Help Wanted, Empathy not Required

I have tried, earnestly tried, to contextualize my pain.  I have worked hard, valiantly, to minimize the cross I bear, to put it into "perspective".  To this purpose, I have meditated on a hundred different horrors.  

(There has always been a fear somewhere in my belly that tells the angry powers both my name and my intentions.) 

I am, it seems, easily drawn to the spectacles that expose humanity for its less humane instincts.  I love soap operas, heavyweight bouts and  the mayhem depicted on the front page of the paper, car wrecks or flesh, war-torn, wide-open, gaping.  In the end, I am like the dozens of people I mock for having such surprising, sudden, enthusiasm--for anything really, but first of all--for their proximity to disaster.  We say to ourselves that this is merely the pride of the survivor, but in actuality this tickle, this smile, this prize winning novel, this strangely sad song, are the savagery of a sadist wearing civility for a mask. 

I can handle these things.  I do not suffer from them,  And I advise you not to peek at the truly gory images that have been tucked away in the back pages.  I know that you will.  I have watched people stare at such pictures and they look (and try to look) as if they were touched in their fragile soul.  Even bad actors know the tricks of the mortified expression.  There is a tightness in the brow, a rigidity in the lips, a blank questioning in downcast eyes.  

But look at the hooking up at the corners of your mouth, the faint traces of your selfish smile, your happiness.  And there in the background of your deadened stare there is the stifled giggle.  Like a light on at the far end of a long and creaking hallway, your eyes reflect the pain of the others but there is radiance too.  Deep inside the tremors and shades of the average human night, there is (always) the silver coin of the moon by which to guide you to prosperity, love, wisdom.  This is for the lucky ones.  The world will judge them only by the blue nostalgia of a spotlight.   It makes less sense to bemoan them there quotient of paradise than to stand beside them at the urinal, dick in hand and chiseling at the urinal cake while waiting for a hug. 

This is the bright light of our pruient fascination with another person's pain.  This is the long shadow of the suffering generations.  And they have appeared to me, my mind's eye:  the children of war, the perversely poor living in rivers of refuse and hopelessness, the myriad of diseases that make mockery of life, the emptiness behind it all.  But, for all the empathy I can muster, the immediacy does not jangle my nerves, choke my words with tears,  numb my dumbstruck mind...

''My mother is good at this, but I am (I guess) selfish; I take no comfort in the tumors gnawing on other spines, or the boy with eight fingers that works in the foundry for a dish of rice.  I am a discrete body with my own burdens, my own suffering, my own broken dreams.  What do I care about the loud descriptions of some stranger's pain?  The sad songs?  The plots of awful television shows?  The nightmares of housewives in Scarsdale or Ashville?

Joy

Joy is a commodity like every emotion.  In the chemical mix--acid and alkali--it is its own kind of combustion.  Joy is an element.  Joy persists while the compounds fall apart, head in disintegrating hands, holding what turns out to be one's very last breath...

What might joy look like in the days of decomposition?  If it is persistent, it will manage expression--find its laughter, its shining eyes.  Even in the catastrophe to come, in war, in pestilence, in loss and alienation, joy must necessarily survive, a nonnegotiable portion of the human experience.  Sometimes jokes harden on the tongue, something to choke on, broken english.  And yet even wet with this sadness, dripping with sarcasm, drowning in irony, the humor eludes the pain.

Joy is its own sustenance.  An antidote.  A salve.

If I look long down the dark tunnel of days, the future with its closing in, its claustrophobia, there is the inevitable, encroaching desperation.  But joy retains....  What will it look like?  Under what name will it arrive?  There will always be dancing girls.  The jesters are in the wings.  And music makes for a comforting thunder, in the background, heard from my bed.

Remember the origin of joy, its gorgeous contours are defined, described by our suffering.  If the underbelly of this torment is the impossible smile, then the smile, the smirk, the uncontrolled laughter itself all find their resonance, their rich echo, in the vaulted cathedral of that (all-too-human) brand of pain.

Invalid

In that last decade of slow decomposition, every morning, Seth would map his pain.  

This meditation was hypnosis.  Laying in his bed, he watched the white blades of a dusty fan from some once pretentious decade.  There was a rhythm of bored aggression as they chopped the stale, humid air.  The cob webs would circle like buzzards.  The desert sky was white, three globes to mistake for suns, as he took inventory of this rocky geography of discomfort and worry.  His body felt both hollow and heavy.  He felt its outline on the warm cotton.  Like leftovers from a crime scene, he stayed still.  His eyes were counting revolutions.  

The fat cat pinned his legs between the tuck and the fold.  No matter; they were all but immobile anyway.  The cold of the isolation of summer was under everything, the unquenchable thirst for lemonade or vinegar.   The sounds of traffic and the distracting laughter of children from the day care next door all had their repercussions.  

A dull, throbbing--of loss, of expectation--was responsible for his insomnia.

He had, in his youth, studied accupuncture.  The practice, in the end, taught him mostly about guilt, the guilt of not being able to heal himself, and of still feeling pain.  Invalid, watching the fan's gyration yet feeling not so much as a breeze, he recalled the charts that had hung in the office.  Man, woman, front and back, the contours of both mortality and energy were marked with a magical grid  of pinpricks and hope.  

Sketching these figures in his memory, measuring the spaces between nerves, he mapped the burning pain, the stabbing pain, the throbbing and the mild discomfort.  In so doing he reshaped the constellations of his own being.  Like the Milky Way rolling off the edge of the Earth or into the ocean, he was leaving the living.  He was going into a hidden sky.  The shape of him--made of stars or made of pain--was but a vague outline, like all things, on which to hang the idea of him, on which to suspend our beliefs.