June 2004
I feel better today. I wasn’t feeling so good for a while. I’m not exactly sure what I mean by “a while.” Months?
I had the idea to write about problems, but in the end all I wrote was this: “A problem is only a problem if it’s a problem.” That sounds cute, I know, but I didn’t mean it that way. I meant to mean that the only things that count as problems are the things one thinks of as problems. If you don’t think of something as a problem, it isn’t one.
When I was 16, my best friend confessed to feeling hurt whenever people called him Nose or Pickle, his nicknames then. (Nose referred to his nose, which was large, and Pickle referred to his jacket, which was green.) He wanted to know why I never got teased like this.
The reason, I told him, is that I didn’t mind being teased. This took all the fun out of teasing me. “You have to stop minding being teased,” I said, “and no one will tease you. Or even if they do, you won’t mind it anymore.”
You can just imagine how that went over. How do you stop minding something you mind?
Related: I once had a boss who refused to say the word problem. This was a technique he learned in a book on management. Whenever he wanted to say problem, he would say opportunity. At staff meetings he would talk at great length about all the opportunities the organization faced. However, since he still used the word opportunity to mean opportunity, you to had to figure out from context what he was talking about, a problem or an opportunity. Later he stopped using the word opportunity to mean problem, and would instead say challenge. Fortunately he wasn’t the sort of person to ever talk about challenges, so this was much easier to decipher.
A man remembers the moment he fell in love with a woman he has long since lost. It happened less than a month after he met her, while they watched a video of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. The man adored Bergman and was surprised to learn that the woman had never seen any of his films. So he rented Persona and they watched it from his bed, their legs wrapped together under the covers.
Persona is about an actress who has inexplicably stopped talking. When the film begins, she’s in a psychiatric hospital where she’s being cared for by a young nurse. Her psychiatrist, seeing little progress in her condition, suggests that the actress and nurse vacation together at the psychiatrist’s beach house. There the drama unfolds.
In the man’s memory of this night, the woman made frequent comments about the film as they watched it, often laughing at her own sardonic observations. The man, annoyed—after all, this was Bergman—considered asking her to stop, but soon began to realize that her snickering remarks were funny. She was making fun of Bergman, and she was spot on. The turning point came when she started in on the psychiatrist, who as she pointed out, smoked continually. Every time you saw her, she was lighting another cigarette or lost behind a cloud of smoke. Somehow the man hadn’t noticed this.
“And what’s with this beach house?” she said. “Isn’t it a tad unorthodox for a psychiatrist to suggest that her mentally ill patient hang out alone with her nurse at the psychiatrist’s isolated beach house?”
Before the man could respond, the woman answered her own question.
“I guess this must be the Ingmar Bergman School of Nursing,” she said.
With this, the man looked at her. She was nestled against his side, her head resting on his chest, her arm wrapped across him. The room, his room then, was dark, and the light from the television flickered across her face.
By Pablo Neruda (translated by Robert Bly)
It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailor shops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.
The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.
It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.
Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.
I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.
I don’t want so much misery.
I don’t want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.
That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.
And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.
There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.
I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.
09 June 2004 | Terrace
I want to write a taxonomy of evil. This occurred to me five Thursdays ago, during lunch, which I ate, as I do each Thursday, on the Fragrance Terrace of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The Fragrance Terrace is for Garden staff. I’m part-time staff, so I get to eat there. Four of my colleagues were with me, and we—or they—discussed the torture of Iraqi prisoners, which was big news right then. I learned all about it from my colleagues.
Never did I determine why it was such big news. Did the American people seriously believe that Iraqi prisoners were not being tortured? Do the American people seriously believe that the people in our jails and prisons are not being tortured today? Do the American people seriously imagine that the Geneva Convention or the U.S. Constitution or any law ever written can prevent people with power from abusing that power? What world are we living in, in the mind of the American people?
I perked up when someone called Rumsfeld evil, and someone else—me—called Cheney eviler. The distinction hinged on a particular interpretation of each man’s morality. Now, this could be totally off-base, but it appears from a distance that Rumsfeld operates according to a specific and consistent set of moral precepts (immoral moral precepts, but moral precepts nonetheless). Cheney, by comparison, appears to have no morality whatsoever and is interested only in power. Said another way, Rumsfeld believes his actions will bring about a better world, while Cheney believes his actions will protect or expand his power. Said a third way, Rumsfeld is Hilter, and Cheney is Stalin. Hilter believed in Arayan supremacy; Stalin believed in his own personal hegemony. Of course it’s entirely possible that Hilter believed in his own personal hegemony no less than Stalin but did a better job of camouflaging it in the rhetoric of Arayan supremacy.
Also, it can be argued that Stalin and Cheney are moral according to a version of morality that values power above all else.
One of my colleagues objected when I put Nixon in the Stalin category. Nixon’s crimes hardly compare to Stalin’s in terms of scale, he said.
Fair enough. My taxonomy of evil will include an adjustment for scale. This means that Jeffrey Daumer will be considered less evil than, say, Dick Cheney, despite the fact that Cheney has not, so far as I know, killed and eaten anyone. I mean, not directly.
My taxonomy of evil will also include an adjustment for how directly evil one is, although in an odd twist, indirectly evil acts, such as expanding the Army’s policy about the use of torture, will be considered more evil than directly evil acts, such as torturing people. It’ll work just like Amway, with a percentage of evil flowing back up the pyramid.
08 June 2004 | Debate
In fifth grade I participated in a classroom debate. I’ve long since forgotten the topic of the debate or whether my team was for or against it, but I remember that the debate took place before the rest of the class, including Carolyn Kinney, who I was in madly love with then and whose photo I still have, thirty-plus years later.
The other thing I remember is that I didn’t say a thing the entire time. Not a word. I’d spent an entire week studying the subject of the debate, so I knew quite a bit about it, but when the time came to debate, I couldn’t think of anything to say, I froze. I remember telling myself that I had to say something, that I couldn’t just sit there in silence, but that’s what I did.
After class, my teacher Mrs. Staller, who wore an extraordinary amount of make-up, almost like a clown, touched me on the shoulder and said, “Next time.”
