A Bridge Into Troubled Water
Like peasants touching amulets to avert the evil eye.
Her long winter coat, black wool, was cut to make the hip suggest a small tulip. An understated New Look. She had long, straight hair, a silken estuary across the back of that coat, except where it was caught up beneath her collar. She stood completely still in front of a painting of medium size, at medium height, crying. As her sobs increased in volume, stillness dissolved. She moved her sleeve across her face, and it was streaked with everything coming from her eyes and nose. Her hair got sticky with it, like the slime of egg whites.
There are never enough benches in a museum. The crying woman sat down on the ground, shaking with tears until they drove her forehead onto the squeaking floor, from which the crying made a muffled-through-hair, wet-with-snot, echoing-in-the-chamber sound.
We thought it must be performance art. Everyone else in the room and in the adjoining rooms was cautiously making eye contact with one another or looking nervous-and-seriously at their phones, an expression that said, “I’m looking up what to do,” or making a face that they hoped conveyed that to everyone else. A young docent stepped around the corner and I heard her radio crackle. A woman with a kid in a stroller was moving toward the crier with her Mother’s face on and tissues. I tried to read the plaque by the painting that induced weeping.
I made that up, and I’m all of the people in the scene.
People sometimes say to me, “Thank you for your honesty,” and I don’t know what they mean. I’ve resolved to ask the next person who says it, “why?” But in the mean time I made up an entire theory about our world.
If I saw someone sobbing on the floor in a museum, I’d think something was wrong, or else it was a performance to elicit a reaction, some sort of big-C Commentary. (There’s a great episode of the podcast Criminal about British suffragettes in art museums.) I very rarely see people expressing thought or feeling in public. It kind of embarrasses me when I witness reactionary emotion in strangers, like I’m trapped in looking at something private. It comes with a can of worms labeled, “to act, or not to act.” Should I, a stranger, interact with this person because they are breathing too, or should I respect them by not inserting myself into none-of-my-business? Choose the correct option, because choosing incorrectly will at best haunt you, at worst get you labeled as a bad human. Or depending on your disposition, switch the best and worst in that sentence.
I would like to go to the museum and cry out to artwork that moves me. I would like to be whipped into a frenzy by something beautiful, or something terrible, or something terribly beautiful, or beautifully terrible. Instead, I hope no one sees me crying. If I let them see me cry, it can’t be the crying of a possessed person.
We all agree to be dishonest with our feelings, in a million different ways. We agree to it without saying anything, and we are a bit shocked when someone breaks the fourth wall, though we love those illicit little tastes of guards-down. It reminds us of ourselves, it awakens an interest, even if it’s negative. Dishonest people are extremely boring, especially when they’re so used to suppressing their feelings that they’re in denial about it. I don’t want to get know people who aren’t going to spill some beans.
On the other hand, when I see a stranger with all their beans out, so to speak, I never think, “you know what? I’d like to get to know this person.” So I concede that some veil over emotions is comforting and protective during some interactions. My ideal encounters are with people who are assessing me as much as I’m assessing them (or maybe slightly less), the assessments leading to curiosity, then a mutually cautious-to-reckless revelation of some good stuff and some bad stuff. Recognition, laughter, intrigue, comfort.
Last week, I had to have some uprooting trees in our yard cut down, and I saw one of the work crew eat a booger. He probably wouldn’t have, had he known I could see him, but I was flooded with satisfaction. I’m sure I smiled like an absolute idiot from my vantage point. It wasn’t voyeuristic pleasure, it was accidental-witness-of-unconcealed-humanity pleasure.
I know why most people agree to act out a life so separate from their thoughts and feelings. When I get very honest, many people react with concern. If you happened to know the woman sobbing in the museum, you’d go to her and say in alarm, “what’s wrong?!” You’d try to guide her away to somewhere more private, extract from her the source of this weeping, fix it with coffee, cake, pills, kindness, concern.
Most people hide what they think other people will react negatively or intrusively to. Unfortunately, there’s a learned precedent for being punished for revealing one’s honest self. So we stop crying or screaming or guffawing or getting on the floor or running without a bra in public. Maybe we stop doing these things at all, they are not proper, they draw so much attention. And what a crying shame that is. To do nothing wrong, to feel your feelings, and learn that it’s not allowed.
Honesty is only rare if you make it rare.
I turned 13 in a muggy-with-smog Beijing summer. I was going through it that year. There was the regular adolescent hormone stuff going on (she said so casually), but it was also the first time that death sounded better than life. I was feeling things I thought I wasn’t supposed to or allowed to feel.
There was an expectation that we not use bad words or think bad thoughts, lest we become what we think and say. It’s a rule made by elders suffering from their own inner worlds, suffering at the hands of other people’s bad words and thoughts. It’s what’s behind the veneration of sterile fictional ideals, the declawed Regency debutantes and our Glorious Founding Fathers whom we must protect from rolling in their graves. Unreal, polite. I acquiesced as far being a girl who loves arranging flowers. If only I hadn’t hounded my little brother through the shrubbery of the Pamir steppe to tell me the f-word that he learned from the movie Patton, I might have avoided becoming a foul-mouthed, foul-minded woman fixated on destroying the government of the so-called Free World.
When I’d write about how I saw the world at 13, I could manage others’ concern at my honesty by falling back on labels of metaphor, art, and experimentation. Within the framework of art, you can say anything you want and some people will automatically take it less seriously than whatever they consider is “actually real.”
I recall my 13th year often as the death of who I thought I’d be and the birth of who I am. I’m still taking that girl’s art seriously because her life was serious.
My 28th year was a rough one, too. I can trace a lot of things I’m still crying about to that year. I think it was the first year I started talking about parallel worlds. (I didn’t talk about it very much, because people look at me like they don’t understand.) Sometimes people experience and process the same events so differently that an unbridgeable gap develops. Trump’s election or COVID masking or the answer(s) to “what radicalized you?” made parallel worlds familiar to some people. You begin to see things and connect your experiences together in a way that is so unlike how someone else does that you stop even being able to communicate in the same language. I’m not saying no effort should be made to communicate across mental divides or worldviews, but some people walk on a path of personal deceit, and I will call to them, but I will not visit.
When I look back on being 13, I recognize that I started on a parallel path that year. I refused the adult social contract that makes everything bearable by diminishing its feeling. By 14, I thought I had Bipolar 2, but I was just unable to scream my feelings in a hidden war zone. And baby, that will make you feel crazy.
This week I finished Doris Lessing’s 600+ page novel, The Golden Notebook. Toward the very end, a primary character describes something like a psychotic break. It was difficult to read, so disturbing in its ability to convey psychological distress at the same time as being an unnamed thing (not diagnosed).
The Golden Notebook was published in 1962, and the edition I read has two introductions by Lessing, one from 1971 and one from 1993. In ‘71, she wrote that a theme of the book (represented by the scene I mentioned above) is “formlessness with the end of fragmentation” which she calls “unity,” because “sometimes when people ‘crack up’ it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self’s dismissing false dichotomies and divisions.” She says her portrayal of this is, “rougher, more close to experience, before experience has shaped itself into thought and pattern - more valuable perhaps because it is raw material.” Then in ‘93, Lessing says that people all over the world write to her to say the book describes their own life.
There are many characters and experiences and thoughts in all those pages that readers could recognize in their own lives, and I assume at least some of them pinpointed the “crack-up” as wretched in its nameless familiarity, too. Yes, unity feels much better than fragmentation. And unity, on a social-communal level, is quite impossible when people insist on lying to themselves about their experience of the world. When I try to self-heal from fragmentation, I can’t seem to resolve it fully in myself because it is meaningless in isolation. Or rather, I can only maintain it momentarily until I reach for unity with other people or ideas that are fragmented. You have to “crack up” in tandem with other people to reach social-communal unity, but instead we treat people who are cracking up as if they’re not the ones seeing clearly.
There was one other scene in the Golden Notebook that made my stomach drop out. The main character, Anna (who’s British), is at a dinner party where all the other guests are American expats (in flight from the anti-Reds in Hollywood, my god, how the world turns!), and Anna is observing the way they use humor:
“They were, I understood, above all self-conscious people, aware of themselves all the time; and it was from the awareness, a self-disgusted awareness, that the humour came. The humor was not at all the verbal play, harmless and intellectualized, that the English use; but a sort of disinfection, a making-harmless, a ‘naming’ to save themselves from pain. It was like peasants touching amulets to avert the evil eye.”
Like peasants touching amulets to avert the evil eye.
Like peasants touching amulets to avert the evil eye.
Like peasants touching amulets to avert the evil eye.
I read it over and over, feeling sickly.
I know other people see the parallel world, but some people try so hard not to that they come to believe it isn’t real. We hate to acknowledge fragmentation because it forces us to engage with the non-unity of the world, and it will make you feel insane. People will tell you you need psychiatric help. (Maybe it will help?) But you are seeing clearly.
Every once in a while, something happens that gives one or both parties a jarring glimpse between worlds. When people comment on my honesty, I can’t tell why they see a bridge right then instead of at any other time I’m talking or writing. At times I have tried, worked, fought so hard to be a bridge, but maybe not the right kind because what I think I’m bridging isn’t where other people seem to want to cross.
Third Culture Kids (TCKs) are often heralded as bridges between worlds. Doris Lessing was a TCK. Pearl S. Buck (also a Nobel prize winner, also a TCK) entitled her autobiography, “My Several Worlds.” I love that book. I’m a TCK, but if I am a bridge, maybe I’m the Hussaini hanging bridge over the Hunza river. You will fall in the troubled water. You have to look into the evil eye. It will make you crack up. Your fluids will be on the museum floor, and people will try to tell you to hush. Your unity will be fragmented with pain. But don’t worry, it’s a only a metaphor, if that’s what you want.
