“…something that wants to rise and shake itself free” (William Carlos Williams)
I had a fairly disconcerting experience when I was a 9th grade spectator at our school’s varsity basketball game. It was a rural school, Kindergarten through 12th in the same building. Maybe 30 kids per grade, so we knew pretty much everyone, or so I thought. But as I was watching the game, one of the players, maybe two years old than myself, a member of our church, our mothers were friends, became instantly unrecognizable.
I lost the flow of the game and became hypnotically focused on this one person. I tried to juggle the knowledge of his “familiarity” with his sudden alien strangeness. His bearing no longer conformed to anyone recognizable. But in a deeper sense, I was noticing him for the first time. Noticing the discrepancy between the mask of confidence he was trying to wear (the identity he was trying to present) and the unfamiliar reality of himself.
And the alien feeling spread to the entire gymnasium. My hometown crowd, all familiar faces, looked like they were all struggling with masks. It was as if the known character of each person was peeling from their bodies, revealing a routine pretense, which was their public persona, which also revealed something of the real human being struggling with fear and doubt.
I also seemed alien. I had never noticed how herky jerky I behaved. I tried to snap out of this alternate reality, but it stuck around for a long half-hour and then a milder version never fully dissipated the rest of my life. I became even more self-conscious, more herky-jerky, and felt more like a fraud who didn’t know how to stop being a fraud.
But at the same time – and this is far more important – the effect was not one of haughty disdain for myself or others, but an unprecedented feeling of sorrow for the real human beings I’d never noticed before. Beneath the smiles and cheers they looked sad or tired.
Sheer forgetfulness may have been the key accident opening this glimpse into more subtle realities simmering beneath the surface presentation; beneath the scripts that often trap us into being people we weren’t meant to be. Where familiarity once was, now bewildered human forms could be discerned. The vague outline of a soul writhing in a spider’s web or a cocoon, depending on whether they would emerge or not.
A while back I discovered a part of town I hadn’t known. This was odd because I live in a small city. We’re surrounded by farmer’s fields, they press upon the city walls. Farms and farms, their fumes invade every spring and summer, heralded by legions of pillaging flies, forcing our retreat block by block, week by week, until we find ourselves by August or September in the last green oasis for hundreds of pesticide-ravaged miles, which is the city park, a tangle of briars and downed trees, a green confusion which is never easy to find, perhaps never even in the same place.
I hesitated to say anything about my discovery for months, because I was afraid that the news would make me and everyone else who grew up here look stupid, misplacing, for god’s sake, an entire neighborhood.
Of course, my aunt ignored the gist of what I told her to resume arguing that we’ve not only lived here all our lives, but for all eternity. She repeated the argument daily, and said she was condemned to repeat it the next day, too. She would say time is a loop of dramas, sitcoms, tragedies, and other forms of farce, one following the other, the same characters, the same punch lines, but you’d need to have a perspective like hers, spanning billions of years, to notice that you’ve played these roles before. The theory alone was good enough to make my aunt feel trapped in a giant hamster wheel, panting for air. That was her preferred state of mind, anyways, favoring the stability of a known horror over any unsuspected risk, no matter how small, which is why the deep silos of her eyes glowed bloodshot red, and why she tirelessly scanned the world for confirmation of her worst fears, so she could blow them out of all proportion, and feel moderately relieved when her worry proved exaggerated.
It was a preemptive claustrophobia that rebounded in a momentary illusion of spaciousness.Read More »
Negative Geography 