Fearmonger

The therapist leans forward, he slips the pencil in his right hand behind his ear.  His hands flutter for a moment, then land neatly in the nest of his lap.  Drawing a breath frames the mood and pace of the conversation.

He asks some ridiculous question.  What was it?  Oh, right:

"How did that fear serve you?"

I want to say that between the night terrors, the bed-wetting, and the body count,  I really learned something about myself.  I say nothing.  I smile.

The therapist nods as if to convince me (or perhaps himself) that he read my mind.  Imagine anybody being able to read another person's mind...

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Anonymous writes:

You are, am I? Occult stirrings provoke our flight. The monster under the bed? Or perhaps the one in it? Or maybe it's just the dirty laundry piled high under the chute? Mountains of rags, or more? Our genesis in darkness. Probing light both illuminates and blinds. Quick, cover your eyes! Did love summon us forth brother? Strange alchemy no doubt. What's the basic motivation? Lust? Confusion? Fear? Self-loathing our refuge? Gnostic rebellion our creed. Forgetful spirits attired in base red clay. Caress my crimson folds no more. Lest my hands be stained forever. They will not wash away. Separated, we imagine discovery, revelation, catharsis, masturbatory revolution. Hurtling into the distance, beyond the event horizon. We shall not pass this way again. We trek from one Oasis to another. Are we there yet? It seems we have each come so far. Yet, our intercourse is interrupted time and again with retrograde awakenings and projected demise. Parched, am I drinking sand? Two steps forward, one step back. Is this how we dance today? Limited perceptions accompanied by cognitive vacillations. Who leads? My heart still beats. Syncopated Deceptions. Who navigates? Did I clumsily step on your foot? Your toes you say? How can we heal? Does it matter? Life becomes Death becomes Life again. We fade, wither and return to cool darkness, a familiar place. Paradise. Ever forgetful, we sprout forth again, reaching for The Light in trepidation. There is no fear in truth. I Am, Are You?

Playfully, without malice, I tear up the paper, freeing the individual words to be something (anything) different.  These games reveal the slippery nature of language and the danger in believing the authority of words.  By knowing, accepting and rolling around revelling in the inadequacies of meaning, I manage to unlearn my human arrogance and I accept the inexact and inefficient "art" of my communications, written, spoken, spelled on bare skin with  the stylus of my second finger.  I accept with a shrug that all of this is only an earnest lie.

Pieced back together, the voice has changed.  It has shifted.  There is no command of language just as there is no command over the sea.  Meanings roll and churn and I am lucky to hold the rudder, to steady the ship in its journey, to continue this crossing, a continent unseen and rumored to lie somewhere, on the  other side of the ocean.  

And so through this sloppy alchemy I reshape the words of a faceless other into the sentiments of a faithless me.  I find my own rhythm, my cadence.  The vocabulary, limited to the same words and the same number of words, will not dissuade me.  I will excavate my poetry from the privation of his prose.  Below is the cache inside the tell:

How I spent my summer vacation...

This  again...

My life is limited in discovery and in distance.  Shall I step forth, step forward?  To trek becomes another base fear.  Again the mountains--still  piled  under folds of cognitive confusion--are  high.  I am forgetful.  Probing who I am, who you are, the way becomes retrograde.  Perhaps  time and place  can  pass forever, yet matter seems to sprout forth  into the light.  Lest one strange paradise did cover the event,  your eyes cool with revolution, red today.      

Wash my crimson  rags.  Dirty and hurtling from this  rebellion, I am the demise of creed and motivation.  Our laundry leads to a  catharsis.  The alchemy of a stained horizon,  stirrings, awakenings.  Maybe far away, not one flight more, your brother...

  

We will summon our  familiar  and the spirits attired in vacillations:  darkness or heart,  genesis or revelation.  We dance  accompanied by  doubt and our syncopated self-loathing.  It's basic, two beats.  We have quick toes, so they say.

Our fear illuminates us, light  clumsily interrupted again and again.  Imagine my forgetful  hands, the  masturbatory clay.  We are drinking sand.  Projected on a parched  bed, our intercourse is an  oasis;  trepidation navigates a caress.  Reaching for my gnostic love, you heal the occult lust .  We each come (again). 

There is a refuge under the  steps.  And, there,  just beyond the blinds, a monster does more for our perceptions.  How in this chute did we both wither?  What's  yet?  How ever I am or you be, we  fade. 

no deceptions

no death

no life

your truth

Separated,  we are not one foot back.  You provoke and I return. 

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Fear sits on the back burner, simmering, flirting with a boil.  I anticipate the danger, the disaster, the catastrophe.  But I ignore it.  The bubbling slough of my childhood terrors--nefarious, breeding--will overrun its aluminum pot (sure to give me Alzheimer's, one day), will snuff the flames of the gas burner, which will, in turn, fill the house with fumes so that I, by lighting a candle in the bathroom to reduce the unpleasantness that is choking the air, will ignite blowing the house to kingdom come.

Because I am unlucky, I will survive.  Homeless, covered with burns, I will be standing there comforted by the fact that my fart has been eradicated and, in light of this accident, my fears are no longer recognizable, no longer significant.

(Except for the knowledge that I will get Alzheimer's one day...)

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When all the ghouls of childhood

with glowing eyes around you stood,

and terrified you in your bed

remember that your father said

of how God protects the very good.

But what is good and what is bad?
The only measure that you had
was one that you would never choose
were there some book that you might use:
How not to upset Mom and Dad.

You learned to stifle your own screams

and turned your nightmares into dreams.

Now, live your fears in daily breath,

and whisper when you speak of death

outsmarting him with secret schemes.

But life will come in fits and starts
with broken bones and damaged hearts.
And death will seem a better route
than Parkinsons, shingles and gout
and jerryrigging worn out parts.

But you will make your peace with pain--
the sleet, the snow, the hail, the rain--
leave your galoshes by the door,
sleep fitfully and wake for more,
ignoring it is all in vain.

Regardless of what you may do,

the grim reaper will be back for you.

You will wake from deepest sleep,

your soul now rising from the deep

to uncover what is "true".

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And the days of worry became months of worry became years of worry.  A nervous stomach emerged then visual effects--little desperate signal flairs firing in the periphery--followed by the insomnia, the depression, the embarrassing rashes.  And then...

The panic attack.  The paralysis that chained me to this chair at this table.  My mouth dry, the barren womb for my words, the empty lot in which my body is rotting, behind the dumpster, under a shallow layer of leaves.  I imagine my end without remembering my beginning.  I live my fears without the context of my days.  One day, soon I hope, I will be bored by my suffering, by my anxiety.  When I wake up on that morning, I will finally rise.

The television is turning over history.  A new angle, fresh ground.  This is not the way I remember this.  There was no panic.  I was calm.  Later I would feel the need to manufacture an appropriate level of horror, shock and  surprise.  People did not understand either my stoicism or my dark sense of humor.   That is what helplessness looks like to me.  I accept it.  I know that it is the truth of things, the way that it is...

As a factor, my impotence is liberating.  Without the option to act, I am absolved of inaction.

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Fear is always just one specific form of anticipation, and--because of its intrinsic future tense (tense future) fear is inextricably linked to uncertainty, possibility and the yet to be known.  While dread is concerned with the devil one knows, fear is a fraudulent emotion pretending to predict some grim fate while in reality being merely the obsessions (instinctual but often unfounded) of the here and now.  Perhaps by sourcing fear in the present, one can remove oneself from the future projection and evaluate the validity of one's anxiety.  Perhaps one can, having weighed current circumstance with possible consequences, find a footing in reality that will mitigate the enervating effect of the irrational.  Which leads to the question:  Is fear ever rational? Perhaps caution or awareness is a better word for "rational fear."