(2)
WEEDS
|
Watching
By my window
Alone
And I know it must be spring out there
I can almost see it
A yellower sun peeping out from between those telephone wires
A bluer sky stretching out above these houses
And though cars and people are making much noise
I'm certain that somewhere the earth is grown fertile again
And though the clocks all say it's time for work
I know that somewhere the trees must be sprouting with green
And though the TVs are flashing their garish pictures
A light-fingered breeze I know, I know
Must surely be blowing about somewhere
Just as if the day were real
And fine
Watching
By my window
Alone
When I was a boy I remember
Walking barefoot across the cool green grass
Out in front of my parent's house
Dandelion flowers would catch between my toes
And get stuck there
I'd be walking around barefoot with dandelion flowers
Stuck between my toes
And those flowers were as yellow as the sun
And their stems were of the palest green
And their petals were soft
As a finger's touch
I remember
Their powdery smell too and faintly acrid
Sometimes they made me sneeze
Watching
By my window
Alone . . .
These memories worry me
They worry me
With delight |
*
*
*
I was reading
a book the other day in which the following sentence appeared:
"Each of us wants to get in touch not so much with the harsh
rebel, the self-destroying outsider, as with the wild and seductive
troublemaker we keep locked up inside." The words brought
me up short. I started to wonder: What is it that causes
some people to become outsiders – and why should it be that outsiders
so often become "self-destroying"?
Upon reflection I
decided that no one takes to this path through choice. On
the contrary, everyone longs to fit in, but some of us simply do not;
everyone yearns to be accepted, but some of us simply are not.
If we don't have this longing, this yearning, then we are not merely
outsiders – we are outlaws. The difference that makes the
outlaw lies in his or her indifference to the social order, or
outright antagonism towards it. The difference that makes the
outsider lies in those character traits which put him or her at just
enough variance with social norms as to make acceptance difficult to
come by; the attempt to achieve it, and the self-distortion this
attempt so often involves, sometimes exacts a high price via self-destructive
behaviors. But – does it have to be so?
The only
self-destructive behavior that I continue to indulge in is my tobacco
habit. I've been a smoker since my late teens; thus cigarettes
provide me with a tangible sense of continuity in the definition I give
myself, a definition which proclaims, through the evidence of what has
now come to seem to my mind to be an essentially self-negating habit:
"I cannot help being who and what I am. I cannot help it;
and if I cannot be accepted for who and what I am, then I will, I
must, sooner or later destroy myself." For the outsider,
this claim amounts to little more than a sort of childish tantrum,
tantamount to the threat of the would-be suicide:
"Love me – or lose me!" For the outsider turned
outlaw, it's a manifestation of revolt against the unreasonable
conformities insisted upon by society, a revolt that becomes rage
turned inward because it has not yet found any other way to express itself.
I go out to
buy a pack of cigarettes. It's nighttime, and although it is
spring the nights are still chilly, so I put on my flannel jacket
before leaving the apartment. I walk the four or five blocks
between my house and the nearest store quickly, without really
looking at anyone; my shoulders are slightly hunched, my eyes
lowered, my head tilted downward. I have noticed that, since I
have been out of work, I have more and more often been adopting this
withdrawn attitude when out in public. I have stopped shaving
altogether, and my beard has grown shaggy. Likewise my hair,
which I've not bothered to get cut for several months now, looks
unkempt. I've noticed that people are beginning to throw me
some curious glances. I don't seem to mind.
Leaving the
store, cigarette pack in my pocket, I turn a corner and start heading
for home. As I do so, my eyes light upon a young man walking
towards me. He is perhaps six feet tall, with curly brown hair;
he's maybe five years younger than I. He wears a jacket
against the damp chill, and his shoulders are hunched, his head
tilted downward: he is lighting a cigarette. He smokes
furtively, putting the cigarette up to his lips several times in
rapid succession and exhaling quick little puffs of smoke.
Feeling my gaze, he glances over at me. Our eyes meet briefly
as we pass.
I cross the
street, walk down to the next corner, and then turn right. When
I reach an alley halfway up the block, I pause uncertainly.
I've warmed up now and suddenly feel that I don't want to go home
yet – I've got itchy feet, and decide to just keep walking
awhile. So I turn down the alley, heading back in the
direction from which I'd just come. I'm moving quickly now, all
geared up and full of energy; but when the alley I'm traveling
intersects with another, I stop dead in my tracks for a moment and
look all about me, as if searching for something. I have no
particular object in mind; it's just an impulse that grips me
unexpectedly. I cross the intersection and continue walking
faster still, only now I find that I'm looking about me everywhere as
I walk – looking intensely, almost frantically. As I approach
the main street I see, strolling up it, the young man I had passed
just a few minutes before. At the instant I see him, I
realize that it's he I've been looking for. But
why? I stare at him a few seconds – he's still hunched over,
still smoking his cigarette – then force myself to look away.
He's on the opposite side of the street from me. I turn onto
this street and begin walking in the same direction, still
throwing him the occasional furtive glance. I find myself
worrying as I go along that if this man notices me looking at him and
recognizes me as the one who had caught his eye earlier, he will
think that I've backtracked on purpose in order to make contact with
him. But I'm not interested in making contact.
When we get to the corner, each of us on our separate side of the
street, I immediately cross. Once having done so, I glance quickly
behind me. The other man has crossed to the corner I've
just come from and is walking away from me. I turn and start
off in the opposite direction.
Halfway down
this block I come to another alley and turn up. When I reach
the main street one block up I check for traffic and then hurry
across, intending to continue up the alley on the other side.
Just as I reach the curb I look up and notice a man standing out on
his front porch. The sight of him startles me – I'm generally
pretty observant as to my surroundings, particularly when it comes
to the location of other people – but this man, I can see, has been
watching me for some time without my noticing. I don't speak to him,
though normally politeness would have caused me to at least nod in
greeting. The fact is that I don't even want to look at him again,
though I can't quite say why. My one glance has revealed a middle-aged
man with wavy red bangs hanging down over a broad, slightly stupid and
(though this may well have been my imagination) slightly sinister
looking face. A lit cigarette dangles from his lips.
The alley I go
up now is very dark; there's only one streetlight lit way off at the far
end. To my right there is a long row of dilapidated looking
wooden garages, then some small houses; to my left are the backyards
of the houses which face out onto the main street. These backyards
are hidden in deep shadow. In one of the yards up ahead of me I
spot the silhouette of something, some shape – I can't tell exactly
of what, but it catches my eye. I can't make out if what
I'm seeing is human or not, and continue to stare at it fixedly as I
walk. A sudden puff of white billows up from the silhouetted
shape, like a puff of smoke coming out of an engine. But I
still can't make out for certain what the shape is – some sort of a
machine, perhaps? When I pass at last under the streetlight I
steal a look to my left and glimpse the figure of a man leaning
against a fence. He is smoking a cigarette.
I continue to
walk for another half hour or so, but no one else attracts my
attention. In fact, though there were surely many other people
about – the hour was not late – these three people were the only ones
I seemed to notice at all. But I did more, of course, than merely
"notice" them: my attention had been riveted their
way. It was as if they had each been brought into the foreground
of my awareness, magnetizing my eye, for some specific purpose.
Strange as it sounds, I feel quite certain that this is so. In
fact, I feel as if the same thing has happened here as happened in the
robbery attempt at the convenience store – that life has somehow arranged
itself specifically in order to bring me a message. But the
message in this case is more complex, more difficult for me to
interpret. These three men that I've seen would seem to be
functioning as mirrors of myself, each one penetrating a little more
deeply into the truth of who I am as an "outsider" turned
"outlaw." The first fellow provides a mere surface
reflection: of my behavior, how I walk, dress, comport
myself in public, and use smoking as a gesture of rebelliousness towards
society (smoking currently being so completely out of fashion as to be
tantamount to an anti-social behavior). Attracted to, yet also repulsed
by this man, I sought to escape him only to have my attention drawn to a second
man, the red-haired fellow standing on his porch. He reflects a somewhat
deeper level of my psyche: in fact, his slightly stupid,
slightly sinister face appears to conflate two separate yet connected
meanings. On the one hand, he is emblematic of a sort of
"stupidity" I see within myself, a stupidity which allows
me, against my better judgment, to indulge in the self-destructive
behavior of smoking. On the other hand, he represents a certain
callowness I see in other people, a callowness which I feel is
responsible for turning the world into an almost unbearably ugly,
insensitive, and inhumane place in which to live.
Perhaps it's
only my own egoism that makes me rail so furiously against what I
see as carelessness and lack of sensitivity in others. I too
am a part of humanity, and it may be that the anger I feel towards
towards other people is in reality an anger I feel towards myself.
Perhaps it's this anger which provides the real clue as to why
the outsider and the outlaw self-destruct. Still, there is much
that is good in humanity, and if it should turn out in the end that
there is not enough total goodness to save us from ourselves, it
would mean nothing more than that we were an experiment of nature
which failed, or that we represented but one stage of an evolutionary
process which, encompassing goals much larger than a single species'
survival, simply did not find in us the requisite ingredients necessary
for success. If the human species creates conditions which it
cannot itself survive, then we will all have been revealed to
be "outlaws," indifferent or even antagonistic not towards
society, but towards the whole earth, towards all of nature – and thus,
towards ourselves. Should this turn out not to be the case,
however, then the outlaw will have been revealed to be simply (or
perhaps not so simply) someone who manifested the behaviors of a
psychological imbalance characteristic of certain specific
individuals, but not the whole of humanity.
All of which leads
me, ironically enough, to the third figure I saw, the man leaning
against the fence. He is the most mysterious of the three,
being a figure of shadows. As such, he apparently acts to embody
some meaning as yet unrealized in me and is thus, perhaps, representative
of some untapped potential I hold within. But I am in a quandary
as to how to realize that meaning and thus manifest whatever latent
potential he represents. That I must continue to insist upon my status
as a figurative outlaw against society seems clear: I will
not, at any rate, permit myself anything less. But if the egoism
which fuels this insistence, like the egoism that fuels so many of
humanity's attitudes and behaviors, may serve self-negating and
destructive purposes, does it not also contain a strong impulse
towards self-preservation? If, in turning my back upon the ills
of society, if, in the process of trying to save myself I am
careful not to sacrifice what is good in humanity, then
perhaps I may also gain the capacity to lend aid to another engaged
in a similar endeavor, and so be given aid in return. Perhaps
I may even be somehow enabled to lend my defenses to this
beleaguered earth. I do not know. I can only travel this
path of mine in slow, groping steps, and hope that the answer will be
revealed as I go along.
As to smoking,
I cannot even now quite bring myself to give up the habit. If
this means that I share in the destructive egoism of humanity, then I
must acknowledge that. If it means that I am not yet able to
give up my sense of outrage and the desire to revolt against the
conformities forced upon me by society, then I must bear
responsibility for that. I can only hope that I, along with the
rest of humanity, will someday evolve to a point at which such
self-destructive responses are no longer necessary. Towards
this end, I continue to ponder that image of the lone man smoking a
cigarette as he leans against the fence, and to ask myself:
What new possibility does he portend? And as I leave him, this
figure of shadows, to melt back into the darkness from which he came,
I wonder: What will he – and what do I – now
become? I know that I must somehow try to understand him, for
if I leave the riddle of this shadow-self unsolved, I risk leaving an
integral part of myself behind, to remain forever "on the fence."
*
*
*
UNTITLED
|
Each day a new promise –
Each day a new sorrow.
Like any addict,
I'm waiting for something easier |
|