11/11/2017

LIFE IN THE TRENCHES

KAPPA-HEAD

“Let’s begin by talking about your brother.”

Dr. Cyprus’s voice is calm but firm.  Randy feels his mind settle around the psychologist’s statement, like solute molecules upon the surface of a seed crystal.  He feels his body settle into the yielding cushions of the couch.  His eyes train on a corner of the ceiling, and follow the edges of its square motif gradually across the room.

“My brother,” Randy begins, but pauses at the croak of his voice, and the hollow silence it leaves.  He clears the dry phlegm in his throat, and tries again.  “My brother, well, where can I start?  He’s always just been there.  There’s- there’s no beginning to him, as far as I’m concerned.”

Dr. Cyprus is nodding, or at least that’s what Randy imagines from his vantage point on the couch.  In past face-to-face consultations, Dr. Cyprus would always give a slight shake of his head whenever Randy spoke, perhaps as an acknowledgement that he was listening to, and responding to, what he was saying.  It was always a slight shake, with no real change in the angle of the neck.  It reminded him of the vibrations of a car antennae, disturbed into slight oscillation by the wind.

“Tell me the first memory that pops into your mind when you think about your brother,” he says, after a moment of silence.

At first Randy frowns and sighs at the seeming impossibility of the request.  Wasn’t he clear that there were too many tangled memories to even begin?  But without warning, images do begin to surface, and then out of those, one image floats to the top.  And before he even realizes it, he is recounting a memory that has imposed itself upon his consciousness.

“I am at the beach,” he says, closing his eyes.  “I must be two or three years old.  There’s a wind blowing, and I can feel the sand sting my skin and sometimes go into my eyes.  I look up, higher up on the shore, and I can see my parents and my brother sitting there.  They are looking at me, with this- this happy, expectant look on their face- like they are waiting for the punchline to a joke.  I think I am smiling too, in response to them- I’ve always been so stupid- so naive.  Anyway, a wave suddenly comes crashing down on me, and for what seems like forever, I am tumbling over and over in a roaring darkness, with salt water in my eyes, my ears, my nose, my throat.”

Randy pauses.  The memory of the ocean is real for him in that moment, and he feels disoriented, queasy even.  He has to flutter his eyes open to train upon the ceiling in order to restore his equilibrium, and his sense of the present.  After a few deep breaths, he closes his eyes and continues.

“When I come to- the world outside seems too bright and too loud.  Beyond the sound of the air, the wind- I can see my parents, my brother, and they are laughing, laughing.  I am on my hands and knees, and everything beneath me is soupy and white.  And then, I see a couple of things at the same time, and it’s almost as though they are all in sync- my parents, my brother, with that same expectant look- and the soup beneath me starting to suck me backwards, like the sea is inhaling me in.  I feel scared, I know what’s coming- and I reach a hand out towards my family, my brother on the shore.”

Randy again pauses.  He can feel his heart racing.  He almost expects a wall of water to crash down upon him, lying vulnerable upon the couch.

“So what happened next?”  Dr. Cyprus’s voice maintains that strange equilibrium between disinterest and concern.

“Well, of course, I got pounded again.  The wave fell, I felt myself tumbling over and over in the water.  And I swallowed the sea.”  Randy is about to stop talking, but there is a fragment of the memory that he did not expect.  He finds himself stuttering out the next words, like someone tripping over things in the dark.  “I was still in the water.  Still in the darkness.  And I called out- for help.  For anyone to help.  For anything to help.  And- and that’s when-”

When Randy doesn’t proceed after a few seconds, Dr. Cyprus prompts him.  “And that’s when what?”

Randy shakes his head, his hands out in front of him, fingers splayed like a fence.  “No, that can’t be true,” he whispers, half to himself.  “It can’t be.”

“What can’t be?”

“I-”  Randy shakes his head again, this time with greater ferocity.  “No.”

Dr. Cyprus inhales a long inhale.  It sounds like the hiss before a gas explosion.  Randy doesn’t hear the psychologist exhale.  Instead, Dr. Cypress begins to speak, in that same measured voice.  “You’re in a safe space,” he says.  “You can tell me what happened.”

It’s clear that

i'm feeling incredibly sad for some reason.

maybe it's because my school is hemorrhaging workers.  maybe it's because i feel completely disconnected from the people around me.  maybe it is because i feel so completely neglectful of my children, or of my other responsibilities.

12. Greeting: Write a story or poem that starts with the word “hello”.

hello
person inside of me
wake up
i want to feel again

there must be a memory
or a song
that can rekindle sensation
and a care

there must be a story
that can engage my sympathy
and attention
for more than a passing glance

my eyes are dead
and see the world
as a flat thing
the textures pulled
down and stretched thin
by the knowledge
that all mountains fall
and all holes have a bottom

that there is no secret
that won't disappoint

so hello you

hello!

respond.
responde si vous plait.

give me a stretcher
and carry me
through this death.

11. Dragon: Envision a dragon. Do you battle him? Or is the dragon friendly? Use descriptive language.

i am a dragon.  i live under the mountain.  essentially, i AM the mountain.  after all, i am its living beating heart.  i am fire.  i am iron.  i am death.

i spend long centuries sleeping, dreaming.  my dreams are of the shifting shapes of fire, and the attendant smoke.  all reality, after all, is fire and smoke: both the fire that consumes and changes the world, and the smoke that obscures it.  being the creator of fire is a lonely thing, for there is the inescapable knowledge that all things burn and flicker momentarily, and that the smoke and hubbub about it is just a precursor to settled ash.  there is nothing in the world that escapes fire.  the beings of the world, in fact, are all simply forms of captured flame, some burning faster than others.  the smoke are the words or deeds of those beings, pretending eternity, but only obfuscating the inevitable.  i too am fire, but a special long-lived flame, an ember burning at the contradiction of my own existence, that something that has mastered the secrets of fire and smoke still cannot make sense of what is an apparent emptiness and absurdity.

there is entertainment in the lives of little flames.  the little sparks.  so short-lived, they pretend to eternity.  with vision so narrow and brief, they generate such hot billows of smoke, words that lay claim to what they deem to be the universe, and what they hope to be eternity.  i laugh at them, chuckle at them in my deepest dreams, but secretly i envy them.  they are beautiful in their simplicity, their surety.  sincerity is a luxury sadly lacking in dragons.

to never stir to action.  every movement or thought ponderous and heavy.  the air around me is heavy with contradiction and ambiguity.  there is nothing that does not bely a world of shadows.  that is the lot of dragons, powerful though we may seem.

so small wonder that, when challenged by fool mortals, the longest lived of us do not immediately snuff them out.  for it is refreshing to inspire fear, and to simultaneously inspire hope.  and what harm, to expose a weakness or two?

perhaps, perhaps, a spark can extinguish a conflagration.

wouldn't that be a story?

10. Friendship: Write about being friends with someone.

friendship. it's a strange thing for me. in many respects, i don't understand it. i don't understand how it starts, or how it persists, or how/why it ends.

my first real friend (outside of my own family) was kendall fick. i can't quite remember how we met. we both attended mililani uka elementary together, and i suppose that we were in the same class or something, but i can't recall exactly how our friendship started. but in any case, he was the first friend to invite me over to his house. i recall one day, playing in his garage with a hot wheels set, even though it was raining hard just beyond. kendall moved away in the second or third grade, and for a while, i didn't have that friend to play with (as it turns out, good friends leaving was to be a recurring theme in my life). somehow, though, we stayed in touch. every now and then, he would invite me to stay over at his house in town. i used to be so excited to go there, and thought it was so cool to live in an apartment in town (the sound of the freeway rushing by made me think that there was always something going on there... nowadays, i've come to appreciate silence). kendall lived in a variety of places, from the sovereign (an apartment building near central union church, with round holes in the concrete walls at the bottom floor), to this distinctive building near the kinau offramp that had brown awnings (?) on the railings, to a small house nearby a park abutting a cliff. i also had the opportunity to stay over with him at his dad's place in salt lake (his parents divorced at some point).

the great thing about kendall was that he always tried to remain positive. i didn't know it at the time, but he had encountered some bullying when he went to the first school after mililani uka. i also discovered that his parents divorced at some point. he never really talked much about it, and i was too naive and selfish to even bring the topic up. in any case, kendall opened up worlds to me. an avid reader, he introduced me to a lot of the fantasy series that i was to fall in love with. he also liked to write, and for a time, we traded stories back and forth...

i think during high school we had a sort of falling out. or at least we didn't correspond much with each other. i believe it happened sometime during my sophomore year in high school. that was a difficult time for me, i think. by high school, kendall had definitely cultivated friendships with his private school classmates. they shared far more in common with kendall than i, who was only an occasional visitor. i recall one day when the two of us went over to a track meet at punahou. i had already endured a season of track and cross country at my high school, and had quit (dramatically) by the end of my sophomore year. i didn't like competing period. but anyway, i was with kendall, and decided to run with him in the 200 m. needless to say, i sucked big time. and it was that feeling, that sense that i was no longer in the same league, that truly isolated me from him. we didn't talk much (or at all) after that. in fact, i think it was only facebook which brought us back into contact many many years later.

***

at about the sixth grade or so, i developed good friendships with a few kids at mililani uka. they were to be my first "group." three of them happened to live very close to each other, in their own culdesac, in fact, and i always felt jealous of them for their proximity to each other. it seemed that any time any one of them wanted to, they could just walk over to each other's house, whereas i lived halfway across town. every time i wanted to hang out, i would have to ride my bike a long distance over there...

anyway, the three friends were greg fastabend, brian mahoney, and ed lau. all smart, in their own ways. soon, when we went to wheeler intermediate, we developed more friendships with the military nerds: clifton oyamot, and others. we were to become the "nerds" of the school, occupying a corner of f-building.

people teased us all the time. in retrospect, i have to say that at times we deserved the appellations thrown at us (nerds). but in any case, it really felt like we were not socially acceptable...

i don't know. i'm not willing to recount all my friendships right now.

***

suffice it to say that i'm probably not a particularly friendly or thoughtful person. people seem to think that i am, but in truth, i really am not. i don't know how to get close to people, and i'm not particularly thoughtful in the way that really thoughtful people are. i'm polite, certainly, but i'm not really kind. i don't, for instance, pay attention enough to know the likes or dislikes of people, and because of that, most of my "good deeds" happen to be pretty vague and nonspecific. i don't know why i'm like that. i just am.

i also don't really fight for friendship when it seems things take a bad turn. i just sort of accept it and move on. again, i don't know why i'm like that. it seems really unsympathetic of me.

at the same time, i hate being alone. being alone seems so pointless. or rather, it makes existence pointless. so much of my life was spent (wasted) in isolation, with me longing for someone to accompany me, to befriend me. but i never made overtures. i really couldn't. i never felt like i had much (or anything) to offer anyone. i just had this deep deep sadness.

i've used this metaphor to describe the nature of some of my friendships. i've imagined my friends as being distant figures on other mesas. i couldn't reach them, but i could see them, and maybe communicate with them in a rudimentary sort of way. and we existed in parallel, perhaps under the same sky. but we weren't close. we didn't really share anything beyond a sort of proximity.

it's sad to think of things like this, but i feel it's true. it makes me hate myself, but hate doesn't really change facts. i think having this stone heart somewhat motivates me to try and pretend to be kind, but it's a lot of work, and at times, i get so numbed out by it that i just wallow in my own introspection.

i like to hope that with my wife lynn, that things have changed about me. and i think i do care about her, and my children, and my students, in deeper and truer ways than would have been possible before. i, for example, wouldn't hesitate to have myself killed, if it meant saving them. but somehow that's not true love, or true caring... and in an analogous way, the friendships i still have, they aren't true either.

maybe i'm being hard on myself, but that seems to be the prevailing opinion i have of myself nowadays. again, i wish it were different. but wishing doesn't change facts either.

9. Animals: Choose an animal. Write about it!

i used to want to be a falcon.  something predatory.  and my friend, he was a wolf.  it used to be a metaphor of sorts, me and my long distance relationship with the world, and he, nose to the ground...  after all, i was naive and idealistic.  still am.

i don't know what animal represents me nowadays.  especially after a lot of the illusions of youth have faded, and i'm aging.  i suppose wolves age gracefully.  or other canines, like bears.  they grow grizzled and long of tooth, and their age imparts a kind of earned wisdom.  not too many other animals do that.  i don't conceive of birds, particularly birds of prey, as aging gracefully.  maybe after a while, they simply lose the ability to fly, and their lives end soon after.

i wish to be a purposeful, intelligent animal, whatever i am.  something with wisdom.  something that is still dangerous, and therefore relevant.  i do not want to be harmless, toothless, clawless.  somehow to be feared is to be respected is to be important is to be alive.

i somehow wish that sensuality were included in the package of being this aged animal.  maybe it's possible, but the way society packages sensuality is that it is inextricably tied with youth.  it's hard to conceive of it as a "beautiful thing" as we grow older.  but maybe that's the point.  when you're young, you cannot conceive of any other beauty besides that of youth, there's a myopia of sorts in that.  but maybe when you're old, if you're not tied down by all of the false hangups of society, then you just sort of naturally morph into something or someone different, with different interests, and different perspectives, and different- appreciations.

i love my wife.  it may not be the same as when we were younger, in terms of levels or degrees of intimacy, but it is strong nevertheless.  i appreciate that i always have a partner to talk to, even in those dead hours of the night, when worries and dreams threaten to tear you apart.  there's a surface to touch, to make you feel that the universe has a skin.

***

i think i would love to be a mountain: still, powerful.  and in motion, i would love to be a river: relentless, flowing.  if there were an animal that could contain that level of spirituality, and embrace both dualities of stability and dynamic action, then that is what i would want to be...  but right now, i can't see it, can't conceive of, any single animal containing those qualities.  it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic image that i have...

so, sorry, no animals that i can conceive of as relating to myself.

***

well, i guess i could talk about other animals.

we have a dog named musubi that i like to abuse.  i don't quite understand why.  it's not because, as my wife thinks, i am jealous (he follows my wife like a shadow, and my wife dotes on him).  i suppose it's because i see a sneakiness within him...  the fact that he jumps on the dining table when no one is around, and tries to eat our leftovers...  the fact that he runs away any chance he gets, to spend time with his girlfriend across the street...  i don't know why, but those acts of "disloyalty," far from appearing cute to me, really sort of disgust me.  and i don't know why this is so.  i can appreciate that these are actually endearing qualities.  it's just- in me, there is something that has a hard time tolerating the weak and small creatures, that demand something that it is not their place to demand.

i've tried to moralize this: maybe, i think, it is because I was never offered a chance, a mercy (i have, actually).  maybe it is because the world was cruel to me (it wasn't, honestly).

i don't know.

8. Dream-catcher: Write something inspired by a recent dream you had.

no recent dreams that i can remember.  only murmurs and echoes.  i wonder at it, at times.

there are times when, on the edge of sleep, i wish that i could choose what i would dream about.  it would be the end of a story that i could not conceive of with my conscious mind.  my submerged subconscious mind would take the raw elements that i offered up on the altar of my threshold mind, and transfigure and transmute them, and imbue them with a life and emotion and sincerity that i lacked.  that is what i wish.

conscious life is a trap.  we see only what we want to see.  or more precisely, we see what we condition ourselves to see, which is not the same thing.  deep inside, we WANT to see something different, a liberation, perhaps, or a pathway out.  there are no pathways out, no crevices, in this reality that my conscious mind has constructed...  an impregnable fortress...  not that there are not concerns in this prison...  things that i have neglected.  i have a thousand worries.  but then again, those worries are the very fabric of this prison.

the true dreams, even those of terror, have little to do with the worries of my conscious mind.

the true dreams are vast.

***

a state of being that allows impossibilities...  it is necessary to act without purpose, or intent.  this is the contradiction or paradox of the true art, or the true dream.  although it has a power, its power is by its very nature untamable.  therefore, to "capture it", and to impel it to allow one to ride it... involves a kind of pretending, a lie of sorts.  a deception of ignorance.

***

the true dreams: a vast underwater empire, full of living things.  a seduction that is endless, and never consummated (a promise unfulfilled)...  other things, immemorable.

***

inspiration.