Category: Uncategorized

Break Up Songs                             

    

Some days the only thing that makes me feel better is a really sad song: some earnest expression of hopelessness, with none of the gloriously aggressive exultation of rock and roll. And, no, not the blues, which seems to throw sadness back in the face of grief, although maybe John Lee Hooker’s “I Cover the Waterfront” will do. To be honest, my heart is broken, which, believe me, is no easier at 55 than it was at 35, or, for that matter, 25 or 15. Stupid heart. So cue the Diana Krall and a little Lyle. Here we go.

I put on music all day. I shuffle through my playlist, and thank goodness it contains Stevie Wonder’s “Another Star” (the happiest break up song ever), or my daughter would be very unhappy in the car. I search through old CDs and copy old songs into the new moment. I even dig up performances on YouTube (by the way, Ricki Lee Jones’ “We Belong Together” sounds much better in the studio). One song I keep coming back to is Ani DiFranco’s “You Had Time,” in which she answers the question, “Did they love you, or what?” with “They love what I do. The only one who really loves me is you.” This is as chimerical a statement as anything, because love, or not love, there is the absence—of hope, of answers, of the future, and yeah, finally of a love that makes all those other things possible—and it is the absence that causes the hurt.

Listening to it over and over, I swear I can hear another song. And thinking of it, I blow the lyric, looking for “I bleed you. You bleed me.” Or thinking I’m digging for a Cat Stevens’ song. I’m not. Finally, epiphany overtakes poor memory, and there it is—almost the same tinkly piano opening—just ever so askew in Ani’s song—and the deeply keening refrain. It’s Jimmy Webb’s “All I Know” that Art Garfunkel recorded a million years ago. And between the two songs I hear two different ways of going through this gruesome little patch.

“All I Know” begins with: “I bruise you. You bruise me. We both bruise too easily.” Yeah, I get that these aren’t literal bruises, but seriously? Then it proceeds to: “All my plans have fallen through; all my plans depend on you.” And may I just say “my plans?” This is one of those dead giveaways of a relationship that was doomed from the start. A couple never has “my plans” because the fundamental commitment to being a couple means planning together. The hardest part of living as a long term single man—and I have been a single adult much longer than I have been in a relationship—is ceding the well-worn prerogative of making all the decisions: from bed times to travel; from the playlist to the dinner menu; from this to that and back again. A relationship is all negotiation. Even if one person leads, it had better be because some kind of bargain was intentionally struck. Of course I am confusing healthy relationships with what most of us go through (okay, not you, or you, or you, either), replicating our parents’ habits without will or awareness.

Okay, rant over, back to the song, which builds to a crescendo of “I love you and that’s all I know.” I’m not really sure what the singer hopes for at this moment. Forgive me for the bruises? The bruises and plans don’t matter because I love you? Can I just say, this is the ultimate “guy” move: the only thing that matters is how I feel. Webb’s song drives that point home: “That’s all I know.” Yes, that’s all very nice, young man, but I believe the object of your affection just left the building with your car keys. I hope you have a ride home.

(And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’s just more of an end of the concert song–the singer pleading with his audience, knowing that his art relies on them, and realizing that although this moment may end, another is sure to come. My penchant for reading everything as indicative of the artist’s perpetual struggle with his or her art and audience is my own perplexing burden).

I’m not sure why we (the males of the species) believe that simply pronouncing our deeply held emotions will ever make a dent in the fabric of reality. Or why we persist even after we acknowledge the deeper flaws (yeah, I bruised you, but you bruised me too). And lord knows I have done it, stupidly, automatically, and genuinely. I’ll give myself some credit.

And that’s why I keep listening to Ani’s song. The song comes from the person who is leaving, who doesn’t have an answer, who knows that she is loved, and still, all she has is “an empty head.” She doesn’t have an answer when her partner pleads, “You said you needed time and you had time, and she feels pretty crumby about it. “How can I go home, with nothing to say?” Even home becomes impossible when things end, because home is a place you (sometimes) make with someone else.

So there just isn’t an answer, or at least not the answer I want. As dissappointed as I feel about that turn of events, it’s as akin to being on the ocean rain that won’t stop for four or forty days. Cursing and complaining don’t help, and putting on dry clothes just guarantees another set of wet in the duffle. Fingers swell with brand new whorls—I’m not even myself anymore. But the rain will stop, the sun will return. Stevie, cue the Brazilian band, ah “Another Star.” Yeah, I’m sad, but I’m here.

For now, I embrace the discordant moment in my life, knowing that it will not be a moment, knowing that as it has before, it will pass, and knowing that the right song (or poem, or sandwich, or trip) may not make everything better, but that eventually I will move on and the music (and poetry and sandwich and trip) will be there and that if I’m a little bit lucky, I will share them.

The hardest part of having great teachers and having accepted their brilliance and sneakiness, is that I expect this same brilliance and sneakiness from everyone. It’s not a conscious expectation, but who am I to deny someone something to which we all aspire.

Oh, that.

Actually, I realize that I have no idea to what other people aspire. And at heart, I suspect that most people don’t know this about themselves either. I would make a list of the ways people get confused about their aspirations, but it would be sanctimonious (even more sanctimonious than the rest of this).

I realize that I spend too much time trying to figure out what today’s teacher’s moment of sneaky brilliance is. Because not everyone is a Socrates. Not everyone is going to share their passionate brilliance about flying buttresses like Michael Cothren. Nonetheless, when working with “authorities”–with people from whom I expect to learn something, I do look for the hidden treasure (and the hidden map).

What is the hidden treasure? My best teachers always had a dual treasure in mind. One was always the subject at hand: Joyce, Woolf, Geology, Baroque Art. The other was always my (or any other student’s) ability to tease out a unique and successful approach to the subject at hand. As a teacher, my favorite moments are witnessing my students’ dawning awareness of their nascent brilliance–watching the lights go on.

What I have learned over time, and it has been a hard lesson, is that many teachers are only interested in the first treasure. Learn the material and advance. And when I write “teachers,” I mean, “people.” Because I think that everyone is a potential teacher.

In my less generous moments, I think that people want to teach everyone else about themselves. In more generous moments I accept that people are always teaching about the world. The lessons may be unintentional and uncontrollable, but there they are, waiting for the student.

I am more troubled by teachers who never want the treasure to be uncovered, or worse. They hand you a map, and when you follow it, you discover not a treasure, not even a new map, but a penalty: an electric eel, an exploding tomato, a severed thumb (wait, that’s my thumb!). Of course there is a lesson here as well, it is a darker lesson, and one I would rather do without. It may be a necessary lesson. Still.

I go on (I can’t go on). The sneaky brilliance (or the brilliant sneakiness) of the world daunts and delights me. There is always something to learn, and, always, another way to get to it.

I met with one of my professors from Swarthmore last week. In and of itself, I encourage keeping in touch with mentors from the past. They help provide a milepost on the travel. Either you say, “Wow! How far I’ve gone,” or “Damn! This road circled back on itself.” Or any of a hundred other things.

In the middle of our coffee and conversation, Michael (Cothren) bridled about the drive to clarify assessments at Swarthmore: creating rubrics that would direct students to a clear path for academic success. Otherwise known as telling students how to get an “A.” Michael thought that figuring out how to get an “A” was part of the student’s job: “They need to figure out what I want. It’s a life lesson.”

And right there is where the trouble starts. If only all our mentors were wise enough (and sneaky enough) to bury the treasure and and not simply give us a map, but teach us the signs and signals and ways to interpret the world so that we could find the treasure without a map.

I started this vision of the best teacher early, when Fritz Marks (at The Hill School) taught us Platonic Dialogues (We read Euthyphro, Crito, and Meno, as well as large swaths of The Republic). Socrates was always able to ask a question and craftily get his interlocutors to develop their own answers, making their way to the truth by fits and starts and on their own. Of course these dialogues are fiction, however much they may be modeled on something that actually happened.

At Swarthmore I was fortunate enough to have teachers who used similar ploys, making us figure out answers, or surprising us with answers that had been under our noses all along. Among these was Kaori Kitao, who opened her Cinema class with the simplest of questions (What is Cinema?), and which, if one wanted to follow the logic, ended with some fairly complicated ruminations that could have lead into Neo-Platonic visions of art and ideals.

The French critic/philosopher Roland Barthes proposed that there were two kinds of teachers: emcees, great conductors of ideas; and exemplars, great models of thinking. (And, no I cannot find the reference for that). When I recall my best teachers they actually wove these two strands together. I recall being amazed and inspired by their approaches to their subjects. They were clearly brilliant and just as clearly welcoming. I felt as if they were standing on the opposite shore waving their students over. Their brilliance was never inaccessible or inscrutable, but, instead, was not only possible, but probable if only one was willing to do the work. And part of that work is figuring your way across the water.

After and in the middle of the tragedy, the family went to Pittsburgh for a long planned visit with friends. We did not talk at length about it. In point of fact, my friends are from the Danbury area of Connecticut–yes, Newtown. One friend taught at Sandy Hook and was in the school when the shooting happened. What strange good company we made.

So, there we were in our different stages of grief, eating good food, drinking wine, riding carousels, and generally taking time away from the world. It almost worked. Careening along the Phantom’s Revenge at
whatever speed helps (and jarred our bones).

Tuesday night we saw the Pirates play the Dodgers along with 30,000 of our closest friends. The game was close until the Buccos scored four runs in the bottom of the eighth inning to reach the final score of 12-7. The crowd followed the game closely: cheering heartily all the Pittsburgh tallies; groaning sickly at the two errors by two different Pittsburgh third basemen; and booing lustily after Dodger reliever Jamey Wright intentionally plunked Russell Martin and was allowed to remain in the game (it was the third hit batsmen of the game, and the second in a series of retaliations).

Seat by seat, aisle by aisle, and section by section the fans embraced the game. My daughter, Katherine, had no idea that a baseball game could produce more than the esoteric detachment of rooting for our (semi-)beloved home team, the Norfolk Tides. We stayed through the entire 3:39, cheering and clapping and booing with all our friends.

Katherine asked, “When can we go back?”

My friend Brian said, “if I lived near a team, I would go every day.” Amen, brother.

Was it wildly jingoistic? Infinitely meaningless? Utterly unpack-able in some philosophical “opiate of the masses” fashion? Yes, yes, and yes. I’ll get back to grief and confusion (and did, quickly), but for one night (and others now to follow), it was good to get swept up and away.

While I am sure that suicide is difficult in any faith, in Unitarian Universalism it poses some distinct challenges. To begin with, as a faith that does not dictate a specific doctrine or creed, Unitarian Universalism finds cohesiveness around the mutual affirmation of some fairly general principles. As general as those principles are, even in our faith we wrangle about them and how they should be lived and interpreted. The main thing we do is agree together to affirm them.

In the end, that agreement that we make with each other is the main thing that holds us together. This makes Unitarian Universalism a covenantal faith; what holds Unitarian Universalists together is not a belief in god, or in a primary prophetic text, but in the act of making a covenant with each other.

This covenantal action bespeaks a premise that we do not make our faith alone–that it arises out of relationships. If you examine the Unitarian Universalist principles, you will find that they all refer to how we are in the world with each other. Even the fourth principle, which seems on its face to be about truth, insists on a “responsible” search for truth and meaning. Responsible to whom or to what? To each other and to the world? At least.

The theology inherent in the Unitarian Universalist reliance of covenant directly places the mysterious truth, what some would call the divine, into this web of relationships. We enter into these relationships freely, which is to say that we are not compelled by force or threat; there is no damnation to frighten a Unitarian Universalist (or anyone) into compliance. We are always in a set of relationships: families, friends, work, but also to nature, to the all the world around us, to the historical past and future, and,in a special way, to our fellow congregants.

This web of relationships can feel weighty at times. For instance, a cup of coffee enjoyed after worship explodes into the world as the web of relationships flowing from coffee in the cup expands ever outward. It is hard to be in the present moment, because no one thing is unconnected. All our choices become profound decisions. However, the web can also be a safety net–they are the ties that bind us to the world. It is not so bad to be bound to this world.

And so to suicide. Suicide is particularly hard because it severs relationships, and it shows that an individual has lost connection to the vast array of relationships to which she or he belongs. The survivors feel the loss because one part of the great tangle is no longer there. And because part of Unitarian Universalist theology is bound to all these relationships, that theology is called into question by the act of suicide.

No, of course not, one might argue, suicide is an act that belongs entirely to the person who enacts it. It reflects only on that individual and his or her state of being. I understand that perspective, but struggle with it, in some portion because I am a Unitarian Universalist.

One of the great mysteries–what makes the self– is answered not by cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am), but by I am in relationship with the world therefore I am (help me with the Latin, please). This is a fairly radical concept, perhaps more so than we ever fully imagine, because there is no self without the world–the self is contingent on the world. Most would reverse that postulation.

But the world! Insistent and persistent. And then, if only it had been so for my friend, and how could it not have been when she knew all this and knew it more than I ever will? So, I struggle, and stay tangled.

My daughter grew up in a world without artificially produced cold. The orphanage in Zhongshan had minimal food refrigeration, no air conditioning, and little or no ice. The wading pools were opened in July and August to give the children a little relief from the summer heat and humidity.

So, our summer world is more than a little strange to her. The temperatures we keep our buildings in the summer? She dresses in long pans and long sleeves. “Cold.” The air conditioning vents for the back seat are closed on her side. “Cold.” Her favorite movie right now is Frozen, which she calls, Cold.

More than that–the obvious–condensation on glasses at the table: fascinating. Ice cubes in water: more of the same. Salads? Who eats cold, uncooked food? Bananas are good; we eat them at room temperature.

I look forward to our winter, and am glad that we have a full fall to help with the transition. Sweaters, long johns, and mittens, here we come.

Let’s put it this way: at the moment Shi Hui would be happier if every pool were no more than three feet deep. Needless to say, her first swimming lesson was in water deeper than that, and the prospect gained her full throated disapproval.

What is a dad to do? Do I cancel the day’s attempt? Do I attempt to force the issue? Do I sit down on the pool deck and join my daughter in an emotional outburst? How about none of the above?

I walked Shi Hui down to the shallow end, where she ran to the water (and slipped s she sprinted around the corner of the pool), and then gleefully showed me her very own swimming lesson. I watched, gave an enthusiastic thumbs up, and then pointed to where the lesson had begun. “Swimming School,” I said. My wife and I had introduced the idea do lessons as school, and so the concept was not a new one to her. School is where work gets done. “Play,” I said as I pointed to the shallow end. “School,” I said as I pointed to where the other kids were working.

Shi Hui pointed to the water around her, making her desire fairly clear. And so I pulled out the rarely used father voice, “Wei Wei.” She looked up. This was business. “School.” She walked up the handicapped ramp and trudged back to the lesson with me, unhappy, but without the tears that had led to our respite.

During the first exercise with the instructor (kicking using a kickboard) she clung to him with the fearful grip of death. During the next exercise (taking a breath and submerging with her hands extended above her head, and which, thankfully, we had been practicing already), she released the instructor. And for the third exercise (a reprise of the kicking), she took firm grip of the board and kicked away.

After the lesson, she returned to the more familiar depths and practiced for half an hour. Laughing and smiling all the way.

I don’t know what the best way to encourage a child to push her limits. My other daughter will go to the mattresses (Godfather slang) over math homework, and no father or mother voice can stem the tide. I don’t know how or when Shi Hui will draw her lines in the sand over food, effort, or rules. But today felt like a gentle victory. I cross my fingers and hope for more.