Inappropriate Behavior, Part Two: Poor Devils

Ever dance with the Devil in the pale moonlight?

I have not, though I admit to being more than a bit intrigued by the idea.  But I have seen many of my neighbors engaged in just such an exercise in full daylight, day after day after day.

If I could be the Tsar of the English Language, I would expand the definition of the word “spirits” in its reference to distilled alcohol or other volatile liquors.  I would have this definition include all manner of intoxicating substances: cocaine, heroin, barbiturates, anti-depressants, etc.  For just as I know by personal experience that there is a devil in rum, so I see on every block of the Tenderloin men and women locked in forms of physical struggle -- or perhaps in dances of one kind or another -- with creatures, whether partners or antagonists, that are invisible to me.

This morning I saw a man standing on the corner of Hyde and Eddy Streets, with his knees bent in a partial squat; with his torso thrown forward horizontally, so that if his legs had been straight he would have formed a perfect right angle; and with his arms bent and flung akimbo.  He was dressed in dull grays and blues, grime covering all of his clothes.  His dirty hair hung forward over his face.  I would have guessed him to be in this thirties, but it is folly to guess the age of those who are leading lives as hard as so many my neighbors' are.

His pose was so imbalanced and so precarious that it must have required tremendous effort and muscular strength to hold it without falling over.  What is more, he stood on the very edge of the sidewalk, at the corner, where had he stepped into the street, he would have been in the crosswalk, and had he fallen, his head would have been in the center of the curb lane.  But in all the time that he was in my field of vision, about five minutes, I did not see him move a muscle.  I imagined that his legs, back, and arms, must have been screaming in silent pain inside his mind, but he was outwardly as still and silent as stone.

As I passed him I heard a rough noise from the street and looked up Eddy toward Larkin to see a woman stumbling across the street in long, irregular, broken strides.  A plastic container of food had just hit the pavement in the middle of the street, evidently having slipped from her hands.  Her arms were flailing on either side of her in order to stabilize her body as each of her steps twisted her, first right and then left, at least as much as it propelled her forward.  She sounded disappointed, even hurt, and a little angry as she spoke loudly to someone or something near her.  But her interlocutor clearly belonged only to her ken and remained unseen by me.

How many dimensions or realities, how many parallel universes, exist alongside mine in the six-block square that is the “TL”?  I see only my reality, but I see my neighbors reacting to the presences in theirs.

This evening, I saw a man who had a large pile of things massed up against the Leavenworth side of the YMCA, mid-block between Golden Gate and Turk.  As I approached, he (oblivious to my presence, I am sure) scattered a dozen or so sheets of white paper along the street-side edge of the sidewalk.  He dropped them with a wild gesture and then went on waving his hands at them while mumbling what seemed to be instructions.  It looked as though he wanted them to stay where he had placed them.  Even now I half-wonder whether he held a magic wand as he worked at this chore.

The papers, like obedient pets, settled to the ground and did not stir.  The man then wheeled around and careened toward the rest of his possessions, drawing from them what appeared to be a rope with two balls attached, one at either end (a bolo, I believe).  Holding the balls in his left hand and folding the rope in half over his right wrist, he held the double line of rope taut and straight, and pushed against the air with it, in the direction of the papers, as he stepped first toward them and then back, shifting from side to side, performing what I took to be the erection of a barrier, a kind of spirit-fence, to keep the papers away from the rest of his worldly goods.  He seemed to have made a corral of sorts for the white sheets of loose paper, keeping them easily at hand should he need them, while simultaneously keeping them from causing any mischief among the rest of his subjects.

Having passed him, I did not look back to see what other enchanted chores he, like a sorcerer’s apprentice, performed.  Besides, I had dozens more folks to weave my way through while they darted or slid back and forth across my path as I walked home, all of them doing business or battle with vigorous intent.

Today, you see, was the first of the month

*

And a propos of the first, I found a shiny new quarter in the street as I walked to the library this afternoon.  (See "Pennies From Heaven" )  I am getting to know these streets well.

*

For those of you who wonder what is wrong with the streetizens whom I have described above, I can answer in a single word:  poverty.  While it is true that not all people who are afflicted with poverty turn to drugs for relief, it is also true that using drugs is an obviously effective response to the symptoms of poverty, especially within a dominate culture that turns to drugs for relief from every kind of stress or sorrow naturally encountered in the course of human endeavor.  (See "An Excess of Black Bile")  Their choice to use drugs is not very different from my choice to eat a diet high in fat and sugars.  (See "A Difficult Day or Two" )  I eat burgers and donuts because they are less expensive and more effective in relieving poverty’s symptoms (stomach cramps, sleeplessness) than a healthier diet would be.

*

Sullivan’s Travels, written and directed by Preston Sturgis, tells the story of a movie director who wants to make a film about poverty during the Great Depression.  To prepare for this task he decides to dress in dirty and worn-out clothes (supplied by the studio’s costume department) and, taking no money with him, to wander the country, traveling with hobos and living among the homeless.

Within the first few minutes of the film, Sullivan’s butler takes the servant’s greatest risk:  he reprimands his master.  His speech, delivered with sincerity and conviction in a close-up shot of the butler looking straight out of the screen at us, gives me chills -- to be honest, brings me to tears -- every time I watch it.

[Like Godfrey, the “Forgotten Man” in My Man Godfrey, this is a servant who has clearly had a first-class education, most probably a gentleman who has fallen on hard times:  notice how he uses the term “positive” in the philosophical sense of a thing that exists in and of itself (as opposed to a “negative” which is a thing not existing independently but only as the absence of another thing.)]

Sullivan has just explained his intention of making a film about poverty.

Butler: The poor know all about poverty and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous.

Sullivan: But I'm doing it for the poor. Don't you understand?

Butler: I doubt if they would appreciate it, sir. They rather resent the invasion of their privacy. I believe quite properly, sir.

Also, such excursions can be extremely dangerous, sir. I worked for a gentleman once, who likewise, with two friends, accoutered themselves, as you have, sir, and then went out for a lark. They have not been heard from since.

You see, sir, rich people and theorists, who are usually rich people, think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches, as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn't, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned.

Sullivan: Well, you seem to have made quite a study of it.

Butler: Quite unwillingly, sir. Will that be all, sir?

The Second of the Paradoxes: Willing Servitude and Sobriety Addicts

[Continued from “The Age of Responsibility”]

Consider the progress of an alcoholic or an addict who “chooses” sobriety.  It is common knowledge that no one can persuade, cajole, manipulate, or force another person to make this change in his or her behavior.  The change must come from “within” the individual, but is it a decision?  Is the change effected by a “free will”?

The hallmark of this change is an experience called “hitting bottom”.  The First Step in Alcoholics Anonymous (and other Twelve Step programs) puts it this way:  “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.”

Almost 350 years ago, John Bunyan described the same experience (more vividly, I think) in his Pilgrim’s Progress:

“Now I saw in my dream that, just as they had ended this talk, they drew near to a very miry slough that was in the midst of the plain; and they being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was "Despond." Here, therefore, they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt; and CHRISTIAN, because of the burden that was on his back, began to sink in the mire. . . .

“This miry slough is such a place as cannot be mended: it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run; and therefore it is called the Slough of Despond. For still, as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there arises in his soul many fears and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place: and this is the reason of the badness of this ground.”

Both ways of talking about the experience continue alike as well.  The Second and Third Steps say that we “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” and that we then “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”  Bunyan’s Christian is, of course, on the same path to redemption through divine grace.

Is it not remarkable that the most widely followed and most widely recommended “cure” for addiction and the most ardently preached means of “salvation” from sin have as their foundation the surrender of personal responsibility and the renunciation of individual will?

Alcoholics and addicts are first condemned for lacking “will power” and then lauded for surrendering their will.  They are derided for having no “self-control” and subsequently praised when they give up self-control.  Have the sober merely exchanged an addiction to chemicals for an addiction to meetings and sponsors and The Big Book?  Is not salvation described as obedience to God?  Do they -- do we -- does anyone -- have choice?

Two thousand years of Christian theology come down on the side of the impotence of our apparently free will:  we are saved not by our works but by divine grace alone.  The allocation of grace itself is itself mysterious:  why do some sinners descend into madness, disease, and death while others (the Elect) find forgiveness and salvation?  Why do some addicts hit bottom and go into recovery while others waste away physically, morally, and emotionally?

*

I remember that when I quit my job teaching at a small liberal-arts college in upstate New York to move to Manhattan with no idea what I was going to do next, a friend praised me for my strength and willingness to take risks.  (It was the early 1980s and Reagan’s America was in love with entrepreneurs and risk-takers.)  Her remark caught me up short.  I had never thought of myself as taking a risk.

I told her for me the biggest risk would be that I might wake up there, in Schenectady, and find myself to be 80 and to have never seen world or lived the life of my times.

Although I had lived through a few months of saying that I was considering leaving academics in order to move to Manhattan and live a different life, I have to admit that I knew all along that I would move.  Once I saw the possibility of that change, I knew that it was inevitable.  The apparent process of making a decision consisted of talking to myself and to others about something that would happen, that had already happened, as if it might or might not.  I believed that this bit of a masquerade was necessary because leaving academics and moving to New York City to deserve a thoughtful process.  [Remember Nietzsche’s point that effects precede causes?]

If I am honest, I have to say that I believe the same to be true of all the momentous apparent “decisions” in my life.  I have written before about having no choice about being gay.  (No one is ever raised to be gay and certainly no one of my generation would have chosen so troubled a life if it were a matter of choice.)  And although one may say that one has chosen to marry this or that person, no one can honestly say that they chose to fall in love with someone in particular.

The decision-making process goes on until it stops, and in its place is a decision, a firmly established state of affairs, one that usually feels inevitable or, as we say, “right.“  Haven’t the major facts of your life, such as what work you do, whom you live with or marry, whether you have children, whether you get along with your parents and siblings, what politics and religion you espouse -- have not all of these been shaped by your love for this or that subject or activity (in the case of work), your love for a certain place or way of life, or your love for certain groups or for certain individuals?  Were these choices or the logical consequences of passions and innate needs which we did not choose?

*

Our lives are the walking of a labyrinth.  At each juncture, each turning of a corner, we can go only one way or the other.  We cannot split ourselves into two beings, one of which goes right and the other left.  And we certainly cannot see where whichever turn we take will eventually lead us.*

We might imagine that we could take one as easily as the other.  We might imagine that the sun revolves around the earth, too.

It looks that way, doesn’t it? 

*

I am not here to argue theology.

I am here to show you the world in which I live, the world of the least among us in this wealthiest of nations.

And I am here to chastise you for the judgments you pass, both in word and in deed, against my brothers and sisters every time you refuse them help because they are addicts or unemployed or enraged by their own suffering.

Get out of your cars and walk these streets.  Look into the faces of your fellow human beings and know these things:

Everyone out here is doing their best.  No one has chosen poverty or addiction or illness, whether physical or mental.

Whatever way it is that each of us is making it through the day and -- more frighteningly -- through the night -- the way is valid.  No one gets to be any better than anyone else.  Whatever you have and whatever you lack, it is not your strength or your virtue or your weakness or your vice that earned you your fate. Furthermore, all that you possess might be gone -- in fact will be gone - tomorrow, through no particular fault of your own.

The first shall be last, and the last shall be first, remember?

Now there is a paradox.

*

*A note for poetry lovers:  Robert Frost, in “The Road Not Taken”, imagines one of those moments in the labyrinth:

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

I love this poem for many reasons, including both Emily Dickenson and Dante Alighieri, but cite it here for one in particular: Frost says that he took one road, not that he chose it.  Then in the course of apparently giving reasons for his fate, as if it had been a choice, he completely undercuts each one.]

The Age of Responsibility

We live in the Age of Responsibility.  We belittle those who “play the victim.”  We believe in “tough love.”  Senators argue against funding for Food Stamps by asserting that such programs create “a dependency class.”  The rich have earned their riches.  The poor would not be poor if they worked harder.  Everyone gets what they deserve.  We make our own reality.  [See “Deserts”]

*

After being released from Bruno, I was astonished and angered over and over again by the way people responded to my troubles.

I told people how completely blind-sided I had been by my arrest at work.  I had done nothing but avoid MRM, while he had continually violated our mutual restraining orders by stalking me, emailing me, telephoning me, and even by approaching me on the street.  I had complained to the police department about MRM’s hundreds of violations, reporting to them everything he did to harass me, yet I was the one arrested.  Furthermore, I was arrested on a criminal charge of domestic violence on the basis of nothing but MRM‘s unsubstantiated allegations.  (After all, there could be no other witnesses to something that didn’t happen.)

MRM had filed a false police report (alleging that I had approached him in a park and hit him) in order to manipulate the police into doing his bidding, and thereby to ruin my life.  And he succeeded:  the arrest cost me my job, causing me real hardship.  While homelessness was nothing new, homelessness without an income to buy food, occasional shelter, transportation, and the like was both new and very difficult.

When I told people that this is what had happened, they seemed disinterested.  Not one said that the situation was shocking and that the behavior of both MRM and the police was unjust.  Instead, they would ask me what I had done to cause my current situation.  They would advise me in patronizing and self-righteous tones to focus on the lessons to be learned from these events, namely, to see how I had “created” or at least allowed these things to happen to me.

I felt like someone trapped in a Hitchcockian nightmare.  Why was I suddenly a suspect?  [“The police don’t just arrest people who haven’t done anything” -- that convenient lie.  Again, see “Deserts.”]  I wanted sympathy.  I wanted some acknowledgement that MRM’s actions had been both base and unpredictable.  I wanted comfort.  What I received was admonishment, suspicion, rebuke, and the clear implication that if I was not in fact guilty of some crime, then at least I was guilty of “playing the victim.”

This attitude left me speechless.  The first couple of times I  heard these sentiments I protested but incoherently, sputtering like a frustrated cartoon character.  I wanted people to understand the devious, dishonest, and shameful machinations to which MRM had sunk in his efforts to make me miserable.  I wanted people to see him for who he was and to understand that his behavior was so below any decent standards that of course I had been completely unprepared to defend myself.  But I could not seem to make this case clearly enough, because I found myself hearing the same question again and again:  what had I done to cause the situation in which I found myself?

I soon realized that the people to whom I was talking simply did not care about me or my plight.  They did not want to hear my story and so responded with this rhetoric, which seemed concerned, seemed right-minded and responsible, but was designed to stop me from talking, allowing people to avoid having to sympathize or -- worse -- to do something.  I quickly learned to listen politely to their nostrums and add them to the list of people in whose lives I did not matter.  They in turn ceased to matter in mine.  I realize now that this too was a wound that MRM had intentionally inflicted on me.

It was as if I suddenly found myself on the other side of a wall beyond which people’s empathy would not extend.  I might understand such a reaction if I had for years explained my misfortunes as resulting from the plotting or negligence or deliberate malice of others, i.e., if I had habitually portrayed myself as victimized.  But I have almost never thought of or spoken of myself that way.  Ironically enough, MRM does complain of being victimized constantly, in every venue of his life.

But before I go any further, let me here declare that I have learned a number of lessons from my experience.  I do recognize that my own behavior, especially my failure to take strong action to rid myself of MRM early on, contributed to my troubles.  I failed to act on The First of Dasman’s Laws of Human Being:  “Everyone always knows exactly what is going on.”  I knew that MRM was a cad, but when I watched his crude attempts to lash out at others, I saw only the way everything he did only demonstrated to the world what a petty, mean-spirited, and unintelligent man he was.  I failed to realize that he would eventually use these same tactics to try to hurt me.

Here is a summary of my failures:

1.  I trusted someone untrustworthy.

2.  I thought that I could handle any contretemps that a bad relationship might entail.

3.  I thought that in a few months of hunting for a job -- any job -- I would eventually find one.

4.  I did not imagine that well-educated and intelligent people of my milieu would turn their domestic problems into drama played out in the street, much less call the police to take away their (supposed) loved-one instead of talking out their difficulties like adults.

5.  I was vengeful.  When I was down to my last few dollars and realized that despite all his promises MRM would never pay his share of anything, let alone support me for a few months as I had supported him, I resolved to force him to take care of me.  The result was our move to his cousin’s house where his cousin, RA, provided for us.

In short, I failed to be sufficiently suspicious; I was over-confident about my ability to find a job when I needed one; and I suffered a failure of the imagination, being blind to the depths of senseless wickedness people can sink.

Note:  This self-awareness is subject to the Second of Dasman’s Laws of Human Being:  We are each the least qualified observers of ourselves: everyone else sees us more clearly than we ever can.

*

In making these observations, however, I am not “taking responsibility” in the way people want me to.  So I have to wonder what “personal responsibility” is. 

A truly strong concept of individual responsibility, the idea that “you create your own reality,” while currently popular among the comfortable classes, is absurd.  My sister’s three-year old son died suddenly while playing in the yard with his friends.  The coroner said simply that he had no idea what had happened.  The child’s brain was swollen beyond any hemorrhaging or stroke that he had seen.  If anyone tries to tell me that my sister created this loss, this unspeakable grief, and must bear responsibility for it as part of her reality, I will tear out their eyes.

And a weaker version of the concept doesn’t really say much.  In this ordinary sense, responsibility is diffused.  We act within the constraints of, and in reaction to, a world that is given to and not made by us.  In such a world, can the individual really be held fully responsible for her plight or success?  After all, the events I suffered were shaped by MRM.  He had the upper hand because he took it, striking first and quite effectively.

So we arrive at a larger and deeper question:  to what extent do we control our lives (if at all)?  Is the doctrine of Free Will no more valid that the Ptolemaic view of the universe?

[To be continued . . . .]

The First of the Paradoxes: Traveling Light, Part Three

I have said before that I am always excited, happily so, when I find myself in the presence of a paradox, because it means that I am approaching truth.

[Dear Truth -- such a strange figure, isn’t she?  Elusive and, when available, so often unpleasant, yet she remains for us the beloved, the one true love, doesn’t she?]

The last thing MRM said to me, as I was cleaning the kitchen floor on my hands and knees after our spat over the turkey, was “You’re going to jail -- and you’re going to have a record!”  He was trembling with fury, shouting at me while he dialed 911 on his mobile.

And all I’d done (I say disingenuously) was agree with him a short time earlier, when he had said, “You don’t really love me!” in the petulant tone of a manipulative child working his parents.  I almost responded as I had many times by denying his statement and affirming my affection for him.  But this time I caught myself as I began to respond.  I felt the impulse to argue that I did indeed love him, primarily as a knee-jerk reaction to being bullied in that way.  But instead of acting on that impulse, I took a breath and said, “You’re right.  I don’t love you.  In fact, I despise you.”

Those words sent him running downstairs, where he stayed long enough to strategize, I guess, and to scratch the back of his neck so that he could tell the police that I had attacked him physically.  He wanted me to suffer the worst thing that had ever happened to him, which was being arrested (in his case for dealing methamphetamine in Los Angeles).  Having a record was continuing to cause problems for him 10 years later, especially as he tried to find work.  Being the son of a cop and having exploited the domestic violence laws many times in the previous ten to fifteen years, he knew what he had to say to guarantee my arrest.  All he had to do was to allege physical violence and to say that he was afraid of me.

I remember that as one officer led me, in cuffs, to the squad car, we passed MRM, who was standing with another officer in front of the house.  I looked hard at MRM and said the only thing I could think to say.  In my most sarcastic tone I said, “Thank you.”

Though I meant the remark sarcastically, I realize now that I might as well have been completely sincere.  For over a year, I had been living with MRM and his alcoholic cousin, RA, a psycho-therapist specializing in Post Traumatic Stress who drank himself to sleep every night and rolled out of bed just 15 minutes before he had to meet his first client of the day in the downstairs office.  They treated me as their house-slave.  I did all the cooking and cleaning, cheerfully shopped and gardened and ran errands for them both, washed and ironed clothes, etc. without receiving a penny in wages.  In fact, I paid rent and contributed to other household expenses, even covering MRM’s portion when he spent his earnings on drugs and who knows what else.  The only time I was paid was when RA gave me $50 to take his bi-annual exams to re-certify as a therapist.  (Ironically enough, one of the fields I tested in for him was Professional Ethics.  I scored 100 on all three tests.)

I had also been working in a gift shop for months, hoping to save enough to cover first and last months rent, security deposit and whatever other moving expenses I would incur by leaving.  MRM consistently took any money I tried to save from me, leaving me constantly frustrated and desperate to find a way out.  The one thing I did not consider was walking out the door and taking up life on the street, homeless, in order to escape the abusive pair.

In a sense, life on the streets was an imaginary world that I could not imagine.  As if the life of the unhoused were an alternative reality very like my own but in some other dimension, I could see no gateway, no passage between worlds, that could allow me to step out of one and into the other.

I remember my arrest and the ensuing days as dream-like, the kind of experience you cannot believe you are having.  Survivors of natural disasters or shipwrecks know what I mean.  Many people feel the same way about September 11 of 2001:  the real world became unreal, as if the fabric of that in which we live had been rent and some other place was revealed behind it.

You might say that I, like Alice before me, fell down a rabbit-hole and landed in another world.  I had remained a prisoner because I did not think I would know how to live without the furniture (both literal and figurative) of the life into which I had been born.  But when MRM took from me everything I had been sacrificing my freedom, my dignity, and my very self to hold onto, I discovered that I did not need any of it.  I could stand on the beach in the midst of the storm, without shelter or support, and the waves broke over me.  I did not break.

Fear of losing the trappings of the life I knew had imprisoned me and enslaved me to my abuser, and when he meant utterly to ruin me by wresting those things from me and tossing me out into the street, all he did was set me free to be myself truly, perhaps for the first time in my life.

What you call your possessions possess you.

Our Minds Are Not Our Own (Part One)

I have once again fallen behind in my attempt to post daily -- or at least on most days.  Again, I apologize.

This past week presented two obstacles, one the lack of an internet connection at home, and the other a series of events that had me running about the East Bay as well as The City.  Details below.

One of my day-long adventures last week was getting together with my friend JVD.  We have known each other since we were four years old, but I had not seen or spoken to him for ten or fifteen years.

We first reconnected when my phone rang a few weeks back, and I answered it to hear him say, “This is JVD.”

“J!” I said, “how are you?”

“I don‘t know,” he said.  “I‘m sixty!”

We both burst into laughter, and then began trying to find a time when we could get together.  We had between ten and fifteen years of living to catch each other up on. 
The time finally came last Wednesday, the 7th of August.

I left home early that morning and rode BART to the Lafayette station, where I was met by JVD.  One of my purposes in starting this blog was to be able to tell friends with whom I have not been in touch in recent years the complicated story of how I got from where I used to live to where I live now.  JVD had been reading my blog in the weeks since that first telephone call, and the blog had served my purpose.  We were able to dive right into the nitty-gritty.

We had lunch at a pizzeria in Walnut Creek, the town in which we grew up, and then spent the afternoon driving to the top of Mount Diablo.  From that peak one can see more of the earth’s surface than from any other spot on the planet except one, Mount Kilimanjaro.  We looked out over the rivers, the delta, the bay, and the Pacific Ocean, picking out landmarks and spotting the places where we live and have lived.  The ground on which we stood dropped off so suddenly that we seemed to be suspended in air, hovering over the landscape of our lives.

Because the mountain was formed -- is being formed -- by the collision of the North American and Pacific plates, the rocks get older and older as you climb to the summit.  There the most ancient strata of what was once the ocean’s floor are being exposed by the constant scrubbing of wind and rain.  Even a casual glance at these stones reveals hundreds of different organisms, from what seem familiar clam shells to oddly shaped, jointed exoskeletons that I could not begin to identify or describe.

The fossils provide a kind of metaphor for something I noticed hours earlier, when I first arrived at the BART station in Lafayette.  As I stepped off the train and made my way down the stairs from the elevated track, a great wave of memories, with all their attendant emotions, broke over me.

For twelve years after my father died, I spent every Thursday with my mother.  For most of those years, I traveled from Oakland, and then San Francisco, where I lived, to Lafayette, where my mother would pick me up in her big gold Mercedes Benz and take me home -- to her home, that is, because she and my father had moved out of the house in which I grew up within a few years after I, the last child, had gone out on my own.

What hit me most forcefully this last week was that I had not thought of those arrivals -- of waiting by the parking lot for my mother, then watching her car appear, then opening the door and easing myself into the leather seats -- even though I had thought of the Lafayette station and even imagined it in all its physical reality, its shapes and colors, its place,  the weight of its materials, etc.

My memories were not attached to my thoughts or ideas or feelings.  Rather my memories resided in the landscape, in the steel and concrete structures of that station, and the emotions aroused by those memories -- grief, affection, melancholy, gratitude -- were attendant not on any mental processes in my brain but on my contact with that particular physical location.  Memories reside in the physical world around us -- in landscapes, in objects, in sounds, in food and drink -- not in our heads.

How much of the rest of our thinking is produced not by our brains, and not by some invisible “mind” that lives as a ghost in the machinery of our bodies, but by the world, including the people, around us?
 

I can no longer believe that our thoughts and perceptions reside “inside” us somehow, as if consciousness were hidden inside our skulls, irredeemably sealed off from any direct contact with other minds, each of which is itself presumed to be similarly isolated with its cranium.  Since I expect that my refutation of this Cartesian model will take many months, if not years, to complete, I beg your indulgence as I begin slowly to explore this idea in this first installment.

*

What about the rest of my week?  On Tuesday, the day before my “mountaintop experience” I traveled to Berkeley, where I took various steps toward finding a job at the University.  I also had lunch with my friend MP, the poet whom I have previously mentioned in these posts.  And on Thursday I received a list of documents that I had to get together and forms I had to complete because I have a chance at getting more permanent housing, dependent on a meeting tomorrow afternoon.

Then Friday.  I confess that I accomplished nothing on Friday or Saturday, when I should have been writing all day both days.

Friday was the first anniversary of my second arrest, the serious one, the one which cost me my job, which arose from charges based on MRM’s blatant lies, enshrined in a completely false police report, and which has yet to come to trial.  I had not thought much about it, but when I saw the date on Friday morning, “9 August”, I slipped down a rabbit-hole into memories of arrest, incarceration, and the paralysis of depression stirred by hopeless anger at injustice -- injustice that is routinely, even mechanically, created by our laws, our police, and our judiciary.

Again I cry out:  Wake up!  Read Tolstoy!