Lieutenant / Union Boss

[ I asked the persona variously known as the First Lieutenant and the Union Boss -- First Lieutenant, because he thinks of himself as the person who actually makes the daily running of the ship possible, and Union Boss, because he's happy to be known as the persona who leads the eating binges, which he refers to as "strikes" -- to tell his story ]

As far back as I can? Well you know, the food was the first thing. Food was a big fucking deal. It was the difference between Dad’s approval and his disapproval: was I a strong-minded rational man or a weak-minded irrational sheep? To my mom it was whether I was fated for a life of misery and failure – fat like her – or a life of happiness and success. And to me – you know, this is my origin story – to me it was just fucking food. Leave me alone to eat my fucking food. Just leave me the fuck alone.

And by God I was going to eat ALL of it. Every bit. I’d eat as long as it tasted good. Who cares if it’s supposedly too much? Orangutans find a tree of ripe durian and eat themselves silly, gorge till they fall asleep under the tree, still chewing. Why not? Mom and Dad could have all the stories about it they wanted to: I was just going to eat.

I don’t know when the Kid showed up. [ The Kid is the public persona who originally called himself the Captain: the Lieutenant always calls him the Kid ]. I don’t remember us really being at loggerheads early on. He had his domain and I had mine. He ran the show in public, among adults, around my parents. I ran the show in private.

I already knew that there was no way I was going to fit in the world. The food was just one thing. I wasn’t like other kids. I knew precisely where the Marshall Islands were, but I couldn’t learn to tie my shoes. I could solve quadratic equations in my head, but I never did grasp the rules of baseball. I spooked my peers and annoyed them. (I was an insufferable know-it-all, as I realize now, among other socially unpleasant things: totally self-absorbed and arrogant. That probably had more to do with my unpopularity than my intelligence.) But anyway, I struck the other kids as weird, and I took it on as my identity. “I’m here, I’m queer, get used to it”: that sort of thing.

Halfway through the year, in third grade, I got called out of class and into the counselor’s office. I wasn’t in trouble, as it turned out. He wanted me to take some tests. He took out some blocks. “Oh, the Stanford-Binet! I like this one,” I said. My mom’s friends were all grad students in psychology, and they had always needed kids to practice on: giving kids intelligence tests was all the rage, in those days. He pulled out another, looking for one that I didn’t already know, but I knew all of them. Eventually he found one unfamiliar to me, that was basically just a vocabulary test. Well, that could only go one way. I read all the time: I was already in the process of reading everything on the science fiction shelves at the public library. I knew all the words, up through the college levels. So he told me I was going to get moved up to the fourth grade.

I have a hard time, now, believing this is what actually happened – weren’t there consultations with my parents? Didn’t anyone talk to me first, consult me about my preferences? All I remember is sliding back into my seat and whispering the news to my friend, who looked wise and said, “I thought that might be it.” And the next day I was a fourth-grader.

Weirder than ever, less physically competent that ever, but by God I was smart. Smart and weird. Look out for me: I’m little and wimpy, but I’ve got a wicked gift for inventing nasty nicknames that will stick. Leave me the fuck alone.

Well: and then, a couple years later, puberty hit. I was eleven years old, I had no chance of being seen as a viable boyfriend by anyone in the world (my then known world, at any rate) and I adored girls intensely. I had always adored girls: but this overbalanced me completely. I was kind of a wreck. I spied shamelessly, desperately, hoping for a glimpse up a skirt or down a blouse. My autism had already supplied me with the identity of “a spy in the land of the living”: now it was intensified. Fashion magazines and Sears catalogs with lingerie sections got my absorbed, painstaking attention. The years from eleven to fifteen were disastrously formative. Nothing but eros, in intense, absolutely unreachable images, really absorbed my attention. Now, at the age of 68, I still drop easily into that state: I can find myself watching fashion videos on YouTube, rapt, on the off chance of a momentary slip of a half-buttoned blouse. An hour later I’ll come to my senses and ask myself, “what on earth are you doing?” Embarrassed, chagrined; but it still is a wrench to tear myself away.

(A spy in the land of the living. The line is Edna St Vincent Millay’s, from a poem spoken by a conscientious objector to WW I: “Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver men to death?” Not a bad poem. A little too easy and pat, maybe, like a lot of her stuff, but she’s as underrated these days as she was overrated in her glory days.)

Anyway, the point is that bifurcation into two personas, one who was public and behaved acceptably, (especially under the eyes of scholastic authority, who actually might lavish praise upon me), and one who was utterly unacceptable and who was devoted to unscrupulously serving his appetites, was reinforced: to reappear and reverberate the rest of my life.

History is Real: our Past is Real

So. I guess I would say that where Abrahamic religion strikes me as uniquely valuable

Is that it conceives of the person and the religious polity as in time in a different way, an open-ended way.

The end-state of a person is NOT ACTUALLY KNOWN, nor knowable

Covenants of communities are broken and repaired

(I am speaking of course of Abrahamic religion as it can be, not as it usually is)

I broke with Buddhism for two reasons: one, that it took the end-state for known and static. It will be like a moment of illumination and plenitude, except for ever and ever, it will be an ecstatic death. And two, that a person’s quiddity was simply a mask and an illusion. Those were my two reasons. Neither of those two things can be quite right. We labor in ignorance. We are seeds of something we can’t understand, but are reaching toward. We will arrive in places whose existence we could not have guessed. But we will arrive as selves which also we could not have guessed, but which are threaded on an unbreakable thread to who we are right now, individual and indelible. Change is real. History is real. Our past is real.

Are we immortal? I don’t know. In some sense, maybe. But just as certainly, we have to really die. Those three days, Good Friday to Easter, are not optional, not notional. The resurrection wasn’t theater. Jesus was stone dead.

April

Dear Prudence, sings a man who left before me
won’t you come out to play?

Fitting Lego bits together, left in a cryptic lay
by a little girl whose intensity puts us all to shame;

April takes stained awnings in its jaws
and puppy-shakes the house until it rattles in its frame.

You thought maybe an simple life would rise before you:
it won’t: we’re only here

to change the guard. We have no use
for captains who can’t steer,

or gold braid, or teachers’ pets: dear Prudence,
won’t you come out to play?

Real

I arrived at Tom’s to find the lot empty, the windows dark, the door locked, and a scrawled note: “restaurant closed until further notice. sorry :-(“ 

In the unlighted interior I glimpsed one of the cooks who usually make my breakfast sitting at the counter: a heavy, immobile Mayan face. He glanced up at me without expression and looked away. 

So. I’m sitting here at the Bipartisan Cafe, contemplating my future.

Yah. My assignment for this week – which has flown past on the wings of gwythaints – was to watch for glimpses of my true self. Every bone in my philosophic body twangs in anxious alarm: true? What do you mean true? What do you mean self? Haven’t Hindus and the Buddhists been squabbling about this for two thousand years?

You can’t do therapy without making extravagant metaphysical claims. Really you can’t do much of anything without making extravagant metaphysical claims: but with therapy it’s particularly obvious.

The modern habit is to just go on recklessly ahead, deferring the ontological reckoning indefinitely. Because “real” of course isn’t “real” and only prissy neurotic philosophy professors worry their pretty little heads about it. The rest of us spend our days stealing each other’s wallets, making YouTube videos, and sending emails to that charming Mr Epstein who’s supposed to have such interesting parties.

For this, for everything, we are out of tune

But, as milady correctly observed, a sense of inauthenticity has to come from some conviction, suspicion or delusion of a missing authenticity. And what is that? When does it arise? 

It’s a fair question, but it turns out to be a difficult one to answer. But this actually is one of the answers: sitting in a cafe and writing. Then there’s that little patch of time at the end of meditation; my phone plays its “wake up!” tones, I tap it off, say the sealing prayer, usually with a little rueful twitch of the lips at the “by this virtue may I quickly realize Mahamudra” bit – by this virtue? Good luck, buddy – but still I come to the hozho prayer, and turning my palms out, I feel the neutrinos from the sun streaming through my body. You don’t feel the neutrinos, nobody feels the neutrinos, they go right through without touching a thing, yeah, but you feel the neutrinos coming from the east at sunrise: not that they mind the earth either, they go right through that too; sunrise is just for photons & coarse stuff like that. But. Even so, yeah, that actually feels pretty real, for a moment. For a moment. “It has become beauty again.”

Already Spring

already spring is the little death of fall:
the wind brushes the tulip tree
with the back of its hand
and a clutch of petals falls,
falls, 

irremediably.

Taking and Sending

The woman is old, nearly as old as I;
Her tongue working and making of her pleasant face
A monkey’s, moaning for the roll of deities to cease,
For the floor to hold still, for Death to open his hands:
I breathe in the fear and the confusion, I breathe out

Light and warmth, pouring from Those behind me
Whom I may not turn and see: breathe in the fear,
Breathe out the light. Give it all away. Every scrap
Of comfort. It was never mine to hold. It is not my peace.

There are others. A Protector, of sorts: dull gray.
Strangely impassible in this world of easy translucencies,
Porosities, She is up and to my right. I am forbidden
To Take and Send with her. All right. But in the corner,

That still heap of blankets (she put on her mask and pulled
The covers over at the outset, like a child, going to sleep):
A brightness has been growing there, a hidden light,
An unguessed generosity. Unto us a child is born

Again, and again. (Do you not understand?
You do not understand. Again, then. How many children
Must be born? All of them.) I contract to a tiny blue
Light, about to close its eye, to let its last ley lines fade:
The monkey’s face is mine, for a moment, and is gone.

The Dreams of Rabbits, Sleeping in my Hands

Oh Sir, I said, I have grown old dwelling in this hanker
And my hands are so empty and dry that the rabbits
Mistake them for husks, and try to build their nests in them.
Did you not say you would anoint us with the lymph of gods,
And wash us with fragrant oils, and wake us when the morning came?
He said, and how do you know that the rabbits are wrong? What did you think
They would look like, in this false and garish sun? The rabbits run
When they can, and so must you. Did you think I made a world
Without wolves? But Sir, I said, under this lamp we grow old so fast
Our nails crust with strange growths, we dig and strike sheets
Of rotten plastic in the earth. Can we ever plant or harvest here?
He laughed at me and said, so you thought I was kidding about death?
Now the seedbed of stars itself is crossed with crawling sabandijas
And night is a neon advertisement: what have you ever planted
But your own ruin? If you want to sleep, then wear yourself out with work;
If you want to work, then sleep till morning comes. What else can I say?
I have one vessel more, and I will break it open when the time comes.
But you have made their bed: now let them lie in it: dreams will come,
And you must read them as you can.