Saturday, December 10, 2005
The Elusive Line
Notes for an autobiographical strip search
If you’re going through hell, keep going.
–Winston Churchill
All I want is for future generations to go ‘Fuck it. I’ve had enough. Here’s the truth.’
–Johnny Rotten
Students of the everlasting enigma, I offer you here a humble case study on the subject of human experience–my own. Every life projects a pattern onto the universe, leaving its unique indentation in the many dimensions through which it moves. Here I begin both an excavation and exhibit of my own life’s journey through time, in which I’ll examine the many snags and tangents along the way to my current state of still-incipient integration.
So without promise of further chronological adhesion, I start at the very beginning: my earliest memory; the moment, in fact, that initiated me into full psychological awareness. I was about three. My baby sister was asleep in her crib at the end of the hall, and my mother was having lunch with a neighbor lady in the dining room. Alone in my room, I was lolling on the bed staring at the ceiling, feeling lazy but full of suppressed, random energy. This is how I think I felt, at least. I really didn't become aware of anything until some indeterminable time later, when my mother walked in on me smearing my own shit across the walls in arches and loops.
Suddenly, everything came into focus: the smell of my own excrement, the texture of it in my hands, the tedium of having to wash the walls and repaint, how my dad would react, what the embarrassed giggles of my mother's guest meant, the slimy feeling between my buns and thighs. I even remember looking at what I'd done and thinking, hmmm, it's not very good, is it? It was obvious I had no natural talent for painting. Going deeper, it was the first time I had been definitely aware that I was an independent entity, with my own thoughts and volition, and that each of my actions sent echo waves into the environment, like the circles generated by a stone thrown into a pond.
And so I was delivered into cognizance to the look, smell and feel of my own shit–a cheeky bit of sardonic humor that was just the first in a long line of jokes the universe seemed to play on me until I figured out I was playing them on myself. But that took another thirty-odd years.
I remember my mother hastily carting me off and cleansing me in the bathtub with the water running, and nothing else specific about the poo-painting incident; but other memories come flooding back to me from that point. Many come in mere snippets: My dad bound and bandaged after having been burned at an oil refinery, stretched out on the couch, carefully sipping a cocktail, using his good hand to guide the glass to his mouth without moving any other part of his body; sitting on the sloped, open side yard we shared with our neighbors while my babysitter smoked pot with the long-haired boys from next door; playing giddy-up on my uncle Steve's knee, and the worried look on my mother's face because I liked it so much; getting out of bed one night and stumbling into a small party my parent's were having, smelling the sickly sweet pong of tropical booze concoctions and wondering why they were all being so loud; posing in front of the TV like a geisha in training, legs tucked neatly beneath me, nibbling demurely at my quarter-cut grilled cheese sandwich so that it would last through an entire late-morning rerun of Bewitched.
Other memories come in complete chunks, and can be examined either whole, through the inner eye's special 4-D viewer, or in sequential narrative. For example, here's one I view in my inner screening room fairly often:
It's springtime, and the lower-grades quad is blanketed in clover. Mrs. Ashbeck has taken her second grade class onto the lawn to listen to her sing and play her harpsichord, or was it a zither?.... I have a vision of her wearing a kimono. She played Sakura, and sang the English lyrics, which were also in our music books: Cherry bloom, cherry bloom/Gently swaying in the air/Soft the colors everywhere.... While she sang, I sat with three girls from the class (I almost said other girls) and made chains out of clover flowers. Bees buzzed around us, and we flinched and yelped if one came too near. On the other side of a beech tree sat the manly boys of the class, yelling and slapping at each other a lot, not paying attention at all to Mrs. Ashbeck's earnest strains. I looked over at one of them, and he held his arm out then flicked his hand down at the wrist with a look on his face as if he had just passed a big silent but deadly fart.
Not long after that, apparently through nothing more than the power of calling the information forth from the universe, for I remember no source, I found out what that limp-wristed gesture meant. Somehow, by keeping my eyes open, by scouring the movies and television for clues, I figured out that this gesture was one in a canon of words and gestures used to denigrate gay men; and that I might be one of them, though I wasn’t sure what it meant at the time. Way back in second grade, there was this other second grader using body language I didn’t know to tell me that he thought I was a homo, and that he had a certain disdain for it–a complicated message that I would hear over and over again in my life from that point on. That day, I just shrugged and went back to my clover chain. Then I got lost in Mrs. Ashbeck's warble and the twang of the taut strings under her ivory pick. And then I got lost in my own thoughts.
When the recess bell rang, I continued to sit there next to the beech tree, absentmindedly counting the blooms on my clover chain rosary. Mrs. Ashbeck came up to me, put her hand on my back and said, You all right? I nodded, then watched her wobble across the tufted lawn in her high heels to the cafeteria. As I turned back, I got beaned in the head with a soccer ball. Once I recovered from momentary shock, I was horrified to find that absolutely everyone on the small playground was laughing about it. I stood up and kicked the ball back as hard as I could, and it soared over the crowd of seven-year-olds onto the kindergarten blacktop. The mob bounded after the ball as one entity while I sat down under the tree and resumed disappearing into my own little world.
I was still sitting there when Mrs. Ashbeck came back after lunch. She told me to come into the classroom, so I followed her without a word, watching my feet and sweating suddenly, sure that I was in trouble, though I couldn’t imagine about what. Instead of the admonishment I had feared, she gave me a new reading book, the fifth-grade reading book, Bold Journeys, and told me not to tell anyone else, since the rest of the second grade gifted class, as gifted as they were, were just starting the fourth-grade reading book, Ventures. Sheesh, that must have been a smart group of little kids. I remember an insatiable hunger for knowledge that gnawed at my insides and kept me very highly strung, and by that time I was as deeply into words and reading as I could manage to bury myself.
A few weeks later, I got moved up to the third grade gifted class, and found that I was even further ahead of them. After a few days sitting small and insignificant under the spiky, collective glare of what seemed much larger children, I went back to Mrs. Ashbeck, and began Bold Journeys by myself, in a little corner by the windows. Everyone stared at me and talked about me all the time, but I didn't care. In fact, I loved the solitude that the disdainful fascination of others afforded me.
But I'm not here simply to rattle off a string of memories. I have the distinct feeling that piecing my life together into an entirety that can be viewed whole from many different angles is integral to my continued healing. I also have the urge to tell the truth, whatever that means, and I figure the best place to start that open-ended project is with myself.
How does it all coalesce, one's experience of life? Once gathered, does it remain cryptic and unwieldy, or does its sheer bulk demand a settling into form? My memory is a miasma of images, thoughts, impressions, phrases, sounds, smells, tastes, euphorias, madnesses, rises and falls, breathing, eating, flying and crashing, having sex and longing for it, dancing, dreaming, screaming, hiding, acting the part and fighting the battle; protecting myself from the awful, mundane truth of everyday reality. The best anyone can do is to weave these motley strands into connective relief, to create a distinction from, but vital connection with, the rest of the human drama; to map the effect of the self on the diorama of life. I've seen it in a dream, this elusive line:
I am walking along a bluff on the central California coast when everything goes blurry; my surrounding environment morphs into a moving mass of pixels, each differentiated only by chromatic gradation, creating a pointilistic watercolor effect that causes the scenery to look as if seen through someone else’s pancake-thick eyeglasses. I panic, stop in my tracks. From behind, a tap on the hip. A thin, toddler-high being with translucent violet skin and a shock of white fur atop his (her?) pointy skull appears at my side, lays a bony hand on my back and, with his other, gestures out to sea. In the distance, from a flurry of azure, teal and coppery silver pinpricks, appears a continuous line of curlicues and twists, loops and arabesques, standing out in all dimensions--a bright, pulsating plait of red and orange. It looks like a DNA strand that has been pulled to its tensile limit, then released with a jerk, or a freedom-drunk guitar string freshly sprung from its time on the frets. That, he says, and I definitely feel it's a he at this point; but he doesn't say it, he just beams his communication straight into my head: That is all it is.
He traces his fingers across the lunatic line, now mimicking the frothy white tattoo a skater cuts into the thick, steel-blue skin of her local pond. When I reach out to grasp it, it writhes in my grip, snakelike. I leap on its back to learn the secrets of its undulations, and the conceptual bronco bucks me awake. The freestyle pattern fades, leaving momentary traces on the quaking screens of my still-closed eyelids like a sparkler does in the silk heft of summer nightdark.
Now, a real dominatrix of a muse has gotten hold of me. She wants me to turn away from the fantasy of fiction and write something real. She wants me to write about my panic and my horror, my irate urges; to flip the sleeping lids of my volcanos and free my searing underground springs. She wants me to write about what it's like to feel that your always on the outside, and why it is that I keep running away, again and again, and what it is I'm running from, when I know that no one can escape either the self or the all-is-one.... Hmmm, I think, as she tells me all this in a calm, but unmistakably firm, manner, bright red lips taut with authority: Hmmmm..., I say. I'd like to see that myself.
Categories: backstory, Bakersfield, glbt, healing
If you’re going through hell, keep going.
–Winston Churchill
All I want is for future generations to go ‘Fuck it. I’ve had enough. Here’s the truth.’
–Johnny Rotten
"Storyline" - compulsive sickbed art by R. Campbell (me), Feb. 2005
Welcome Spiel: an inquiry into the author’s intentions
Students of the everlasting enigma, I offer you here a humble case study on the subject of human experience–my own. Every life projects a pattern onto the universe, leaving its unique indentation in the many dimensions through which it moves. Here I begin both an excavation and exhibit of my own life’s journey through time, in which I’ll examine the many snags and tangents along the way to my current state of still-incipient integration.
So without promise of further chronological adhesion, I start at the very beginning: my earliest memory; the moment, in fact, that initiated me into full psychological awareness. I was about three. My baby sister was asleep in her crib at the end of the hall, and my mother was having lunch with a neighbor lady in the dining room. Alone in my room, I was lolling on the bed staring at the ceiling, feeling lazy but full of suppressed, random energy. This is how I think I felt, at least. I really didn't become aware of anything until some indeterminable time later, when my mother walked in on me smearing my own shit across the walls in arches and loops.
Suddenly, everything came into focus: the smell of my own excrement, the texture of it in my hands, the tedium of having to wash the walls and repaint, how my dad would react, what the embarrassed giggles of my mother's guest meant, the slimy feeling between my buns and thighs. I even remember looking at what I'd done and thinking, hmmm, it's not very good, is it? It was obvious I had no natural talent for painting. Going deeper, it was the first time I had been definitely aware that I was an independent entity, with my own thoughts and volition, and that each of my actions sent echo waves into the environment, like the circles generated by a stone thrown into a pond.
And so I was delivered into cognizance to the look, smell and feel of my own shit–a cheeky bit of sardonic humor that was just the first in a long line of jokes the universe seemed to play on me until I figured out I was playing them on myself. But that took another thirty-odd years.
I remember my mother hastily carting me off and cleansing me in the bathtub with the water running, and nothing else specific about the poo-painting incident; but other memories come flooding back to me from that point. Many come in mere snippets: My dad bound and bandaged after having been burned at an oil refinery, stretched out on the couch, carefully sipping a cocktail, using his good hand to guide the glass to his mouth without moving any other part of his body; sitting on the sloped, open side yard we shared with our neighbors while my babysitter smoked pot with the long-haired boys from next door; playing giddy-up on my uncle Steve's knee, and the worried look on my mother's face because I liked it so much; getting out of bed one night and stumbling into a small party my parent's were having, smelling the sickly sweet pong of tropical booze concoctions and wondering why they were all being so loud; posing in front of the TV like a geisha in training, legs tucked neatly beneath me, nibbling demurely at my quarter-cut grilled cheese sandwich so that it would last through an entire late-morning rerun of Bewitched.
Other memories come in complete chunks, and can be examined either whole, through the inner eye's special 4-D viewer, or in sequential narrative. For example, here's one I view in my inner screening room fairly often:
It's springtime, and the lower-grades quad is blanketed in clover. Mrs. Ashbeck has taken her second grade class onto the lawn to listen to her sing and play her harpsichord, or was it a zither?.... I have a vision of her wearing a kimono. She played Sakura, and sang the English lyrics, which were also in our music books: Cherry bloom, cherry bloom/Gently swaying in the air/Soft the colors everywhere.... While she sang, I sat with three girls from the class (I almost said other girls) and made chains out of clover flowers. Bees buzzed around us, and we flinched and yelped if one came too near. On the other side of a beech tree sat the manly boys of the class, yelling and slapping at each other a lot, not paying attention at all to Mrs. Ashbeck's earnest strains. I looked over at one of them, and he held his arm out then flicked his hand down at the wrist with a look on his face as if he had just passed a big silent but deadly fart.
Not long after that, apparently through nothing more than the power of calling the information forth from the universe, for I remember no source, I found out what that limp-wristed gesture meant. Somehow, by keeping my eyes open, by scouring the movies and television for clues, I figured out that this gesture was one in a canon of words and gestures used to denigrate gay men; and that I might be one of them, though I wasn’t sure what it meant at the time. Way back in second grade, there was this other second grader using body language I didn’t know to tell me that he thought I was a homo, and that he had a certain disdain for it–a complicated message that I would hear over and over again in my life from that point on. That day, I just shrugged and went back to my clover chain. Then I got lost in Mrs. Ashbeck's warble and the twang of the taut strings under her ivory pick. And then I got lost in my own thoughts.
When the recess bell rang, I continued to sit there next to the beech tree, absentmindedly counting the blooms on my clover chain rosary. Mrs. Ashbeck came up to me, put her hand on my back and said, You all right? I nodded, then watched her wobble across the tufted lawn in her high heels to the cafeteria. As I turned back, I got beaned in the head with a soccer ball. Once I recovered from momentary shock, I was horrified to find that absolutely everyone on the small playground was laughing about it. I stood up and kicked the ball back as hard as I could, and it soared over the crowd of seven-year-olds onto the kindergarten blacktop. The mob bounded after the ball as one entity while I sat down under the tree and resumed disappearing into my own little world.
I was still sitting there when Mrs. Ashbeck came back after lunch. She told me to come into the classroom, so I followed her without a word, watching my feet and sweating suddenly, sure that I was in trouble, though I couldn’t imagine about what. Instead of the admonishment I had feared, she gave me a new reading book, the fifth-grade reading book, Bold Journeys, and told me not to tell anyone else, since the rest of the second grade gifted class, as gifted as they were, were just starting the fourth-grade reading book, Ventures. Sheesh, that must have been a smart group of little kids. I remember an insatiable hunger for knowledge that gnawed at my insides and kept me very highly strung, and by that time I was as deeply into words and reading as I could manage to bury myself.
A few weeks later, I got moved up to the third grade gifted class, and found that I was even further ahead of them. After a few days sitting small and insignificant under the spiky, collective glare of what seemed much larger children, I went back to Mrs. Ashbeck, and began Bold Journeys by myself, in a little corner by the windows. Everyone stared at me and talked about me all the time, but I didn't care. In fact, I loved the solitude that the disdainful fascination of others afforded me.
But I'm not here simply to rattle off a string of memories. I have the distinct feeling that piecing my life together into an entirety that can be viewed whole from many different angles is integral to my continued healing. I also have the urge to tell the truth, whatever that means, and I figure the best place to start that open-ended project is with myself.
How does it all coalesce, one's experience of life? Once gathered, does it remain cryptic and unwieldy, or does its sheer bulk demand a settling into form? My memory is a miasma of images, thoughts, impressions, phrases, sounds, smells, tastes, euphorias, madnesses, rises and falls, breathing, eating, flying and crashing, having sex and longing for it, dancing, dreaming, screaming, hiding, acting the part and fighting the battle; protecting myself from the awful, mundane truth of everyday reality. The best anyone can do is to weave these motley strands into connective relief, to create a distinction from, but vital connection with, the rest of the human drama; to map the effect of the self on the diorama of life. I've seen it in a dream, this elusive line:
I am walking along a bluff on the central California coast when everything goes blurry; my surrounding environment morphs into a moving mass of pixels, each differentiated only by chromatic gradation, creating a pointilistic watercolor effect that causes the scenery to look as if seen through someone else’s pancake-thick eyeglasses. I panic, stop in my tracks. From behind, a tap on the hip. A thin, toddler-high being with translucent violet skin and a shock of white fur atop his (her?) pointy skull appears at my side, lays a bony hand on my back and, with his other, gestures out to sea. In the distance, from a flurry of azure, teal and coppery silver pinpricks, appears a continuous line of curlicues and twists, loops and arabesques, standing out in all dimensions--a bright, pulsating plait of red and orange. It looks like a DNA strand that has been pulled to its tensile limit, then released with a jerk, or a freedom-drunk guitar string freshly sprung from its time on the frets. That, he says, and I definitely feel it's a he at this point; but he doesn't say it, he just beams his communication straight into my head: That is all it is.
He traces his fingers across the lunatic line, now mimicking the frothy white tattoo a skater cuts into the thick, steel-blue skin of her local pond. When I reach out to grasp it, it writhes in my grip, snakelike. I leap on its back to learn the secrets of its undulations, and the conceptual bronco bucks me awake. The freestyle pattern fades, leaving momentary traces on the quaking screens of my still-closed eyelids like a sparkler does in the silk heft of summer nightdark.
Now, a real dominatrix of a muse has gotten hold of me. She wants me to turn away from the fantasy of fiction and write something real. She wants me to write about my panic and my horror, my irate urges; to flip the sleeping lids of my volcanos and free my searing underground springs. She wants me to write about what it's like to feel that your always on the outside, and why it is that I keep running away, again and again, and what it is I'm running from, when I know that no one can escape either the self or the all-is-one.... Hmmm, I think, as she tells me all this in a calm, but unmistakably firm, manner, bright red lips taut with authority: Hmmmm..., I say. I'd like to see that myself.
Categories: backstory, Bakersfield, glbt, healing
