Media sometimes make lists of famous long term friendships between writers. Mine is not on any of them because my correspondent prefers the shadows, but it has transformed — or maybe fulfilled — my life. You can google the most famous pairs, but I want to focus on my metaphorical entanglement which was both real and a theory concept.
"Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when a pair or group of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in a way such that the quantum state of each particle of .the pair or group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, including when the particles are separated by a large distance... Wikipedia
“The action or fact of entangling or being entangled. A complicated or compromising relationship or situation
an extensive barrier, typically made of interlaced barbed wire and stakes, erected to impede enemy soldiers or vehicles.
The once more common handwritten correspondences between individuals are now replaced by electronic transmissions that happen as quickly as pingpong. This particular exchange first came from a comment to someone else’s blog, then went to email and finally developed into sharing/alternating blog entries. Now it is over.
I’m reading Siegel’s book, “Mind”, and just came to where he admits he is Jewish-heritage/Unitarian-raised/university-employed. I groan. Kumbaya. May no evil cross this door. Hallmarkian lists of virtues. Strings of words that amount to bbb, if you need acronyms to keep order.
But Siegel’s advice still fits. His children asked him what was the meaning of life? His answer was “just keep going.” In spite of it all. This is the true spine of my correspondent’s life after one teenaged attempt to stop, which was foiled by those around him. Now he does the same for others.
All three of my sibs and I admitted to considering suicide but no one tried it to my knowledge, except myself long ago. But why? I think it was the attachment style: maybe I’ll keep going and maybe I won’t. No decision. Disorganized/ disoriented. Neither brother had a clear goal. I did, I just kept being knocked aside by circumstances, fallen on my butt with my head spinning. Again.
Siegel says that when he had a particularly successful intervention with someone, she said she “felt as though she were felt.” Not seen. Felt. Feeling was what I tried to understand at Div School, but didn’t. Kept going. This unexpected shared writing made me feel felt.
I did what I always do in any context: isolate something to research and report what is found out. The kicker with my powerful correspondent was that the needed research was on worse evil than I could ever have imagined. Neglect, abuse, starvation, disease, stigma, atrocity, and demonicaly twisting identity destruction. Boys staying alive by allowing themselves to be fucked, tortured, beaten, starved, defiled, mutilated, and demeaned for money. Boys staying alive by learning to control those demonic people, the earliest often being their parents. Some achieved a kind of gallantry.
I was surprised again by the great body (embodiment) of literature and theory as taboos fell away, thought reframed the obscene, and neuroscience detailed the created connectomes even in the public mind. I kept going.
The shared writing sources were physics, even as atomic power; the Indiana dunes; salmon (Siegel, too, thought a lot about salmon); sexwork; photography; electronics, pandemics, triumphs, images and metaphors, dogs, religion. Not the literary canon. He roamed the world: ”Indian” reservations, gay beaches in tropical places, Nazi death camps, Parisian catacombs, Irish fishing villages, abandoned Italian monasteries, Carolina barrier islands, tall-masted sailing ships on the Caribbean sea, and the railway across Russia to China. I looked at the photos but never copied them — only the writing so I could read pieces again and again. I tried to fit it all together, as Siegel recommends.
This work was more compelling than the published books. It was only on blogs and often deleted. I stretched my own work to try to keep up.
Sometimes I offended him and often I needed explanations when Google didn’t know everything and Wikipedia was just flat wrong. A lot remained mystery. But I kept going. So did he, despite pain and damage only survived with surgery, tabletops of medicine, constant monitoring. (Yes, I’m using Siegel as a distraction and cover for a person who has been attacked by the scurrilous and self-interested.)
By mistaking the intensity of my attachment as romantic, I finally destroyed the relationship. That is a rigidity, the wrong way to relate between two disorganized/disoriented persons. Siegel’s focus is not the myth of falling madly in love, but rather the provision of a secure family for children. He believes in plasticity as growth. "Entanglement" is in the index of the book five times.
I’m thankful for years of lively exchange, shocking stories -- images and ideas, parallels and differences. Our grandmothers both lived in SW Michigan on farms and we have the domestic part of that life in us as a sense of what a modest, orderly life can be like. But we also have shared the lives of people excluded and impoverished and have seen their value.
My correspondent knew much less about me because I hid and I wasn’t the point anyhow. Since ending the correspondence he has been able to see much more of me as I open up in blogs. Part of what he sees came from him anyway — a shared bitterness and boldness about what can happen. Both our families seemed irreproachable, admirable to outsiders. At my house my father had lots of nice books but behind the dirty clothes hamper, he kept his Police Gazette. My friend’s house . . . it’s his story.
Until I got to Browning in 1961, I walked through life assuming that I was doing the right thing. Ten years on the rez taught me there is no right thing. I didn’t tell the truth earlier. Because I grew up finding out about what had happened in the wars, I knew the dark side. I knew what war did and not just on the battlefield. Mostly to men — boys, really. And their sons. I just shut out the dark of what was close.
One can only survive. And witness, take notes, and testify. For this writer and I that was the shared ground of understanding. No fancy moralizing. No religious cant. Just stories, one after another, some true, some truer than actuality, an entrainment that finally reaches consilience. Maybe. At least vocabulary and principles.
When I got stories about him from some other source, he was indignant, but not as indignant as my family is now that they realize what I've found out. Nothing overtly lethal. Alcoholism, failure. But respectability can be so protected that it creates a darkness inviting penetration. So I do. Him, too. He’s younger. It’s a bit amazing that we’re still alive and writing. Just not to each other.
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