Reflections on January 17, 2003I just don't want to forget. Sometimes when I realize that I haven't written in my journal for days at a time and that when I have, it's just been the same stupid thing over and over again ("I'm not satisfied with my job; I feel very alone; I wonder what will happen in the future"), I feel a pang of guilt. Life comes to me in little packets, according to the weather and the people I'm around. Every night when I'm saying evening prayer, I remember my days at Olivet, when I would go to the library before or after dinner, sit right in front of the German philosophy section, and mouth the words, "He has shown the strength of his arm; he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly." Walled in by the study partitions on the ultra-quiet floor, with my back turned to Hegel and Heidegger, occasionally glancing up at the titles on pornography and its deleterious effects, hoping none of my friends would be around to see me, I mouthed the words to the psalms, the scripture reading, the canticle of Mary, for no reason at all. I pulled out the bookmarks that I had torn from corners of rejection letters to graduate schools, I opened to the right pages, I flipped back and forth, I made the sign of the cross at appropriate junctures. No one had told me I should do this. It was very quiet -- people at Olivet don't do a lot of studying. I used to walk back and forth between Burke and University Place upward of four times a day, a long walk along the fence topped with barbed wire that separated Olivet from the Catholic school next door. Andy and I once climbed onto the roof of the Catholic school, using the bike rack as a makeshift ladder. It was perhaps the only time I had used anything as a makeshift anything else, so it sticks out in my mind. It was in the spring, when there was homework, but not enough homework to make it worth missing out on time outside. We climbed back down quickly -- we were in plain view of everyone in the city and didn't have anything to smoke. Anti-climax is a prominent theme in my life. I put in massive effort over the course of months, if not years, so that I can get nothing. My freshman year, I tracked down everything to which T. S. Eliot referred in The Waste Land, read most of it, read virtually every article I could find in Olivet's library, developed an astonishing familiarity with the circumstances surrounding its composition and with its critical reception, and wrote a strongly argued paper that got it wrong on every point that mattered. I got an A-minus because I inadvertantly plagiarized a critic who came to almost the same conclusions as I did. I felt I had independently discovered the same thoughts -- in other words, I missed the entire point of the citation regime. Through that experience, I came to understand literature as a puzzle that could be worked out with sufficient effort, so that by my senior year, I was tired of it. I moved into philosophy instead -- harder puzzles somehow make it seem more worth it. I want to skip the many, many parallel stories about girls, because as I am showing more and more, I am stuck on my complaints, on the abstractions. I can imitate someone appreciating nature, talking about the peculiar quality of the light at a Saturday evening mass toward the end of the school year, the beauty of a woman I've convinced myself I love but will do nothing to let her know about it, the smell of her hair, that shirt she would always wear, the day we played board games for so long and she just gave up on modesty, the ambiguous signs that she taught me how to read negatively -- I move instinctively to the abstraction. I look up at the stars, and all I want to do is talk about them and point out constellations and joke about what they were thinking when they named them and generally ruin the entire thing by saying too much, the "too much" that somehow always comes out as "too little." I tell her I love her too many times, in too many ways, I show her by my endless devotion, my willingness to drop everything in order to study with her, to ditch my friends on a Friday night on the off-chance of spending an hour with her -- I send her signal after signal after signal, I let her know that her body overwhelms me with its beauty so that I am quite literally in pain, and I stick around for her little jabs, her cutting remarks, her incidental comments that are aimed precisely at my hope. She keeps me weak. She knows what she's doing, even if she doesn't know she knows, and she gets what she wants, a devoted friend, the one person who seems to love her unconditionally, the one person who asks nothing of her, the one person who has finally earned her love by never asking for it in so many words. I failed. I failed to speak the word that would make it real. I don't even know how to regret this, but I've wasted years of my life, alone. But I never could get rid of her. Even when it was a foregone conclusion and I finally decided the misery was not worth it, driving her home after an evening of tension, I finally said that I had put in my time, that it hurt too much, and that I needed not to see her again unless it was going to another level. She didn't believe me, but I cried, probably not for the first time in front of her. She got everything out of me. I couldn't shake her -- within weeks, it was as though nothing had happened. She took the initiative long enough to get me hooked again so that I could take the initiative. Her feigned regret when she couldn't talk long. Those phone calls that cost so much money on a phone card I got because I thought I could talk to her. Nothing had happened. She had it right. She always won. She won't read this. She won't know it's for her. Again, I've said it all except for the one thing that matters. I've earned something whose essence is that it cannot be earned. "I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter." "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." Eliot was right. I've heard out the naysayers who think it's garbage, I've searched my soul for reasons to hate myself for putting myself through such a hopeless pursuit on a poem that no one even likes, that's not even worth it -- but it is worth it to me. I do understand, now that it's too late. I know what I should have done -- but whatever else this is, my life was my choice. The problem is clearly not that I will forget, but that I will never get away, that I will never get past those painful, daily, hourly moments when I remember a past misstep and start reciting the act of contrition. Standing in front of the register too long putting my money back in my wallet, walking back and forth too many times, asking the wrong question in the wrong words that are too quiet to hear anyway, wearing the wrong thing, never choosing for real, never bearing up bravely under the consequences -- this, for me, is sin, the kind of sin that I can't tell a priest about. I told a priest at Oxford that I never felt like I was getting it all out, and he misunderstood me. I should have said, "I've been killing myself slowly for years now, Father. I've done the wrong thing in every instance. Even when I joined the one holy catholic and apostolic church, Father, even when I got that right, I forgot I was being baptized and spit water out of my mouth when I came up, just like in grandma's swimming pool. Don't you see that I'm dying at my own hand, Father?" But isn't that the unforgivable sin? "We who are living are now dying I just want to forget -- better, I just want to want to forget. But the circle has been drawn, the circle in which my life will travel forever, saying excessively little, missing the point, coming out with a text as a consolation prize. "O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee." |