i came upon an epiphany of sorts... first of all, let me say it's been a crazy couple of days. immediately after my first day with students, i developed a fever with chills and bodyaches. i got tested. it took them about 24 hours to get my result, which was negative. but in the meantime, i was practically delirious with fever dreams. it felt like my brain was boiling, and thoughts were seething upwards in meaningless repetitive cycles. i know i was mouthing off a lot of it, as though i were trying to let the "steam" escape...
so one of the things i thought about was, of course, how much i hate my brother. and i still do. but i realized something. whenever you hate someone you split the universe in half. and that universe includes you. the way it works is this. you start to look at the qualities of the person you hate. for example, for my brother, it is his selfishness, his greed, his arrogance... basically, the way that his feelings take up all of the air in the room... some of those qualities exist in everyone, including myself. so when i "hate" him, i also split away those aspects within myself, because i find them unacceptable...
what that led to, in me, was this sort of split current. on the one hand, there was the life that i wanted, with all the beautiful people... and on the other hand, there was this lesser place that i inhabited, playing the helpless, hapless "nice guy," who cannot for the life of himself admit his inner wants or desires- he would literally disappear in a puff of smoke if he ever dared mention anything relating to these things... this in turn led to this mentality that the only way "in" to that other world, that beautiful world that he so "deserved" (this, too, is a construct; there is no deserving anything) was for someone to see in him the value that he could not advertise himself. in other words, for me, a woman was someone who could "see" me, who would work to "translate" my own inscrutable heart, and would liberate me... somehow it had to be a woman. maybe it has to do with mother figures, etc., but in the world of men, and "brotherly" friendship, you earned respect through silence and what you did. so i had no problems getting by there. sure, i wasn't the braggart and blowhard that my brother was, but i could survive in that world...
it's a trap, of course. you cannot adopt that role, you cannot disallow yourself from being selfish and acting on your own wants, and be whole. the "nice guy" always lives frustrated, because he cannot break beyond the bounds of his own self-constrained "niceness." no one, not even angels, have the temerity and perseverance to "love" such a person. why bother, when he will never see himself truly, because he has always already blinded himself to himself?
it becomes like a koan. you have an irreconcilable difference. a conceptual gap that you are straddling. what is there to do?
*****
i still hate my brother, of course, for the things he did to my sister. one day, i will sit with my sister and have her recount exactly what he did to her. and i will try to learn from her how she goes through her life, day by day. maybe if i understood that, then i wouldn't feel so angry. or maybe i would feel more angry, who knows... but at least i can see that the qualities i paint my brother with, well, they also paint me, so i shouldn't be so absolutist in my strokes.
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