The Limitations of Shame Theory in Regard to Wantu

How could he be ashamed?

Shame was unrecognizable to Wantu. Like telling a man to feel his womb; it could only be imagined. There was no self-hatred in Wantu, no inner-critic. As far as the voice of self-hatred, Wantu was an interior mute.

And how could you call him humble? Humility was not a virtue for Wantu--it was the only possible existence. Without shame there could be no off-setting grandiosity, no self-inflation. There was only Wantu. Wantu and his pigeon. Or, more accurately, pigeon and his Wantu.

Some Stuff about Art and Making a World

Walking in the dark outside a party one summer night sometime in college, I fell suddenly under the spell of some song they were playing inside, not even a good song I think. There was the smell of dirt and magnolia, the thought of reading to be done, the feeling of my feet on the cement walkway, but nothing was as compelling, nothing was as much the center of things as the song. And then just as suddenly I remember feeling sad and angry that nothing that could happen inside the party could be as good as the feeling of the song, the not very good song. It was during a time when almost nothing presented itself to me as a given, almost everything provoked me to wonder what was necessarily so, what might be different if I were born into different circumstances or if I had the will to change myself, to expand myself. I didn't go in. And I will feel a bit suspicious of my reader if she does not mentally chide me or at least roll her eyes at my preciousness and fatalism. A different person might have made no connection between the music and the party, or might have understood the music as the promise of something wonderful waiting inside. I walked away. I was raised to keep watch at the boundaries between art and life.
Which has not served me entirely well.

But often, and maybe this is reason to be suspicious of people like me, I'm just talking to hear how things sound. Or to hear what sounds it's possible to make. So there is this other way that art works that has become as important to me as how art makes claims about the world. Art teaches you how to use your senses and how to frame things, how to see completely particular things among the infinite field of things. Or maybe it's just one thing and it's just hard to see that from the midst of it?

My eldest daughter is a junior is high school and so our mailbox is littered each day with fantastical glossy pamphlets from colleges. They're really good fun to leaf through, fold out, spin around, search for stickers and graphs and typographical sleight-of-hand. And we're right to be suspicious of them, even though they have the courtesy to show up explicitly as propaganda, unlike so much propaganda. Many of the shots in these pamphlets of kids discussing French feminism under a beech tree were taken right after other kids walked by with "Beavers" written on the butts of their sweatpants. Dumpsters just out of the frame to the right and a bank of deafening heat pumps just out of the frame to the left. Ah, well.

But so the other day I was driving to a dental checkup up a highway built over Jones Falls River, the main waterway through Baltimore. Past new apartment construction made of imaginary materials and an enormous, perfectly rectangular cinder block storage facility that can't be more than thirty feet from the highway. And the wind was whistling in the driver's side window that doesn't quite roll up. But it was foggy and near-Spring, the new grass at the shoulders and median shading into the darker green of the trees and vines I was driving past, and I had the sense of gradually ascending a land mass that slopes up from the Chesapeake Bay, Pennsylvania hanging green and misty above me as I climbed. And a highway sign tipped into view, and as I mounted a long, arcing corner the sign, which is suspended over the highway, focused the vague glare of what sun there was into a third completely distinct green--that highway sign green--and it was beautiful. And I don't know if this is a good thing but I think I found it beautiful only because watching movies has taught me to accept the world in frames. Only because of the way Michelangelo Antonioni's lens, in the midst of all the deliberately self-distracting day trips, and all the sad and irritating characters who populate L'Avventura, is transfixed only by the Mediterranean breeze in Monica Vitti's hair.

Wantu and the Pigeon

It is not Wantu alone who causes the bowels to quiver. Yes, he is unusual, even bizarre. At first, moving at the periphery, he is often mistaken for a child or "little person," but he lacks the energy and ease of a child and his odd, diminutive stature is without the odd proportions, the wobbly gate, the starched eyes of dwarfs. It takes a closer gaze before one realizes the lined forehead, the mouse-haired mustache, the wizened eyes, the sagging paunch common to middle-aged men. It is only then that you might feel an interior shiver, the kind of startled awareness one experiences when encountering the non-categorical. And it takes awhile, some sifting through the mental databanks, the medical trivia, the barroom tales before one finds the word, the symbol for the reality before you. For Wantu is a halfling, a man in miniature.

Even when this unusual creature is fully received, it is not Wantu himself that creates a shudder of alertness. There is an unwritten protocol when we, the seemingly able-bodied, encounter the disfigured—we become friendly. We smile. We offer a chair. We're eager for small talk. We demure, as if the misshapen creature contains royal blood. I suppose the reason is two-fold: though each of us is as self-centered and greed-driven as the basest Wall-Street trader, nevertheless, our interior reporting is much more generous. We tell ourselves we are one of the good eggs, kinder than most. When encountering such a clear opportunity to assure ourselves of our angelic nature, we feel compelled to play the part of the charitable. Secondly, some remnant of the ancient religion still lives within our spine, incanting the Gods’ demand for sacrifice and suffering: a lamb burned, an enemy’s heart eaten, a virgin thrown from the mountain. In the presence of Wantu there is a genuine gratitude that rises up from us, a relief that we have not been chosen to carry the necessary curse, the scourge of being unusual.

Yet it is not Wantu’s pint-sized anatomy nor his tiny mustache nor Native-American cheekbones that causes the deep discomfort in those he encounters. It is the pigeon. The pigeon at Wantu’s side. The pigeon with the oil sheen neck and empty gaze. The pigeon who has been to the center of the turning world and found it utterly empty, and not as Buddha intended. It is this pigeon that causes you to hoist your children. This pigeon who causes the sphincter to clench. It is this pigeon who exists without name nor lineage.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

We are undergoing the long resentful adolescence of spring. The Sun is psyched, it wants to take the car and go. It hasn't grown the part of its brain that can foresee disaster, and so every morning--most, anyway--we get up and have to fight the argument that all we need is shorts and sandals, and we calmly explain to Sun that it's a good idea it just wouldn't work in practice, for maybe a while yet. How long? Sun wants to know. We'll tell you when.

Cold is still making the rules for at least another month. In the morning Sun bursts into the room with a joy and enthusiasm that I'm not really man enough to accept at face value. My ideal version of me would remove the cheapass slat blinds from the east-facing windows in the bedroom, do Sun Salutes to the dawn, oxygen-crazed light streaming through my closed lids. When the kids leave. The magnolia is ready to burst into bloom. It is as boisterous, as insanely excessive and as disarmingly vulgar in its innocence as my teenage daughters. And the blossoms are waxy, fleshy, tropical things. A bit of a freeze and they go all corpsewhitebrown. Nature's apparent lack of a viable plan is shocking. I think of Clinton's hopeful, goofy phrase from his second inaugural address: "Forcing the Spring." I must remember that because I was genuinely moved. Serious, it's cold today.

Beauty has to catch me off guard like a toddler bursting into the love lair or often I can't quite see it. I need it to arrive chubby, grotesque, dangly, pied, wizened, flat-faced, broke. Downstairs my daughters are making crepes and blasting The Proclaimers, who are playing this unworkable Chicago blues thing with total commitment. I want to hate it but they (The Proclaimers) are from Auchtermuchty, Fife, Scotland, and the council area of Fife is located between the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth, and Auchtermuchty translates as "Field of Boars." These are my people.

For a couple days I have been resisting the sun. I'm blue, I have a cold or it has me. And I think the reason I've been staying inside for the most part is that everything else in the world is participating in spring. Or it isn't even as civic minded as that makes it sound. It's not like everything in nature is giving 110% for the team, or putting on a brave face or holding up some other social virtue. Here's how Hopkins says it:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells:
Selves -- goes itself: myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

And then the next bit is about how the likeness of God exalts humanity above nature, about how we express not just ourselves but Christ. But I don't even need that much. I just want to be a proper kingfisher.

Is My Soul Romanian?

Dear Kirk,

The Ipod chose "Cine Are Fata Mare" by Dona Dumitru Siminica this morning. Siminica with the suave mustache, the falsetto voice over gypsy accordian and violin. I have no idea what he's singing about. Something melancholic, something troubled, some kind of Romanian blues. I hear this music and my soul shifts within me. How can this be? I'm not Romanian. I have no nostalgia for this music and yet the plucked strings and wailing voice make me long for a time I never lived.

Soul: It's time we go to Bucharest. Drink wine with grandfather. Wine pressed by the feet of our gypsy cousins.

Me: How many times must I remind you that we have no grandfather in Bucharest, nor peasant cousins. Why must you live in dreams?

Soul: Listen to this music. Listen to your lust for blood roots. Now tell me who talks in dreams.

--Mark

Biscuits

Dear Kirk,

The wife made biscuits. Buttermilk, flour, butter, salt. She gave them to me right off the parchment paper with blackberry jam. I ate her biscuits and it was almost as good as sex. Almost. I will try and test this comparison tonight.

--Mark

Whisper Spring

Dear Kirk,

I think we both notice that now at mid-life we linger over moments of beauty, moments of grace, moments that satisfy, moments we both need to hold and encourage, moments when the longing finds rest. Like yesterday when the sun broke through, the clouds dispersed, and the daughter wanted a park. We walked transfigured by the bright smell of spring into fawn princess and her friendly giant. We followed the creek past the melting ice of the outdoor rink toward the sound of children delirious with colored bars, rope castles, and plastic rocks. Seeing the bearded man with his stringless guitar we smiled then climbed the bank to the playground. "Swings!" she cried and so swings it was. She sat opposite the other children and I pushed her from the front, first by the soles of her feet, then by holding her waist and hoisting her up over my head. She closed her eyes, dropped her head back and let her curly hair drag in the dirt. I stepped to the side and as she swung past I whispered in her ear, "Spring." She laughed and said, "Say it again. Say 'spring' again." And so I did.

--Mark

Sun and Fog Wrestled

The HVAC system of the building buzzes with tense energy. You notice when it gets quiet that these spaces are full of this anesthetic hum, that it's the pitch to which all the rooms and hallways are tuned, and that it keeps you a little edgy and drugged. Not terribly irritating but irritating enough. Not that there's anything wrong with being indoors; I like buildings. Right now it's joined from beneath by the low hum of something stirring, rousing itself. In about half an hour I'll begin a ten-day vacation. Time for coffee and reading, to walk and stare at stuff, slow time with people I love, to meander and learn things by accident. And outside it's March.

Every year Spring makes me crazy. I'm full of this loooonging but if it's for anything in particular I can't imagine what. Love? Or movement--the longing to go, to get on a plane for anyplace and land and walk along something, keep walking. Or for talk, maybe. Maybe the rest of the world would feel calmer if I could say whatever it is that keeps humming in me?

But. So. This blog.

Mark and I have been friends since 8th grade. I was the new kid at a small school, and lonely--although I don't remember being lonely--and I think my mom got Mark's mom to invite me to spend the night. I assume I was not entirely hateful company but I don't think I began my career as Mark's friend as entirely welcome company. Nevertheless he did welcome me. And over many years now he has been my friend, and taught me about friendship and about life, often unintentionally, I'm guessing. But really the conversation we keep having is mainly stoked by questions like what the hell is going on around here? what's the next thing? what am I for?

The answers to these questions seem to show up on an as-needed basis. And pretty indirectly. As if you asked the Heavens what the hell is going on here? And then it turns out that mild italian sausage is on sale, and that's sort of interesting, and now that's what's for dinner, and the question about what the hell gets displaced by variations on pasta sauce recipes.

Or better. Sometimes moments show up and entirely claim you. You see something beautiful, something that seems like the perfect words for what you couldn't say. Like the answer to the question you weren't wise enough to ask. Something that seems to act out enormous forces. As if, as you sat on a hillside above Santa Rosa flicking dew off the grass, sun and fog wrestled below you, slowly and vastly, and for a few moments you knew that their wrestling was the same as the wrestling inside you.