I don't know what to say.
There is a mirror by the ceiling in the corner of a hallway in a public building in our town. I walk past it every time I come to town to pay my bills. I never really paid much attention to it until yesterday.
There are times when I look at something I have seen for years and it looks like I had never seen it before. That happens a lot when I look at my wife; there are moments that she changes appearance, as if somebody who wants to be her has broken into the house and set in her chair. I look up and think, there is something different about the hair, the eyes, the shadows on her cheek. Have I seen this woman before? Should I ask her out on a date? But if I did, would she say, "Do I know you?" Yet, she sits there quietly stabbing carrots with her fork and she does not fawn, she does not gush. No expectations, no desperation. So I look down and just stare at the dinner plate with the seven peas rolling around the rim and pretend I have been in this house all along and wait. She will eventually throw down her fork and burst out the door and run down the lane in a way that I do not recognize. In will walk my wife and she will say, "What was that?" Fortunately, I do not know.
Sometimes it happens with places I have been; I see something I have seen for years and it looks like I had never seen it before. This is what I call Negative Deja Vu. The Already Not Seen. I have not been here before. And the more I am here, the more I have not been here.
So, I paid my electric bill, handing it to the teller with black hair and a veil, her torso hidden by a black shawl. She didn't even look up, she never does, she sat there in the booth breathing heavily, moving the bills to and fro with her white hands, sweeping them across the tabletop, swirling them in patterns, matching one bill to another, turning them over one by one. I stepped backwards and walked away and the lights flickered. Must be their business model. Anyhow, I passed by the mirror, the one I have seen for years, and something was different. The curvature? The placement? The color? Today it seemed altogether new. In the mirror I saw my image, distorted, oblique, spherical, like a tulip bulb, my helium-filled head and shrinking voice, the little man slipping away like an astronaut who lost his tether, receding into the black distance, hands fitfully grasping at the vacuum. I did not recognize myself. And then, I realize, maybe I am new.
Somewhere, there is a person on the other side of the mirror watching my movements on a television screen. Shiny eyes, like a housefly, watching multiple images, this person eats a ham sandwich, drinks a soda, studies the screen. I would not know this unless I thought about it and I might have no idea if this is true if I hadn't thought about it. I think I saw it blink.
At least one time it is true. I have been on the other side enough to know. I have met thousands of people, probably hundreds of thousands of people in my life, even if for a moment, and there may be thousands that I remember meeting whom I have not seen or heard from since. A man in physics class, a woman at the laundromat, a woman on the bus, a child in a hospital, an old man behind a screen door, a man in the wilderness. I can still see them.
I forgot that you can see both ways. And for this, I am grateful. I got a letter in February from my third grade schoolteacher, Miss Myrna Douglas. Red hair, green shoes, 21 years old, fresh out of college, wooden birds in her hair, loved to dance. It was 1965. She got my address from a former classmate and dropped me a line, 'out of the blue'. She asked if it was really me, recalled how much trouble I was, how she lay awake at nights wondering how to handle me, yet how she enjoyed me as a student - I made her 'laugh until she cried' - and how she wondered what had happened to me. She apologized if she made me fall out of my chair.
I fell out. I had no idea there was someone on the other side. This was my favorite teacher in grade school, the only one who was not an adversary, a creative, patient, young teacher who figured out how to channel me rather than sanction me, to whom I was grateful as long as I was able to maintain. At the end of the third grade, I told her that, once I realized she would not make me sit in the hallway, she was 'OK.' Was that a thank-you? Leaving the third grade, I carried the experience for the next three or four years. It gave me a sense that somewhere in this world I could fit in and be understood. I tried to find her again. I rode my bike to her house a couple times that fall, I found her once, we chatted. I stopped in her classroom. We chatted. One moment in fourth grade she appeared at the end of the hallway - I had been banished from the class and was sitting in the hall - and I jumped up when I saw her, but she turned around and walked away. Now she tells me that she was choked up, seeing me banished to the hallway. She moved on by the time I got to sixth grade, and then I walked into the fog of adolescence and the tar pit of moral revolution and that haunted mansion they call high school and forgot everything. I had no idea that I had been on her mind for 44 years. Where was I?
We were able to correspond for about six weeks. We wrote back and forth about six or seven times. She took a while to reply, and I figured it was due to a busy life. I didn't want to be a bore. But I had to admit it was thrilling to read her observations, her recollections. It filled in a lot of the gaps in the puzzle of my life, gaps I would never expect to fill, gaps normally filled with imagination. I imagine that I graduated from college. I imagine that I learned to read and write. I imagine that I was a child. Too much of my life is imaginary as is. It explained why I had a hard time reading in first grade, the social damage from my classroom exiles, the disrespect I had for teachers. But in her fourth letter, on March 10, she mentioned a battle with cancer, and that is the last I heard from her. I worried that my letters were taking something out of her. I talked about winning the battle. I told her stories. Her daughter sent me the next letter: Myrna died on March 28.
Now, the light flickers and the hallway grows dark. The curtains close.
It gets so quiet out here sometimes. Nobody comes by. Nothing moves. Not even the breeze. Everything looks the same, nothing is new.
I am growing old again. I have been exiled.
Come this way, please.
There is a mirror by the ceiling in the corner of a hallway in a public building in our town. I walk past it every time I come to town to pay my bills. I never really paid much attention to it until yesterday.
There are times when I look at something I have seen for years and it looks like I had never seen it before. That happens a lot when I look at my wife; there are moments that she changes appearance, as if somebody who wants to be her has broken into the house and set in her chair. I look up and think, there is something different about the hair, the eyes, the shadows on her cheek. Have I seen this woman before? Should I ask her out on a date? But if I did, would she say, "Do I know you?" Yet, she sits there quietly stabbing carrots with her fork and she does not fawn, she does not gush. No expectations, no desperation. So I look down and just stare at the dinner plate with the seven peas rolling around the rim and pretend I have been in this house all along and wait. She will eventually throw down her fork and burst out the door and run down the lane in a way that I do not recognize. In will walk my wife and she will say, "What was that?" Fortunately, I do not know.
Sometimes it happens with places I have been; I see something I have seen for years and it looks like I had never seen it before. This is what I call Negative Deja Vu. The Already Not Seen. I have not been here before. And the more I am here, the more I have not been here.
So, I paid my electric bill, handing it to the teller with black hair and a veil, her torso hidden by a black shawl. She didn't even look up, she never does, she sat there in the booth breathing heavily, moving the bills to and fro with her white hands, sweeping them across the tabletop, swirling them in patterns, matching one bill to another, turning them over one by one. I stepped backwards and walked away and the lights flickered. Must be their business model. Anyhow, I passed by the mirror, the one I have seen for years, and something was different. The curvature? The placement? The color? Today it seemed altogether new. In the mirror I saw my image, distorted, oblique, spherical, like a tulip bulb, my helium-filled head and shrinking voice, the little man slipping away like an astronaut who lost his tether, receding into the black distance, hands fitfully grasping at the vacuum. I did not recognize myself. And then, I realize, maybe I am new.
Somewhere, there is a person on the other side of the mirror watching my movements on a television screen. Shiny eyes, like a housefly, watching multiple images, this person eats a ham sandwich, drinks a soda, studies the screen. I would not know this unless I thought about it and I might have no idea if this is true if I hadn't thought about it. I think I saw it blink.
At least one time it is true. I have been on the other side enough to know. I have met thousands of people, probably hundreds of thousands of people in my life, even if for a moment, and there may be thousands that I remember meeting whom I have not seen or heard from since. A man in physics class, a woman at the laundromat, a woman on the bus, a child in a hospital, an old man behind a screen door, a man in the wilderness. I can still see them.
I forgot that you can see both ways. And for this, I am grateful. I got a letter in February from my third grade schoolteacher, Miss Myrna Douglas. Red hair, green shoes, 21 years old, fresh out of college, wooden birds in her hair, loved to dance. It was 1965. She got my address from a former classmate and dropped me a line, 'out of the blue'. She asked if it was really me, recalled how much trouble I was, how she lay awake at nights wondering how to handle me, yet how she enjoyed me as a student - I made her 'laugh until she cried' - and how she wondered what had happened to me. She apologized if she made me fall out of my chair.
I fell out. I had no idea there was someone on the other side. This was my favorite teacher in grade school, the only one who was not an adversary, a creative, patient, young teacher who figured out how to channel me rather than sanction me, to whom I was grateful as long as I was able to maintain. At the end of the third grade, I told her that, once I realized she would not make me sit in the hallway, she was 'OK.' Was that a thank-you? Leaving the third grade, I carried the experience for the next three or four years. It gave me a sense that somewhere in this world I could fit in and be understood. I tried to find her again. I rode my bike to her house a couple times that fall, I found her once, we chatted. I stopped in her classroom. We chatted. One moment in fourth grade she appeared at the end of the hallway - I had been banished from the class and was sitting in the hall - and I jumped up when I saw her, but she turned around and walked away. Now she tells me that she was choked up, seeing me banished to the hallway. She moved on by the time I got to sixth grade, and then I walked into the fog of adolescence and the tar pit of moral revolution and that haunted mansion they call high school and forgot everything. I had no idea that I had been on her mind for 44 years. Where was I?
We were able to correspond for about six weeks. We wrote back and forth about six or seven times. She took a while to reply, and I figured it was due to a busy life. I didn't want to be a bore. But I had to admit it was thrilling to read her observations, her recollections. It filled in a lot of the gaps in the puzzle of my life, gaps I would never expect to fill, gaps normally filled with imagination. I imagine that I graduated from college. I imagine that I learned to read and write. I imagine that I was a child. Too much of my life is imaginary as is. It explained why I had a hard time reading in first grade, the social damage from my classroom exiles, the disrespect I had for teachers. But in her fourth letter, on March 10, she mentioned a battle with cancer, and that is the last I heard from her. I worried that my letters were taking something out of her. I talked about winning the battle. I told her stories. Her daughter sent me the next letter: Myrna died on March 28.
Now, the light flickers and the hallway grows dark. The curtains close.
It gets so quiet out here sometimes. Nobody comes by. Nothing moves. Not even the breeze. Everything looks the same, nothing is new.
I am growing old again. I have been exiled.
Come this way, please.
4 comments:
Jamie vu: The familiar becomes unfamiliar; Reverse Deja Vu. My mission in life is to explain everything; to know all that is knowable. I can't explain when Moe, Larry, and Curly walk into an Old West saloon and a cowboy is cleaning his big hairy chaps with gasoline and a guy lights a cigarette throwing the match down near him and explosively igniting the chaps so that the man stands there in smoldering blackened bare straps when another comments, Man, you look ten pounds lighter! Why is that so funny to me?
Miss Douglas made contact. Count on one hand the number of people that make contact in life. There are so many phenomenal forces we experience, use, and measure that we do not understand. Fly men to the moon using a force animals and children use and take for granted: Gravity. The Law explains how things work 13.7 billion light years away. Yet, What is it?
Myrna Douglas is both person and force of nature. The person felt something for you, Dave. Yes, 46 years later she remembers. Now she is gone but not forgotten. I believe there is no greater love than to remember the person. Certainly, there is no greater gift to give to those we remember and love than Life.
I cannot explain Miss Douglas. She is unfamiliar. They say our vision has a blind spot directly in front and center where the mind must blend surrounding visual information to fill it in. The end of all our exploration is to arrive home again and see it for the first time. T S Eliot
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years---Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres (between two wars, 1918-1939).
Trying to use words, and every attempt is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure because one has only learnt to get the better of words for the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it.
And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the generalness of imprecision of feeling, undisciplined squads of emotion.
And what there is to conquer by strength and submission, has already been discovered once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope to emulate---but there is no competition---there is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions that seem unpropitious.
But perhaps neither gain nor loss, for us, there is only the trying.
The rest is not our business.
Home is where one starts from.
As we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living. Not the intense moment isolated, with no before and after, but a lifetime burning in every moment and not the lifetime of one man only but of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight, a time for the evening under lamplight (the evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers here or there does not matter.
We must be still and still moving into another intensity.
For a further union, a deeper communion through the dark cold and the empty desolation, the wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters.
Of the petrel and the porpoise.
In my end is my beginning.
The whole earth is our hospital endowed by the ruined millionaire, wherein, if we do well, we shall die of the absolute paternal care that will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.
We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T S Eliot
For this is what the High and Lofty One, who is residing forever and whose name is holy, has said: In the height and in the holy place is where I reside, also with the one crushed and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly ones and to revive the heart of the ones being crushed. For it will not be to time indefinite that I shall contend, nor perpetually that I shall be indignant; for because of me the spirit itself would grow feeble, even the breathing creatures that I myself have made. ISAIAH
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