O Earth, my holy mother,
O sky, where sun and moon
Give light to all in turn,
You see how I am wronged!
Then the stage set falls down with a crash, and the people in the audience reenter the world of their own concerns, consoled because, no matter what their troubles, they’ve just seen someone whose fate is worse. Or consoled because they’re now free to go home and wail, having just seen someone who’s not afraid to keep lamenting, even when faced with an atmospheric showdown.
Job, on the other hand, shuts up at last when God unleashes the Leviathan and nature goes crazy. I like to think my own song oscillates between these two polarities of complaint: Bitch bitch. Tweet tweet.
Inside/Outside
A friend recently asked me: “Have you ever walked by a shop-window in a new hat you’ve just bought”—this was a man’s hat he was talking about, probably purchased from the haberdashery downtown that’s been in business thirty years despite the fact that I’ve never seen anyone go in or out, a shop patronized by ghosts only, ghosts plus my bald friend—“and you study yourself for a minute before you devilishly give the hat a tilt?”
“Oh no,” was my answer, “I never stop to look. My advice would be don’t ever stop to look.”
For a while I taught remedial English at a college attached to a Benedictine monastery. Though I didn’t understand how anyone could find happiness in monastic life (bad food, no sex), my religious colleagues inspired my envy for one reason: they could wear robes to work. Long black robes under which they wore jeans or old sweatpants or even their pajamas. In these garments they vanished the way the Star Trek Enterprise became invisible once the technology called the cloaking device was engaged.
Out on the streets, where the robes had the opposite effect and made them ultra-visible, they opted for the camouflage of jeans and sweaters. The only sign of their being monks would be the expensive sandals they wore year-round.
In college I had a friend named Tom who wore a similar black robe that his sister sewed for him because he’d taken the notion that if he wore a garment that almost completely covered him he could almost completely disappear. One afternoon, when he went walking to the outskirts of our small Canadian village, a ring of children gathered around him, as if they’d been swept up from the twilight itself. And even though he was a tall, imposing man, they started chanting, “Weirdo! Weirdo!” until he got scared and had to run. Of course, the robe also made him ultra-visible, though I’m not sure that that wasn’t what he’d intended. Young people generally don’t want to blend in.
This was the 1970s, a decade when we quoted Henry David Thoreau: Beware any enterprise that requires new clothes, which we took for a warning about the superficiality of the world. After collage I intended to head off to my own private Walden Pond, some remote place where I’d wear flannel or go naked, depending on the season. In those days I thought the obsession with self-presentation was a retrograde stage in human evolution, soon to pass. I fully expected that, by my middle age, the loan officer at the bank might be wearing a pair of farmer overalls.
(But no — he can have an earring and a well-groomed ponytail, but the overalls do not qualify as an adequate garment, not even on the dress-down Fridays.)
Now I see two flaws to my youthful thinking: my rags were themselves a fashion trend. I spent hours embroidering the patches on my jeans, and the sophistication of this needlework established a hierarchy of cool among my friends. Before I knew it, punk came into style, ripped clothes still the uniform, though you could no longer claim to be naïve about there being no artifice in your making of the image you presented to the world. People started paying a lot of money for old jeans, a status item. I stopped wearing them because I still wanted to present myself as anti-status, anti-money.
Flaw two: even the duck has breeding plumage. So there must be genuine biological imperatives that drive us to present ourselves in an attractive light, however I chastise my friends for choosing the beauties on the computer dating website. (When it comes to computer dating, I get most of my information from my wheelchair salesman, an actor whose head is covered with attractive blond tresses and whose palsied arm I never noticed until he showed me how his fingers spasmed when he tried to grip his pen.
“I’d rather kill myself than go back to dating,” I say.
He offers helpfully: “There are computer dating sites for people in wheelchairs.”
“That’s just it!” I say. “I’d kill myself if I had to date me.”)
I’ve read somewhere that a famous philosopher — Wittgenstein maybe — considered the objective self/subjective self conundrum, the inside view versus the outside one, for a brief while before concluding that the dilemma was immature and unsolvable.
My distaste for seeing my objective self — for having to have an objective self at all — preceded illness, so it’s not entirely a manifestation of my fear of becoming disabled. It first occurred back when I headed into my pubescence, when I took up the hems of my turquoise polyester culottes, and voilà: hot pants. I was feeling pretty good about myself for the brainstorm of this transformation, until a boy made fun of me as I walked the trail through the woods that led me home from school. Furthermore, he pointed out that my shoes were made of cardboard. This I’d never noticed; in fact, I was quite proud of my two-tone, blue-gray wingtips with the stacked heel. But the edge of a wing was curling back, and sure enough I saw it: cardboard.
The 1970s were a decade filled with calamities of self-presentation, as the dashing young Elvis collided into the fat old one in the karate suit. Prior to my adolescence, I knew only my subjective body, which knew the secret handholds in the bark of every local tree. The body that rode no-handed on the hand-me-down bicycle and did not see itself doing so: these memories occupy the slots in my brain that I associate most with happiness. By junior high, they were over. Right around the time when I began to menstruate, when I went off to YMCA camp for a month and sat bleeding on the shore of the lake for weeks. I gained an external idea of myself but lost confidence in my body as a dependable vehicle, whose purpose had nothing to do with reproduction but only transport from place to place.
This was what made me start hiking alone, in the suburban woodlots at first, where I could be all body, all subject — something not seen. A decade later I began to love walking into the vast landscapes of the West, where you can almost hear the whooshing as the land gets large, and the body dwindles to a matchstick that becomes your one survival tool.
In his backyard in Camden, New Jersey, a place he transformed into a wilderness that he called Timber Creek, Walt Whitman wrote: “There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent.” He was only in his late fifties, yet he’d become partially paralyzed, in spite of his cunningly orchestrated public persona as the vigorous avatar of America in its entirety. To reclaim this former self, he created a ritual in this, his old-ish age: first he stripped and covered himself in mud, then he rinsed his body and scrubbed it pink before rinsing it again. Then he performed what he called “vocalism” by singing and reciting poems before long bouts of wrestling naked with the trees. This rejuvenation through nature worked, sort of; at least it gave him enough oomph to stagger through a few more years as the bard of the New World.
It’s a common equation for poets to make, from nudity to purity. Billy Collins lampooned this belief in a poem that recounts the rituals one of his narrators goes through before sitting down to write. First the tea is made and then the clothes come off, and then: