on my way to my mother's the other night i told her i believe that my father was meant to be a good and loving father and an artist. i believe that he was wired that way and that he was born into an environment that never let him survive fully. it bothers my mother when i talk this way; i don't know why. she makes comments very short and we kind of quarreled later on "you always want to talk about family and the past and yourself" she said "we think about other things" and i felt so indignant. indignant is what i built around myself to deal with her. to deal with the fact that i always feel stupid around her... less than, that my ideas are worthless. & i feed it. been feeding it all my life... i offer her this chance to kick me. i told her about an idea that came out of my dream and it died like a frostbitten bird that had just flown out of my mouth. i asked her do you understand? and she just said no without looking up from her magazine. and this idea felt worthless. what had a night before seemed to be made of pure lacy inspiration seemed obvious and hollow. i still hear her sometimes saying "if it could work that way, someone would already have done it." i am a collection of my ideas, each one forms a prosthetic bit of a body of a spirit that was crushed a long time ago, and she doesn't know that she's making little bits of me go dead. she just knows that she doesn't like what she doesn't want to hear. and i think last night it was also a little bit of revenge because of the sweet things i had said about my father. she still doesn't like him, she i think feels that everything i give to him is a little more i take away from her.
my father, i think, left the best arts of himself a long way away in a war. this horrible fear of feeling that he got in vietnam and from his family, he let that be the color of his life henceforth. he never showed. he got at least one gallery ready to give him a one-man, probably more, but he never once showed. i think nothing could have been more full of fear than my father, so he was never much of a father. he knew i was stronger than him, so he let me be and saved street kids in a mall in northern cal, unable to tell his own daughter to shut up and listen not knowing what to say if he did. i so regret the day i stood in that mall looking at everything and understanding nothing... wrapped up in indignation cause it was all i know to do when i didn't understand and i told him he was a failure a father. but that there was still time if he was willing to work to not be a failure as a man through his art. i always thought maybe if i believed harder in him this wouldn't end in tragedy. that i wouldn't be standing at the foot of my fathers life the same way i did at wounded knee, without reckoning, trying to swallow the whale, trying to understand human tragedy. trying to understand how the best part of a person can die and they can walk around without for 20, 40 years and raise children and pass them paradoxes to eat.
i sat in the shower that night and thought and thought. i thought about maus, and listening to the author trying to deal with what auschwitz left him for a father and i thought about the way life feels and the lesson i learned one night from tina, that we all feel the same things, that we all paint with the same colors, the same infinite capacity for every emotion, and i thought of the other book i'm reading and this extraordinary woman and that her voice was different from mine and my fathers and this author; that there was some color that she had never painted with and that was having your spirit crushed. the rest of us were rebuilt a little, and i thought about kennedy center. there's one day when they locked me up and did awful things to me and i tell the story a lot but there's thing about the story i don't tell. it ends with "when they carried me out of there i was ready to do or be anything at all they wanted as long as they wouldn't put me back in that place" and the indignation was gone. the truth is i say it and i know it's true, but i can't remember it. after a certain point that day spirals into a collage of memories and then i just shut down. i can remember very little of the rest of my time at the child study center. i know by fall i was back in public school. a real feather in the kennedy center's cap, i imagine. and maybe breaking me was good for me. since then i have slowly reconstructed myself from my own ideas and those around me. the raw of me is i think a bit gone, and i'll never have it back. i can feel so small and so helpless, like a very strong color could simply wash me out of existence.
i sat and cried like a child at the vietnam war memorial. i was so helpless there. i didn't know a single name on the wall. i felt like i had no right to feel like i did. i wanted to scratch my father's name in at the end and say yes he died in the war, he just kept twitching for 25 more years. i walked and mumbled and cried and cursed and made my way to the national monument and i kicked it. and i said i hate being american and my friend amity said "that's cause being american ain't shit" with such bitterness and seth shut her up and let me cry. and i thrashed in the grassed and nothing changed. eventually i got tired and they took me home. amity has painted in tragedy, seth has not. i have painted in tragedy, my family has painted in little else for generations. a quiet starving tragedy of sickness and souls going hungry.
i've so lost my point. i really think i had one...i think this was it: that watching this relationships between people, trying to keep moving after it's all over- this is so much more real that the story of tragedy itself. i see in it an old man who has forgotten almost all the other colors of life and paints with only a few because he is out of balance, he can't see anymore. and i can see where every color my father painted with was tinged with the color of fear, sometimes little else and how that killed him and cut him off from me. and i see a little though it is hard to look at (and people pour way too much adulation on me for even trying) how i paint with certain colors, how perhaps i have learned to limit my palette a bit to tints and moods that are no longer true. how we make life out of the clay of experience! and the big experiences, we keep making them over and over again no matter how worn they are, like we cant stop our hands from moving, and can't even after a while see the shapes we make that make us. how life is thrown out of balance, how it scales and a whole people can be thrown out of balance and only paint with a limited palette, and that never lasts. they conquer or are conquered and balance keeps trying to shift. i thought in the shower that consciousness is a good things, to see the shapes and colors we use and try to understand why we use them. perhaps, slowly we can learn to create a picture that doesn't possess us, as people or as an individual. but a little of me just feels that i am silly and obsessed with myself and the past and that everything i discover is obvious for everyone else.
for me it is a terribly hard thing to say 'i am a writer and a painter who works as a system administrator' because i don't believe any of those things. between those three i spend all of my time that isn't spent maintaining myself or being with other people or reading. but i am, because i give each time and energy and love and fear; right now i am not much of a stand up comic because i'm not *doing* it. yet i'm recognized more for that than any of those other things. recognition is a strange thing. it validates a little for those of us who have lost the ability to do it ourselves.
i still believe that i have nothing to say. i've watched pages and pages fly by the last few weeks and wish i would start writing. i feel this understanding of stringing words together come crystalline to me in a way i have never imagine, it is a thing i can see now, reach out and touch. i can see how to speak and be understood with the strong bits of my mind, like riding a wave, like i could see how to proceed in the internet business before i ran away. i see it like a thing outside of myself and i don't know where it came from. i see bad writing too, like i never have, clearly and where it went wrong and why. most of the time it hides where the author doesn't really understand the subject or the language. now my gobbledegook (when i don't understand) is really hard to see through, especially at work, but i can look at it and see where it is hollow.
i can see those that have loved me, trying so hard to reach in and pull some hidden untouched me out of me. i can see love looking at me with this pleading expression, saying "please let me know what i do to make it better, please, i don't understand" and hold me and try to swallow the whale without even knowing what it was. please forgive me that i don' know how to make it any better. if i did, i would have given it to my father from the first moment i saw him break in front of me as a child. we can only give one another compassion in those moments. compassion is the only saintly quality i think, i think it is at least half of the reason we live at all. perhaps compassion is the reason for pain, it's as good a one as any.