#262

http://soulselfhelp.on.ca/wombata.html

The risk you take when you lower the social and psychosocial walls between you and someone else is that you’ll encounter something you didn’t expect. If it’s something unsavory or unsettling, you might turn away or run away screaming. Maybe the new friend, who took a risk exposing herself or himself, gets hurt. Well, such things happen, and most all of us have broken hearts before. On a darker take on this theme, a friend of mine once told me a truly unsettling story about why he left town suddenly and never came back. He had befriended someone who, my friend was convinced, carried something truly wicked about her, a demonic kind of business in the classic sold-your-soul vein. A shadow that happened to be in the shape of a cross fell across her, causing her to give him a look that absolutely terrified him and froze his soul. He stood up and he ran. Whether it was true or not, he thought it was, and he left town on the fly, literally stopping only long enough to pack a suitcase, and he never came back. He lit randomly in a town out West and stayed there and made his new life, far away from whatever it was that had scared him so completely back here in the damned Midwest.

If love is involved—the dismantling, carefully, of those barriers—then you brace yourself and take what comes. It’s like unwrapping a pretty present, that may have candy inside, or sticks and grass clippings, or a severed ear. You never know, though there is a certain interpersonal skill astute people have of being able to judge a present by its wrapping. But maybe Pandora wrapped it, and then look out. In reality, most people are decent and kind down deep, and they’re all screwed up too. You generally find candy and a severed ear in the same box.

I don’t know who this poem is addressed to. The complexity of the emotion it lays out makes me certain it has to be his wife, Kate, the beautiful young Irish woman half his age, remarkable for her patience and her ability to see past the grotesque, yellowed, smoky two-foot beard to the screwed up alcoholic inside—who of course was also recognized as a great artist, fiery teacher, and all-around screwball genius dork. To each her own. But he recognizes that having lowered the wall, she now gets to participate in the depths of his suffering as her reward. That’s her heartbreak. His is just as bad—she has become anonymous to him. She saw what she saw, and while she didn’t quite leave him, (there were vows, and children), did she back away from the abyss she was chained to? It seems so. Maybe it’s just me, but I want my love to be associated with light and peace, not the depths of darkness we metaphorically call an abyss. I don’t want to be run from. What must a man think of himself when he opens to a woman, and she shrinks away and goes anonymous on him? If she’s a coward, he’ll know that, and while it hurts, he can on some level blame her. I doubt Kate was a coward. He knows what she saw, and he knows her response, and “love” then becomes forever after an untruth. He has written about pain before. There is often some element of drama involved. His father’s suicide was probably a murder, but he needed to keep it a suicide. He grieves when poet friends and heroes die, but I too often suspect an element of a kind of craven persona crafting in that, and a grasping at the escaping ghost to have it haul him to the heaven of artistic glory. There is pain at the political state of the world, and fury at stupid politicians, and there is empathy for suffering of others, who were deliberately tortured or lost in the Arctic and eaten by polar bears, to name a couple. But this is new, and different, and I think it’s the saddest and most honestly wounded of The Dream Songs so far. I’m only two thirds of the way through the cycle of poems, and I’ve been a bit appalled at the abject misery of what has been revealed on occasion, as well as the abject unsavoriness of the character. He threw up on a pillow, doesn’t take the hint that it’s time to go, smells funny. But I still keep expecting things to turn around, and in fact I kind of expect that they might yet. This has to be a project with salvation as its goal, and I’m sap enough to not give up on that yet. But in order to turn around and begin moving toward salvation, you have to hit bottom. He was a smart, resourceful and resilient character, and his bottom apparently was deeper down than most people’s. But this is getting into something really hard to watch, and I feel for him. He looks at himself and says to himself, I hurt this beautiful woman because she loved me and I just keep bashing myself brutally, mercilessly. That brutally and mercilessly bashes her. She is no longer with me in spirit because of it, though life has her tied and chained to my darkness. Does he have this kind of suffering coming? Probably—he’s a boorish fool too often. Still, it’s a bad place to be, and it’s bad to be there with him. I’m taking solace in knowing that I’ve tried to not be that person, and while I’m no angel, I’m not a wanton destroyer of people’s hearts, nor of myself. To know you’re that is the very worst thing to realize I think. The bottom must be close.