands through and smell their tousled locks, caress their stubbled faces, and breathe in the strong healthy scent that the skin and even the breath of such men have…to feel the definition in their hard, lean muscles and rub my cheek against the silken sworls of hair on their bellies, and lower, lower still…Ah, the smell of a man’s sex in warm denim. The animal in the cotton. It sleeps there in a mound, hibernating. I like to see it there, to know that it is there, whether or not he is going to let me touch it, wake it up. When I know that he is not, and I can see that it is there, it makes me crazy.
I hope that at least puts François’ doubts about me to rest.
**
There were a few surprises in the mix, and odd moments of edgy levity. I was particularly delighted to find this little ditty, written as it must have been while I was sick in my noisy tenement apartment. I had forgotten all about it; it made me laugh.
FLU AT THE BOARDING-HOUSE
The bass from the alley neighbor
drills its beat into my bed;
the taxicab driver in number six
is walking on my head;
burrowed beneath my pillows, there’s
no rest for my aching brain;
no wonder no more why it’s always the poor
who kill, or go insane.
I do remember writing the following not-quite-nursery-rhyme in my thirties to a twenty-four-year-old who flirted outrageously with me but never made good on his threats or even returned my nervous calls. He was full of clever jokes and bravado, but in retrospect I think he may have been more nervous than I was.
AGE-APPROPRIATE VERSES
You pocket your posy,
my little boy blue.
‘It’s mine, you can’t have it,
so go suck on poo.’
It’s all games and nonsense
and nyah-nyah to you.
Nothing is serious
when you’re brand-new.
Crow’s-feet and varicose veins,
boo-hoo-hoo.
Worms will have eaten me
before you do.
That’s not really much worse than Ring-Around-the-Rosy, which is ostensibly about the Black Death. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down?
But it’s this piece of relative doggerel that sums up the entire bitter AlienBaby oeuvre in four short stanzas:
EVERYTHING GOES ALL TO HELL
Those lips that first kissed me, for hours on end,
soon made excuses, excusing themselves,
soon told me how he loved her well.
Everything goes all to hell.
Once, I was happy when she would call,
until grievance and blame and demand coerced me
to give her far more than I had to sell.
Everything goes all to hell.
He begged for love or scorn. The first
felt right. And Christ, but his eyes were blue.
Now he makes me watch him court young belles.
Everything goes all to hell.
When they dredge me up from the reedy depths
Blue and bloated like a manatee,
those who knew me best won’t say “She fell.”
Everything goes all to hell.
Nothing like a little suicide fantasy with your fatalism.
**
The biggest surprise of the weekend, however, was a long-forgotten passage written after one of the most heartbreaking “misses” of my twenties. Luke Taylor and I might really have been something, if either one of us had had the courage to put ourselves out there and not just bluff and duck (I’m a master at the hit-and-run). Luke was a gentle giant of a guy, lovely in his ragged hippie way, with whom I could discuss Virginia Woolf and Nabokov. He had a broad vocabulary when it came to his emotions, and when I looked in his clear, kind eyes I felt somehow at home. Reading that part of my story again, I could see how we circled each other for months like uncertain animals, each waiting for the other to do or say something definitive. The openings Luke gave me, I blew, paralyzed by the prospect that my actions might actually have an effect. I was frankly terrified about what might happen. Maybe he was, too. Eventually he moved away to New York to be with a woman who wasn’t afraid to ask for him. I wonder where he wound up, and whether he’s happy. I hope he is.
I remember being crushed at the time, however, and crying a lot, grieving the loss of a good connection that I knew intuitively could have been amazing. What I don’t remember is writing this after he was gone:
Tonight, I felt strength. More than that, I felt something like greatness. By that I mean, I felt bigger than anything that was happening to me. Without even considering the future — how I hate those well-intentioned advisings of ‘it will get better’ and ‘you’ll meet someone!’ — I found myself in a present where both nothing and everything were, at once, possible. Walking the tightrope of paradox, I was powerless and all-powerful. I had nothing, but because I had nothing I had everything. Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of faith’ makes sense to me! Finally I understand…the deathbed revelations of Prince Andrei, the postwar epiphany of Pierre Bezukhov (in War and Peace). To love everyone is to love no one in particular, is to be supremely free…I feel again the strength and fearlessness of having nothing to lose, and I can at last speak my mind. How many people, do you suppose, have felt that liberated fearlessness?
This is not the sort of revelation I used to have back then. I was never one for living in the present, or for feeling fearless. It goes without saying that this was long before I ever picked up Eckhart Tolle! But I had definitely had some kind of firsthand experience of presence, nonduality, and even transcendence here; I was describing something in language used by spiritual teachers I had not yet read, something I hadn’t understood when I encountered versions of it in classic literature. In contrast to all the incessant why-me left brain activity characterizing the majority of my twenty-five-year diary, the above paragraph stood out like a neon sign. It was like an intimation of awarenesses to come, awarenesses that would eventually lead to my active destruction of these same diaries.
Ironically, losing Luke seems to have led to the loss of the fear that in all likelihood contributed directly to his loss in the first place. If only I could have found that expansive space of equanimity before! I can rarely find it now, still invested as I am in outcomes, in doing or saying the right thing, and still taking everything personally — in other words, still living mentally in the past or future. Today I might be a little more aware of the necessity of separating Luke from my anxious need for something from Luke. The higher you make the stakes, the more fear can enter, and fear is the greatest obstacle to love.
At any rate, I will no longer be hoarding the painful stories of my past. They sit, ready to be hauled away, lacerated beyond recognition in six jumbo shopping bags. Good riddance to my mopey opus! I am bigger than anything that has happened to me.
Something African-Americans have known since this nation’s inception, and which the election of President Obama confirms.
President Obama. I love saying that.
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