violence – Landing

Wind

June 12, 2016

Maybe you did not go to church because God lets crazy people shoot fifty strangers. I have not been going because God has ruined my life in other ways.

I walked into a church, a church where no one knew me, so maybe I would feel different, and an usher told me not to sit down because they were in the middle of reading the lesson. Wouldn’t it be much less disruptive to let me sit down than to tell me not to? What kind of person tells people not to sit in church? It wasn’t even the gospel. I was going to leave.

I wasn’t going to leave.

The lesson was about Ahab and Jezebel and a garden, a long lesson no one would want to talk about. I had to confirm it was really about Ahab, and I didn’t just have Ahab on my mind, the way I always do when I am downtown, in Melville’s neighborhood.

I sat. On one side of me, a woman who also was doing the whole thing, on the other, a woman who didn’t seem to know the drill. In front of us, three people who were Asian and just sat. It’s a funny phenomena, here where churches are tourist attractions, so that church, and the big cathedrals, are both holy places and places people come to see holiness played out. Through the whole service, there was a group of people in back taking photos. The woman next to me was texting someone.

This is all fine, it’s just weird.

Why were they there? We were animals in the zoo? In Asia, we would go to temples and take photos and not pray. Why was I there? To feel better for a minute, to feel not trapped in being angry the church I had joined, that no one might notice I was gone, so petty. Or I was there because I had several times hit this church after a bad day, it was on my way home from my Manhattan job, and the side chapel is small and sweet and quiet, and the subway is right there, and it was bigger and more fancy town than my church.

The priest had to talk about the shooting. I had heard something bad in a minute of NPR. I am in full self-protection/healing mode, which means No politics, but still I had heard that. I hadn’t heard it was a gay club.

I’ve spent some small happy times in gay bars for the dancing or the singing. The reason a gay bar feels so safe is that I figure everyone there is at peace with him/herself, they had to work harder to become so, and they value tolerance more than other people, so I feel safe.

Like people should feel safe at church, but then, it’s been a year since another lunatic shot up a Bible study.

I got communion. I got to sing. I didn’t feel particularly better about God, in a narrative sense, but I did feel that things that hurt me were like pieces of armor or extra bones that I could shake off, rather than a part of my structure.

I was not feeling brave enough to go to doughnut time afterward.

I went down to the water. I am preparing this costume for the Mermaid Parade next week. I am going as The Sea. So it was research. What is water? It has four or five inch ruffles of white foam from the wind and the passings of the jet skis and the ferry and the Statue cruise boats, which could be rendered with white acrylic paint and dabbing with a bristly brush. I was watching the happy painter earlier in the week. His technique could help me.

Monday I went to the East River and looked out at it for a while. My anxiety brain cloud has been reactivating ferociously, so I was looking at the East River and waiting for my good drugs to take effect. It was windy that day, walking out on a pier to be surrounded by water.

It was so windy today, I lay back on a bench, with the Statue of Liberty to my left, and even though I was holding it down, the wind was so strong, my skirt a sail, it blew up and I was glad I wore clean and uninteresting underwear.

I don’t think a single soul noticed.

The priest said we can’t let people who use freedom another way take it away from us. What freedom really means. FDR’s four freedoms: of speech, of worship, from want, from fear. Why does God let people do that, frighten us for their freedom. Why do we let them?

I am used to wind. I don’t know why now I need water, water does scare me, big quantities of it seem like too much, for this midwesterner. It never scares me as much as buildings too big or too much sky, though. I was always a good swimmer, in my dreams, I can always breathe underwater.

Image: “Evening Wind,” Edward Hopper, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Sirens

June 21, 2015

The ceiling of our church is the underside of a piano, those rolls and baubles, carved rods, that make fancy furniture from rude trees. The service had been: nine slain. People had cried, well, Episcopalian cried– sniffling and wiping eyes.

When I stood in the water the evening after the day at the beach, I knew how warm and loose and filling of holes a good shower was We had read how Jesus calms the water, though only after they said, “Lord, do you not care that we are all about to perish?”

I knew it was like that, that Jesus did not care I was about to die of loneliness, or of wanting a husband whose shirt I would even iron, poorly, and would tell me I could and should be a mother, and that I was beautiful, in a different way than other people said it. I knew Jesus didn’t care if you asked to make the kids shut up so you could talk, please, just for a minute, so we can go on, so people will say, You’re a good teacher, you demand respect, Jesus slept through you even when you cried sitting on the floor or sitting on the steps. Jesus slept through all of it, like my baby brother slept through his first Easter when he was a week old.

I believe in church, more than I believe in anything. I know God, Christ, The Divine. I know Art, including The Text. But I believe in church. So although I had slept fitfully all night, woken again and again, hot and cold, remembering dreams and what my life was, what to gird for, and dreams again, I happened to be awake at 9:50 AM, I had been to my usual service the night before, and I didn’t feel great, but I thought, people at my church wanted to speak, were hurt, church was at 11, and it was a good day for white people to go to church, you know, unarmed.

Our priest told us she loved us. That made me tear up, too. What does it mean for someone who doesn’t know whow awful you can be to say, I love you? Or if she does? I will take either.

A poet read a poem, and another woman read a prayer she had specially chosen, she managed to read it with great effort.

I was too full, too nearsighted, to accept Charleston’s story, but I felt betrayal for them, abandonment. Jesus did not show up and spare anyone. Their reverence, politeness, kindness, does not stop bullets.

Moving to New York did not fix everything about me. I mean, I knew it would not fix everything, only one small what if about moving to New York. And it broke things. That happens.

The awning across the street says, “Crown Hights Beauty.”

When you try so hard. We who are church people, we have problems, maybe more than people who don’t go to church, but I would say our virtue, if we have one, is that we try so hard.

Those people in that church, they were really trying, man, they were showing up.

I showed up at church. Singing helped. We sang “Let Us Break Bread,” and “There Is A Balm in Gilead” (which, oddly, I didn’t know), and “Go Down Moses,” which felt funny with an organ and a classical signature. And “Go Tell It On The Mountain.”

I knelt and thought about if I would get a bagel, how hungry I was, or maybe I would make breakfast at home. Maybe French toast. I would be tired forever. I should have gone back to sleep.

Jesus was just a person, he slept like people do, he had to. Christ, though, is always awake, and you should call him when you’re upset, how else will He know? All those numbers in your phone, a good number of those are Christ, as are most people standing next to you waiting for the light to change and the people sitting at the bar.

I was walking up from the subway, on the way home, when I felt really tired, though, it all fell down on me, and I delayed-reaction wanted to cry. I remembered the Orthodox people I had seen the last time I got off at my stop, three young women walking together, two young men walking together. The women in their long sleeves and tights, even in the heat, and the men in their beards and hats, though they were young. Sabbath was over. The Saturday sun had gone down. There is a siren on Fridays, the first time I heard it, I was like, tornado? Where? There is no siren for the end of Sabbath, you just see the sun is down.

Parade

June 20, 2015

The Mermaid Parade was nice, the ride there was nicer. A female “sailor” with a “mustache” was standing next to a cooler, and what would probably become a tail. We got on the D train, and a guy asked us if anyone was going to Coney Island. Yes, I said. What is it like, he said, we’re visiting. I don’t know, I said. I think she’s going though, referring to the “sailor,” who happily talked up the parade, she was meeting her girlfriend, who would be mermaided, and the trains were all messed up, she was late, she hoped not too late, they were supposed to sign up to march at 1.

The subway on the weekends is like me on the weekends, except unpredictable. It hardly does much, it is not clear what it is doing, though it still has a routine.

There was also, in our car, a self-appointed subway director of traffic, who told everyone that the N was running on the R track, and if they wanted the R, they should just get on this train.

For a while, he and the “sailor” chatted about how bad the trains were.

I realized the woman going for the same seat as me was really first, and I let her, she said, She needs to sit down, and someone somewhat frail-looking sat down there instead. Of course, I said.

A woman sitting facing me looked at me and smiled broadly, we all knew many of us were on our way to the Mermaid Parade.

I watched the train as it rounded turns and could see itself, and the top of that Chinese-looking building, and the ancient painted signs that Brooklyn is still that Brooklyn, in places, especially in the south of it. The trash along the train tracks, and the graffiti, and the half-done repairs, the 100-years-agoness and never-nowness of New York, I loved, and the shared suffering, the weekend trains that do what they feel.

I was reading Brain on Fire, the memoir about the woman who had a psychotic break because of an autoimmune problem, and the mention of EKGs reminded me that though I skipped many traumatic experiences in childhood, I happened to spend two nights keeping two different kids awake all night long, in anticipation of an EKG. You were supposed to keep the kid up all night so that during a daytime appointment, kid would sleep and get brain waves measured. I had made play-doh late at night, watched movie after movie and then MTV, eating candy in a ranch that overlooked the golf course. I had known two kids with brain issues.

I tolerated the cattle march that is the spectators of the parade, finally found a spot to see, though I could really only photograph the backs of paraders. Neptune, mermaids, jellyfish, octopi, babies, old people, modesty, pasties, bubbles. It was longer and slower than I thought.

I went down to the beach and lay down on a sheet, on my stomach. It was chilly. I wore a hoodie and I put the hood up. Sometimes the beach feels too big to me. It reminds me of the zooming agoraphobia I’ve had with panic attacks. It doesn’t hurt, it just reminds me.

Walking back to the train, I realized I had forgotten my mother’s most important rule and not brought food with me. I felt thin. Nothing looked or sounded good. I waited until my transfer, bought peanuts and Gatorade, and when I ate, I felt how hungry I was.

I went to church. I felt a little silly wearing a mermaid t-shirt. I like to look kind of reverent. That’s just for me.

Our priest talked about the shooting in the church. She was burning with the horror of it. I hadn’t even felt it.

This happened before, me not feeling a big tragedy, when Sandy Hook happened, there had been a gun incident at my school, and the far-away gun thing just didn’t register, I was already so full of agony at what was closer. Right now, I’m full of ending the school year, limping one more week, and job interviews, which take a lot out of you.

Like the one in South Carolina, our church has a historical connection to the abolition of slavery. Most of our congregation is black. I hadn’t even thought about this, honestly. I liked Jon Stewart’s bit about this, I feel similarly, this just happens, and it doesn’t matter. In America, freedom for individuals matters more than the health of groups.

I didn’t feel it, I don’t, yet, but our priest had special prayers, readings, there is a special service tomorrow, a vigil the bishop has asked us to go to.

One of the kids I knew, she had seizures. We didn’t talk a lot about it. Doctors knew best. They would work it out.

Evil doesn’t usually surprise me. I don’t know if that’s good.

I think the water makes me write poetry, or maybe being alone more, as I am here. Here I’ve written more poetry than I have since I was in high school. I thought I was done with poetry. Water, being alone, being on the edge of the continent, one of those things.

Baltimore

April 28, 2015

From an interview with James Baldwin, just after the death of Dr. King:

Baldwin: It is not the black people who have to cool it, because they won’t.

Interviewer: Aren’t they the ones getting hurt the most, though?

Baldwin: That would depend on point of view. You know, I’m not at all sure that we are the ones who are being hurt the most. In fact, I’m sure we’re not. We are the ones who are dying the fastest.

Yesterday I took this long walk in Manhattan from Chelsea to Chinatown, not because they both start with “Ch.” Purple tulips, one lady with purple hair, one sign with a curl as one of its letters. The townhouse Edward Hopper painted in, it is on Washington Square Park. I climbed the steps to see the plaque that explained this, and stood on his stoop a minute. I planned only to see things I hadn’t seen before, which was more difficult than I thought it would be. I accidentally walked by the same pharmacy that always makes me think, what a fancy pharmacy, my doctor’s office, and a restaurant I ate in 1996.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about the average citizen, the white man… what should he be doing?

Baldwin: If he feels he wants to save his country, he should be talking to his neighbors and talking to his children….

Interviewer: What should he be telling his neighbors?

Baldwin: That if I go under in this country, I, the black man, he goes too.

I asked three of my students what they thought about the trouble in Baltimore. Two of them had opinions. One of them knew someone in Baltimore. One was like, what? I told him to look it up. I printed off that interview with Baldwin, and an excerpt from The Fire Next Time, and I sat and read both with a pencil in hand.

This is from The Fire Next Time:

Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any [white] people ot treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that.

Five Bradford pear trees are blooming just outside the school, every time I go out they are there, a white not of purity or emptiness, but of unsplit light, these bloomed branches pressed against the sky so blue it is almost pink. I walked under them, looked up at them, on my way to buy lunch for myself and a friend.

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this– which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never– the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

“It looks like it’s gonna rain,” one of my students said.

“No, it doesn’t,” I said.

“No, it doesn’t,” another kid said.

She looked again at the pink-blue sky. “Oh, I guess not.”

Something very sinister happpens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become.

The thing right now is “deez nuts,” that is what the kids are saying, pretty much every day, someone, and today I said, “That’s so last week,” and a kid considered, accepted that perhaps this was true, the saying was worn out.

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

I saw also that my heart was full of little holes, pinpricks, and this is why it has trouble holding things, sometimes.

If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.