Stimuli and Silence

You realize it when you’ve been thinking about things, walking along on a busy road, listening to music through your headphones. It’s too loud. You haven’t really been listening to your music, you realize, once you realize that the music is on and actually too loud now. You had turned it on so you could think, so it might give you an even flow of sounds that you favor more than the honks and engines outside your head. It seemed that the music had worked for a while to drown out those roaring cars, because you had forgotten it was playing as you walked and thought about your life; but now in this flicker of awareness when you’ve stopped thinking, you notice the two sounds just clash.

You turn off your music, and continue to walk. It feels profoundly quieter and more peaceful, easier to think. You didn’t expect that. You realize now you only have to find a way to turn off the cars and all of the birds, the outside voices, the construction machines, the airplanes rushing, etc. Then you can hear your own noise inside your head.

That’s the thing. You realize that you turned on your music only to come to an awareness that it’s on and not serving you, because it only adds to the loud clamor outside. You turn it off. You realize that you have cut out one layer of audio stimuli. You could turn off the cars. You’d realize that’s another layer, but then there would be more noises you’d be able to detect now in the absence of the cars. You could turn layer after layer of sound off, until there was no sound but your voice when you speak. You could stop speaking. Then the only sounds left are your voice in your head, and the churning of your hot blood within your ears.

You can then move to sights. Close your eyes. You still see the backs of your eye lids, the dark red that shows from light coming in through the thin skin. You can start rolling your eye balls back and up, to the third eye place of darkness. Then you can stop focusing on seeing at all, and only experience how it is in the darkness of your entire being.

Move to physical touch. Stand still, and do not consume or feel anything. The best you can do, given that you have a physical body that you always are in contact with and must perceive physically, is to be elevated off the ground and only feel the air against your skin.

Eliminate taste and smell.

Then you are finally getting to a place of peace and quiet. But somehow it is still extremely loud. It’s your thoughts. You now realize there’s this voice that you have inside of you. It’s racing and louder than anything else that had been outside. You can’t see at first how to stop it. It’s completely within you, stemming from you, but seemingly out of your control. Then you attend to the silence you’ve created outside. You awaken. For a split second, you hear nothing, you are quiet within your mind. You focus on the black, the nothingness, and for longer and longer periods, you turn off your head. All that’s left is the flow of your blood, the slow beating of your heart, and the subtle rise and soft fall of the lungs inside your chest.

There’s not so much space for thinking when you realize how loud and packed it is outside of yourself. There is so much going on, so much stimuli that hits you at all times, every day. You create more noise, thinking this will cover the nonsense. You either do that for the rest of your life—consuming, creating, reorganizing, discarding, shifting materials from place to place but with no end—or you step outside of it as best as you can, and learn to shut off the layers step by step. You might begin inside your head, right away, without even bothering to turn the outside stuff off first. Because really, it never will turn off completely. You have the most power over your own thoughts, your internal world. Learn its contours. Learn what you are capable of. Learn what you are.

Tapasya: Straightening by Fire

An Article for Natural Awakenings

In a rich world of endless material stimuli—colors, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, thoughts, words—we find ourselves very easily tangled up in desires. We want to experience everything: better clothes, decadent foods, alcohol, gadgets... We are also concerned with what people think of us; how we will possibly cram everything we “need” to do in a day; where we will take our next vacation; how far we advance in our careers. We are buried in the clamor and baggage of our desires. We lose consciousness and spend our lives wanting what we don’t have, not seeing where we are, what we are, our perfect God-nature within.

Tapasya originates in India and is a simple and direct practice for renouncing worldly desires. If you enliven your “tapas,” as it is said, you build a creative fire within, no longer susceptible to you yourself being consumed by all of the tempting fires of the external world.

Tapas

Tapas is a Sanskrit word meaning, simply, “heat.” But in the context of yoga and spirituality, tapas is your internal fire and willpower that grows as you turn inward to abstain from worldly desires. When we find ourselves compelled to mindlessly eat, tapasya encourages a fast. For incessant talking and thinking, enliven your will to be silent for extended periods of time. What you want, you do the opposite of. This austerity balances and strengthens. It may be hard at first, but if you remain steadfast, it becomes easier and easier. In due time, you can proceed joyfully in tapasya. Your work pays off.

Russian esotericist Peter D. Oupensky writes, “If a man gives way to all his desires, or panders to them, there will be no inner struggle in him, no ‘friction,’ no fire. But if, for the sake of attaining a definite aim, he struggles with the desires that hinder him, he will then create a fire which will gradually transform his inner world into a single whole.”

     Remember, even when practicing restraint from your desires, be gentle with yourself. You’ll miss the point if you end up with loads of emotional stress and self hatred for when you inevitably give in and eat that cookie or indulge in some other way. It’s okay! You are practicing, not perfecting. Do your best (not try your best), and you will reap great health and tapas benefits!

An Exercise in Silence

The ego bangs and shouts endlessly if you let it. (Note that you and the ego are separate entities!) Your ego causes you to miss the beautiful dance outside and the peaceful stillness deep inside. In the same way that you are what you eat, you also are what you think. If you mindlessly let your thoughts drag you down, all you see is negativity and judgment. It’s very difficult to observe the patch of bright flowers in a field when you only ever focus on weeds. And spiritually-speaking, over-thinking throws a heap of debris on top of the divine essence within. You simply cannot dig through all of the clutter quickly enough in a life time if you don’t stop thinking… and talking… and consuming. No matter how intelligent or noble you consider yourself while deep in thought, you frankly cannot be who you are when you are so consumed in it—by it. “Good” or “bad” thoughts are thoughts, which you are not.

So, find who you are by beginning tapasya with a simple exercise in silence. Take a personal vow to refrain from vocalization, and work toward a meditative, thought-free state in your mind. Begin with just an hour a day. It may be easiest to do this when you are alone, but if you are with people, make sure to inform them of your decision. Ask that they support you.

This quiet time enables you to hear your soul, your thought- and ego- less you, and observe your external environment plainly for what it is. For this hour, you get off the tumultuous rollercoaster ride and watch peacefully from stable ground. You can see passengers still on the ride screaming and banging about with their hair whipping out of control and stinging their faces. You might begin to grasp a new insight from this perspective!

Expect nothing from your practice, however. Expect only the quiet, as this is your intention. Be aware of yourself, but know you’ve done it right if you just keep your mouth and mind silent for the hour. Let it all go. Persistence, simplicity, and awareness bring you to a meditative state, where tapas develops, and where you meet yourself with continued practice and openness.

Yogi Sri Yukteswar describes Tapasya vividly here: “Conserve your powers. Daily renewed sense of yearnings sap your inner peace; they are like openings in a reservoir that allow vital waters to be wasted in the desert soil of materialism. The forceful activating impulse of wrong desire is the greatest enemy to the happiness of man. Roam in the world as a lion of self control; don’t let the frogs of sense weakness kick you around.”

Tapasya is a gateway to being born again, outside of the grasp of materialism and sense gratification, addiction, neuroticism, and self-consciousness. So be stong, be bold! Light your flame and watch as it joins the Great Fire that loves everything unconditionally, and is everything—needs nothing. Happy Silence to you.

Quotes taken from “Be Here Now” section on Tapasya from the larger section “Cook Book for a Sacred Life.” Hanuman Foundation.

Plumber's Daughter

When you’re the daughter of a master plumber and expert handyman—a doer, a person who takes things apart fearlessly and fixes them—you develop a complex. You feel inadequate at home, around him, when you don’t want to attempt fixing something because you fear you might do it wrong, or make a stupid move. He might judge you harshly for not figuring it out or being able to just follow the instructions. You had also learned to ask him to fix whatever was broken when you were younger, and he did, because he knew you were pretty young to figure it out, and he liked to do it, anyway. But now that you’re older, he expects you to have observed and learned, and to try it yourself. You feel the pressure around him to not be stupid or illogical, so you either don’t say anything to him about whatever you could use his help with, or else you just try it on your own, when he isn’t watching.

But away from home, you are actually on a different plane. Your friends’ dads may not have been plumber-handymen. You find they call repairmen to come in and fix things for lofty fees. You think, “wow, why don’t they just look at it to see if they can find the problem and solve it?” You remember how your dad banged on the furnace and took the wrenches down into the basement and came back up with the fires roaring (although they couldn’t roar for long, because that’d cost too much money… nevertheless, the furnace now worked). You remember the clogged sinks and how you had to cover that little hole with a damp towel while you plunge, in order to create the pressure and suction. You see your boyfriend’s drain filled with water that is slow to go down. He leaves it, but you stick your hand in and pull out the drain, finding a wad of hair and gunk on the end of it. You clean it off, put it back into the sink, and watch the water go down the tubes.  It was a very simple fix, but sometimes it seems people don’t even look, for whatever reasons, perhaps because they assume they wouldn’t know what to do. Would he have left it or put drain cleaning chemicals down there, not even thinking that he could pull the parts out and investigate? Would he know how to use a plunger on a sink, let alone using it in a standard way on a toilet?

               

You think of your dad in the bathroom, lifting the ceramic back of the toilet off and jiggling the ball and flusher when the water level is oddly low in the bowl, or the water is continuing to run long after a flush. Running water costs money, so you can’t just leave it going. You’d watch him and think “wow, I don’t want to touch that; or wow, I don’t understand, good thing he’s doing it.” But when you’re away from home, you have that leg up in many cases. You have come to realize that you just have to wash your hands after sticking them into the toilet or reaching into the water area behind it, scum and mold or not. You realize that you can wiggle parts and often something shifts and it works again. You realize you can take note of what you did, and try the same thing next time, and find there’s in fact a logic to that wiggling. You don’t have to do anything but investigate and be confident that you’re actually helping the cause. Without your dad watching you, you don’t feel in your mind that you’re judged for  not thinking logically enough as a  handygirl; instead you are commended for trying to fix whatever’s broken at all, and you are bold in what you try, because you know your boyfriend or other friends don’t necessarily know any more than you do.

To be a master plumber’s daughter outside of his house is wonderful at times. You rise up and fix something yourself, finding you’ve learned more from him than you know when you’re under his self-shingled and repaired roof. 

Happy Meals

Basic:
Say food is your drug of choice. It's not uncommon to have learned to turn to food for (immediate) comfort (out of desperation), or to simply distract you so you (presently) forget how bad you feel about yourself (although the negativity resurfaces later, compounded and even more toxic than if you'd just dealt with it before turning to your outlet/addiction).

Notes:
(1) This is through the perspective of women, for the reasons that men tend to be less outwardly sensitive to food issues (although they are there too, sometimes). Mothers are nurturers who cook for their families and feed their kids, traditionally. There may be differences in different families, but for this writing, family females are used to represent everyone in a generation who may have contributed.
(2) This is an exaggeration, used as a basic and condensed template. Events might not be so direct or powerful in real life. It's more of an exploration on how negativity and addiction can be inherited through genetics and family culture.

Generation 1: Your Grandmother
So you've learned to turn to food when you feel unhappy about yourself or your life. We have a lot of food in this country. If your mother (your chief nurturer) was fat, or eating disordered (to whatever degree, "diagnosed" or not),  and/or from a food-oriented culture (Italian, say), you learned to feel a little uncomfortable around food. You can't necessarily track it back to all of that consciously when you're growing up, but you know that you feel odd pressure around food. Your mother and aunts are pushing things at you constantly. You can never not eat or pass something up. It's a big issue, usually. You have always been so strongly encouraged to eat, and meanwhile your mother is trying to lose weight constantly, and she seems unhappy. Your aunts tell you how thin you look, but you definitely know you've actually, clearly, gained weight since she saw you last.

Generation 2: You
So now, you've inherited this familial food-obsession. The children of overweight, underweight, or eating-disordered parents usually are also overweight, underweight, or have severely distorted relationships with food, respectively.

And say now years pass, you try to push aside your food issues, try not to fall into the same traps as your mother and family for the rest of your life. You walk an edge. But you enter your adult years, and responsibilities add up, husband, house, car, school, choices, add heavy pressure to your life. So, as your mom did, despite you saying you would never be like that, you deal with all that stress by eating when you're upset, or overwhlemed. You are conscious that you're turning to it a lot of the time (where maybe your mother hadn't been so aware), but you can't seem to stop it. An inherited fatal attraction. You understand more fully how your mother must have also felt better when eating comfort foods--cookies, homemade classics, ice cream, breads--because you certainly do. But soon you are obsese, say, and you give in, and now you just accept that this is how you were raised, this is how you are.

Generation 3: Your kids (From your perspective)
Now you've proceeded ahead with things despite your growing negative emotions and instability. You have kids, thinking that will actually take your mind outside of yourself. But it happens that they add enormous additional stress to your life because you want to love them fully but you can't seem to be well enough inside yourself to treat them as they should be treated. You are supposed to give them attention, but you still need to attend to yourself.

When your kids are acting up, you feed them, and they calm down for a minute. You love them and want them to have all that they need to eat. You don't really know how much someone needs to eat, though, because you don't really eat when you're hungry or stop when you're full. You don't eat for physiological reasons; it's really only emotional. You're eating all the time, therefore, because you've snowballed into an emotional trainwreck. Your body physically, now, is overdosed on sugars and fats, which adds that negative physical element to the emotional stress as an unfortunate consequence that keeps you rutted even more firmly.

You find that you and the kids may eat together in stressful states, because you've fed them to quiet them, you've fed them to make yourself feel better, you've fed them to truly nurture their bodies, you've fed them for having fun, because food has become a mystery to you, and you apply it to many things. The vibes are subtle, but they're there. They eat often as you do, and they assume they can eat whenever they want. Sometimes they've tried to eat something, but you've realized a bit of what things they're learning. So you snap at them and tell them they can't have that cookie right now. You go into the other room out of their sight afterwards, and eat a cookie yourself later on, because you feel guilt for having done that.

And then, say you're feeling good one day. Out of your genuine love for your kids, you think "what will make them happy? I want to treat them to something special today!"  The first thing that comes to mind, however, is easy and immediate, and it's food, because you're so fixated on it, it's constantly in your brain. You think, I'll take them on a drive, we'll get Happy Meals from McDonald's, they'll get a toy, they'll get fries, I can get them a little ice cream cone too. The kids are young and they smile delightedly at the prospect when you suggest it. They are happy at the time, but then if this happens many times, they soon become unhappy. Because ironically, Happy Meals are made from toxic, unhappy ingredients that make kids fat and sad as the toxins get stuck in their tissues and brains. Addictions are forming.

Generation 3: Your kids (Their perspective): Your parent looks at you at your young age of 10 becoming just like her, fat, sad, and tormented by food, and she becomes then fatter and sadder with that realization, as she turns again to the only thing she knows to make things better, worse, different, numb. You start looking at yourself in the mirror, and vow never to eat again. You begin to hate yourself.

THE GREAT HOPE:

You can actually break this trip cycle. You can step outside of it. You're aware of it now, you've just been on a bad trip for years. Don't worry, you'll come out of it with just a little effort. You practice spirituality, you sit and meditate, you break the cycle of unhappiness, feeling compelled, reaching for cookie, putting into body, feeling shitty, being compelled, reaching for cookie, putting into body, feeling shitty, feeling compelled to eat... You can break the cycle, sit in meditation, and look at yourself. You can realize that there's really no reason to hate yourself so much. It won't be this easy thing, necessarily, but if you are persistent and gentle with yourself, consistent, you will come out of it in no time. It's very easy to meditate and sit with yourself. All you have to do is breathe, don't do or try to do anything. You calm down enough to see through the negative waves of thought that charge through you. You see it's all old and past, from when you couldn't reason well beyond your coarse, immediate emotions as an unthinking little kid. You're older now.

You're beautiful and perfect just as you are. You've always been that way. You're coming to your senses, out of the negative emotion trip. Hello, it's wonderful to meet you again.

It will be okay. We are all already okay.

Mugs or Paper Cups, February 1, 2011

A man ordered two cups of coffee.

"Would you like your coffee in paper cups or mugs?"

Nearby, a woman with soft wrinkles, in her large brown jacket, short blonde-dyed hair, and slim black slacks, looked subtly toward the man.
The man wore dress-like tennis shoes, a dress-like black work coat, and had gray hair.

"Mugs," he said.
The woman looked away from the man and took a couple of steps from the ordering counter to the pastry case.
But she turned back a moment later and said, "You know what, I want mine in a paper cup."
She gave little facial expression, her voice was quiet, but there was a light in her eyes, a slight desperation or else a sense of rebellion, sprightliness. Her overall-subdued physical quality made it hard to discern what, exactly her face displayed from within her.

The man mentioned the cup change to the barista, almost in a whisper or mumble, his body turned so his side faced her rather than his front.

The coffees were handed to the woman and to the man.  

The barista could not be seen, her body obscured by the counter, and shelves of coffee and tea accessories for sale a few feet away from the register.

With his exchange ended, the man walked away from the counter and chose a table decisively, establishing himself firmly in his seat, still clasping his mug handle.

The woman and the barista lingered a moment, sharing a few lighthearted words, a smile. It seemed they may have known each other prior to this interaction. 

With their exchange complete, the woman then carried her paper-cupped coffee to the stand with cream and sugar, the windows stretching behind it. She made touches to customize, sweeten her drink to better suit her taste. As she stirred, she contemplatively watched outside, the coldness of winter swirling through everything. 

She then walked to the table that the man had chosen, and sat down with him as he sipped his black drink.

Her back was toward me was as I watched.

The man had also bought a scone or muffin and a newspaper. He slowly chewed, mulling over his food. 

Sitting silently as the man ate, the woman brushed her light-colored hair from her face, and for a moment I glimpsed her profile. Then it was back to blonde, brown, pale and plain and light. 

The man's eyes lay deep in his head with large gray brows furrowing over them. His hair was combed gently to the side, though, which appeared slightly feminine or self-conscious. 

I stopped observing for a few minutes.
As I looked up to watch again, the man was smiling softly at a group of passing children who were on a tour of the bookstore and coffee shop.
I looked away in a low state of contemplation. It was inconclusive.

Again I resumed watching them, and now the woman--her back still toward me--was apparently speaking.

The man quietly listened, his eyes following hers, though sometimes dropping with a timidness or temperance of intensity, considerately. His hand drew to his mouth thoughtfully as she continued.

She gesticulated.

He glanced up to refocus on her, but this time his eye caught mine and he darkly peered out at me.

I made no expression. I looked down to the paper and continued to observe mentally.

I recalled that his eyes had not been completely in contact with mine. One was lazy.

Two Plain Observations, February 2, 2011

1. A man in a pickup truck with a snow plow drove by. We continued shoveling the end of our driveway by the main road, because the snow there was so deep we couldn't get out. We were cold and emotionally drained. A few minutes (yes, minutes) later, the man came back. He began plowing the snow. We got out money. He drove away and waved it off. Then a moment later, we saw he was turning around again to finish the job more properly. We thanked him profusely. He drove away. So did we, smiling for the first time together that day.

2. Standing in the shower, with dim lighting, a hair falls from your head imperceptibly, and sticks to your wet calf. Moments later, the strand of hair crawls down your skin and you feel satisfied and attentive to it. The next time it happens, you notice more acutely the sensations. You and the hairs that trickle down your leg in the shower with the warmth and the water travel down the drain and flow to unknown places.

Window Writing, Summer 2011

 While walking today, I hugged the warm core of my body, and felt the blood in my leg that is sore.
A bit before this hug, in finger and dust, the drivers' ed window read, "Mel Malone is a whore," which struck me, grabbed me, and I did not want it there anymore. So in passing and walking, I looked around for something with which to wipe the words away, but found nothing but leaves still attached to trees. I did not want to hurt or deface the trees in breaking their branches, even though Mel was sprawled out, exposed on the face of the glass. The dust was so thick, luckily I couldn't see my own face in the window's reflection, in the words, or I would have made weird or unwarranted connections. So I kept walking, realizing that I had only my hand to smear the words away. The window looked too strange and dirty for me to use my own palm, my skin and muscles; so I passed by completely, having felt sad, and bad, and then worse, hoping so much that Mel would not see those words, or me.

Man and Machine, Creative Nonfiction, 2008

A worker ran the levers, a claw devoured the dirt. The rhythmic beeping and grinding of the Excavator pulsed, thick through the air. A bulky grey generator hummed loudly, its motor the sound of an airplane roaring by overhead, but instead of passing it just sits there hovering. A three-seat black metal bench splattered with mud was tipped over on its back near the fence at the border of the construction site. Another worker who stood nearby the bench, probably on his lunch break, chewed at a heaping burger, the homogenized mixture of mustard, ketchup, and mayonnaise typical of cheap fast food restaurants trickling down his dusty fingers. He coughed and threw the paper on the ground, wiping his hands on his pants as he trudged toward a pile of bagged cement mix. He looked thick-skinned and manly. From him, I took in the Excavator.

            In its glaring yellow and dirt-smudged glory, the Excavator seemed confident in being the chosen machine for work as I came across the scene. Against the backdrop of a towering steel-beam-and-bolted skeleton of the unfinished building, it grumbled over the ground: cocked and twisted its torso, swung its arm in slow, powerful fits, bending at the joints—elbow, wrist—scraping up the earth into its cupped claw. The thing was hard and robust, its metal impenetrable. The mark of manual labor manifested in sprays of dirt, drips of oil, and what settled over time—a blackish film of diesel exhaust lightly coating its bright sides.

            The smears and the dirt didn’t matter, though. The Excavator still functioned fluidly and with direction—to the point where it struck me as abnormal, as eerie. I knew somewhere that logically, a worker was inside the control center, pulling the levers; but the slow, deliberateness of its movements, and the fact that I couldn’t see worker at all times, sufficiently masked that knowledge. So I stood there, transfixed, watching the arm jutting outward, rotating smoothly on its axis which was nestled beneath the weight of the core. Thick artery-like cords shot out from the heart of the beast, hugging tight to the arm, pressure and hydraulic fuel gushing, throbbing inside. The arteries carried the fuel from the heart to the brain—The Claw, the thing that gave the Excavator purpose. And then I watched as the claw’s four blunt, squared pronged teeth sunk into the earth, ravenous, savagely, dirt crumbling and falling in globs out of the shovel. It groaned and dragged its head to the side and spewed out the rest of the earth into a waste pile. Then, restored, emptied, it turned back toward the hole and dropped its claw down for another reckless, tearing bite. It seemed the Excavator’s appetite could never be satiated. It ate without restraint.

           

            Still feeling somewhat disconcerted by the scene, I began to walk again, toward the end of the fence. Machines are mindless, they don’t have minds, they can’t decide… Inside a Jeep about thirty feet in front of me, backing out of the site’s driveway, four men sat wearing tough, tan Carhartt-like jackets. I could see the man in the passenger seat best: he looked to be about fifty, shaggy graying hair, slightly dirty face. Even from this distance I noted the darkened crevices and wrinkles that seemed drawn on with pencil lead, draped down the sides of his mouth and curved out, crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, which were burrowed in his head beneath a pair of wiry, crumpled brows. His features seemed cemented in place.

            I didn’t think too much of him, but I naturally continued to focus on him; the Jeep was right in my path. It moved slowly, then stopped waiting for cars to clear. I still was looking in on the man, staring directly into his old, worn face. Maybe I was asking for it with that. He must have noticed me coming from the side, because he turned and we made eye contact.  I again was caught unprepared, unsettled, watching the cemented wrinkles crack and bend in weird lines as his chapped lips curled up. The wispy creases around his eyes deepened. His lips separated. He bore teeth.

            This all in an instant. Programmed by my environment to be socially polite, I automatically began to return the smile in response. But before the whole reaction formed, my conscious, thinking self interrupted. Looking at his mouth smeared on and animal-like, he could have started panting or cackling, let out a howl or bark. His grin widened a little as I came nearer, and he quickly glanced back at the other men in the Jeep, then again at my now-stern face. Another instant, and it was over.

What happened to him and them and me? A sort of faintly-breathing grime fell over my skin.

            Some force had been emitted from the man, concretized and made real in his mocking, cat-call of a smile. It zoomed in quickly and smacked against my eyes, big square teeth that nipped uncaringly at my brain. It wasn’t an outrage. I wasn’t flushed with vehemence or indignation. But a rough extraction occurred. I was grabbed, hassled away from my thoughts and grounded down into the physical world in that moment. It was something the Excavator, though haunting and human-like, failed to do. Something different, a separate beast. This event caused a pricking at my soul that reminded me I wasn’t drifting around alone, how affected I was and can be. And it threw me off. It made me serious. Bolted me down. There had been a transference of something—something living and impressing—from the site to the man to me.

_________________________

            He is a man in the society of man’s men day after day. I’m a young female. I’m soft, he’s hard. He’s not used to suppressing himself because he has no reason for such discipline.

            His environment is one of disarray and clutter. Forms are unfinished and weak. There’s no melting into plush couches, and there are no soft ambient lights or patterned curtains or lacquered cherry-wood coffee tables. When he gets home, to where he might find these physical and visual comforts, he’s too tired to enjoy them. He eats dinner, hits the bed and falls asleep before his wife climbs in next to him. He’s up and off in the morning before she wakes. It’s another day of coarse and sharp, of muted and dark, of scraps flung at odd angles, tipped benches, growling generators, blaring yellow demolishing machines. 

            The construction worker is a nomad within this chaos. He migrates from site to site, never settled, then, but also always settled and within the Construction Site environment—a necessary element of it. Site after site the worker festers in filth and void. He comes to the place, and he either demolishes, or he builds from the ground up. Either way there’s arguably a sense of desolation that’s hard to avoid, be it sub-conscious or fully aware. If he comes to tear down: the act of destroying is one of release and freedom, but also one of guilt and ambivalence. He crushes structure and pattern. Obliterates logic. Negates the efforts of past workers. Throws materials away mindlessly, wastefully. It’s easier that way. You’re there to get the job done. Level the place. It’s an act of reversing progress, almost—devolving civilization—even if only for the time being.

            And the other means to desolation—the construction worker comes first to barren land: the land may be naturally beautiful, and the fact that he’s there to smother and kill it may eat away at him; or the land is ugly and weed-ridden, littered on, cracked cement; so the worker encounters this atmosphere of emptiness and disorder immediately. He knows that he will endure a long time of things looking worse before they get any better. And when the work is done and the place looks nice, it’s time to move on to the next site of desolation. So while working, he leaves his tools and equipment strewn all over, and feels free to throw his plastics and wrappers around because the standard was already set. He’s there only to destroy, to build, and to get messy. He and the Excavator, molded by the hand of the Construction Site. The world adapts. The world spreads.

Life and forms are passed into each other gradually, unnoticeably for the most part. Blending. Bleeding. The site seeped into the worker, and the worker seeped into the Excavator. The harshness, the mess, the crude behavior, the disheveled clothes—he plays his part to compliment the stage. Then he hops up into the wired mass of hulking metal, and he pulls the levers. He takes his calloused hand and confers his own raw energy into the thing. He merges his vital organs with it, giving it all it needs to breathe heavy breaths and boorishly rip into the ground. The force was transferred.  The organism became its environment. Affected. Impressed.

Yet it’s not a simple and even “transmission of environmental influence” across all parts. It’s disproportionate. There’s a hierarchy that affects impressionability. The man inside sits above the machine, and the machine above the land. There’s a discrepancy in the degrees to which surroundings are transmitted to the subject, the influence they carry; an inequality in the interactions between land and machine, machine and person, person and person. Me and the man. It’s the last on the list that is most electric. It’s the last that can pluck me from reflection, turn me inside out, and sit me down on the outside. It’s something distinct about the man. This man.

More than the Excavator or the land itself, the grinning man transmitted a piece of the Construction Site to me. He arrested me and commanded me into the concrete world. The nature that had trickled into him through the chaos of the site was released through that dirty smile fluttering clumsily on his lips. I felt it, palpably. Cyclical. A moment of grime settling over me, the filth, from land to man and machine to me. I couldn’t avoid it because I have no ultimate power over anyone else’s actions. And I’d have no way to predict their behaviors if I did have that power. It’s the spreading—the invasion—of foreign minds into my own that I can’t escape. I’m left without a choice, essentially, of how I will be impacted by anyone else, and thus how I will end up as a human being. The world is designed so that it’s impossible to exist in and of myself. I’m left to be eaten by the wolves. To be changed. To become part of a million different packs at one time or another but never to run on my own. 

It can all be explained. The Excavator looked like it did because of the man inside. The man acts like he did, in part, because of the Construction Site. But what of the feelings elicited, and this particular act…

[I really wish I could back away sometimes. It’s like I can’t see this thing for what it is. I’m inextricably tangled in the objects and structures, the systems, the laws, rules of physics, of biology, sexuality, the feelings, the language and words, my footsteps on solid ground, the people of the world. I’m just tangled and sculpted, and I can’t back away. I can’t see the shape I’ve become from a distance.]

That construction worker knows something of my shape now. He might know more than I do. He may not be aware of it, but his eyes were able to envelop me, completely, package me, see my form in full, up and down. His mind had already loosened from the site’s disorder. There was no real change in behavior when he turned to me, when he ate me up. How the site treats him and how he treats the site is how he treated me. No distinct behavioral change. He and his eyes and brain, sex hormones churning, paid me not human interest, but gender interest.

And it’s not having a choice that’s the scariest. There’s no backing away from him. Uninhibited flowing of energies from place to place in the world. People to people. People to me. Fluid and unstoppable. Necessary. In and out environments. In and out. The man and me. The man in me. Dear god.

Because there’s a further hierarchy or discrepancy in the influence of people on people: man to woman is different—maybe more potent—than same-sex interactions. There’s an element of the unknown with heterosexual interactions. There’s size difference, physicality, biology. The man’s smile didn’t hit me as a smile in itself; rather, it was an overt display of his sexual instinct. It was me as meat. A woman could have smiled in the same cheesy way, and I would have thought nothing of it beyond its cheesiness. I’m familiar with femininity, the general female mind. But the male mind—and further, the male mind that’s cultivated by particularly dirty and masculine activities, construction work—that’s something else altogether. It’s intimidating and alien. It’s driven and unstoppable, and I am its object. I can only react to it. I live with it, I produce it, and I need it to produce me.

            There I was, in my environment, my peace, my evenness. Students, crisp, town, comfort. A momentary collision with men of masculine jobs, of testosterone-laden worlds. Construction, destruction, rampant instinct. Me, unable to escape or control it. The big Excavator was startling. It was basic evidence of life force transmissions. But was limited; it was dependent, lesser. Dependent on people I can’t change. On men fostered by crumbling structures and dirt, fumes, and their laughing chums. I can’t get through to them. Their minds—blocked and influenced, stale, hungry. And their smiles, and their eyes, rubbing all over me.

_________________________

Once the traffic cleared, the Jeep began to finish backing out of the site driveway. After flashing his teeth once more at my emotionless face, the man leaned back in his seat. It meant nothing. It happened, it passed out of him, into me.  He carried on, I felt a weight. They all disappeared onto the road with the cars and smoke.

Musing on Knives, February 18, 2011

A murderer can hold a blood-dripping knife. A grandmother can hold a knife tenderly in her grandchild’s hand, guiding him to cut his birthday cake and make a wish. A mother can slice her famous meatloaf. A father can carve a Thanksgiving turkey. A butcher can hack off the heads of live chickens. A hiker can lash at brush with a machete.  A cook can slip and cut his finger, blood oozing onto the lettuce. A daughter can draw a blade against taught ribbons to create bouncing curls on a gift for her father. An adolescent alone in her room can hold a knife to her skin, shaking; her mother is downstairs cooking dinner and listening to Gospel music. A warehouse worker can smoothly swipe a blade down a line of tape to open a box. A sculptor can carve and chisel visions of angels into a chunk of the rugged, hard face of a rock—of the earth. A man can cut an apple with his army knife, walking down a dirt road, wiping gathering dust and juice from the blade on his pants, slicing again at the fruit’s flesh; chewing, swallowing, walking onward with no end in sight. A surgeon can calmly plunge into your frail son’s chest with a scalpel as you heave in the shadows of the waiting room. Two children can sneak into the kitchen drawer and pull out knives—shining daggers, swords!—and let out shrieks of glee, for rebellion, for adventure, and then… What is a knife but part of daily life, in countless ways, in ways that slice and carve and create and separate? Used by everyone, the blade enables acts of violence, love, and ingenuity. 

An Exchange at Dunkin' Donuts, Fall 2011

This is admittedly something some people might think is written about or talked about quite a bit, too much. But it is what it is, it strikes me, still, as I observe, and I record. I wonder who else is struck by basic life, and what, specifically, strikes them.

It is for your viewing:

The mother goes to relieve herself in the bathroom while her son approaches the counter and looks at the signs. One sign shows frozen “Coolatta” drinks in neon colors, blue, orange, yellow. “New!” it reads. Another sign has a white star in the center of a blue and red target, with a large red Coolatta proudly displayed alone in the foreground. “The Coolest Way To Be A Hero… New! Cherry Flavor.” It’s the popular Captain America logo.

The son is about ten years old. He waits, appearing to scan the signs. There is an oversized white coffee mug with a dollar sticking out, for tips. The boy fidgets and turns to look at the soda and drink cooler. In a moment, he turns back and leans against the counter. The clerk has not approached him to ask if he needs assistance.His mother returns from the Women’s Room, straightening her shirt, and the clerk swiftly approaches. The mother and son are both overweight. The mother picks at the front of her pant leg to loosen it from her thigh while her gaze remains fixed on the menu.

The boy opens the cooler and reaches his hand inside to take an orange Gatorade drink, then stands next to his mother at the counter. He sets the Gatorade down and decisively says, “chocolate glazed,” while looking forward at the doughnuts, which are arranged in three large columns with four rows each, the doughnuts lined tightly together on metal racks, slanted downward for customers to view with ease and visual appeal—the pink frosting, the rainbow sugar sprinkles, the tiny chopped nuts, the maple syrup frosting, the sugar glaze on light cake donuts, dense sourdough, and fluffy French crullers, the chocolate frosting on chocolate fried dough, the red, purple, clear yellow jellies oozing out from inside sticks of fried dough. The mother does not turn towards her son, but replies, scanning, “Chocolate glazed… let’s see…Ok.” She has spotted the chocolate glazed donuts, so then indicates the choice to the cashier without hesitation.

The cashier takes a thin white paper tissue, picks up the desired doughnut, and puts the doughnut into a brown paper bag, folding the top of the bag over two times. The mother grabs the bag and a coffee she must have ordered in a quick and quiet voice, while the boy clutches his Gatorade. The mother hands the clerk a small plastic card to pay for the goods, and then the two turn and leave the store. They get into their large red SUV that gleams in the bright sun, driving off in a direction I cannot see.

It is into the store, into the bathroom, straight to the ordering counter, into the bag, out of the bag, into the body. There, in and out of the body, in and out of the car, in and out of the mind, from the cold of the cooler or the doughnut racks to the room temperature of the store, to the heat of the throat and stomach and blood to the intestines or bladder and out again into the bathroom into the toilet and flushed through the pipes, out to the water, into the treatment plant, back to the faucet or shower, the dirt on and off the body, in and out of the holes of the body...
...the stores, the cars, the food, the toilets, the talking, the taking, the motioning, the signaling, the swiping, the paying, giving and taking, sopping and wasting.

In a day, every day, it is done and done, a couple minutes here, another exchange there, at home eating lunch, drinking coffees, drinking water, drinking lemonade, eating crackers, snacks of chips and ice cream because it’s hot and it’s summer and it’s America and it’s available and on display, signs saying to us in the boldest, most exciting colors, “yes, yes take and eat, gather up goods, store up life points, something to do; yes, then process, use, expel what you want or need to make room for the same goods again, or different new goods, or don’t use the goods, just keep them until they break or expire, throw them away to gather in a public landfill heap or leave them in your garage to gather in a personal home heap, forget about the old things just enough so you want new things, and enter another store and get what you need, buy away.”

Perhaps take a moment and watch today.