lila

Three weeks ago I went to Central Park. It was very sunny and I took the bus in order to watch the neighborhood instead of the dark subway tunnel. This neighborhood isn’t pretty, the buildings are mostly grey and there are no trees, but the idea of the sun and the wind blowing on my face through the bus windows while crossing the Queens Borough bridge was a good fantasy to hold in my head. So I took the bus. When I got down, still a few blocks away from the park, I was thinking of Wendy. Wendy is a blond, small woman whom I met when I was in Oregon. Maybe she was over forty. When she spoke, her mouth filled with saliva that people could see accumulating in the corners of her lips. I was thinking of what she told me once, that she had felt like a violet in a forest, so completely strange, but free. I crossed the streets and then got to one of the park entrances. I read the signs announcing Romeo and Juliet’s performance. I watched the pink flowers ahead of me, promising. I was holding my stomach all the time, holding my wound with my two arms, and thought that Wendy had given me back my life, really. I hold the scar, an old cut across my stomach, and felt the same pain I felt when I was stabbed for the first time.

I found a small mound, behind a statue, and sat there. In front of me there was a couple fixing a mat on the floor for their baby, they were about to photograph him sitting. When I heard a saxophone I realized that I hadn’t looked around, that my view was so narrow. On my right there was a lake, small boats floating over, and the music came somewhere near. I walked to the lake and knelt down over the water, to watch the fish. A boy approached with her father; he threw orange pieces to them, and the fish that at first were swimming tranquilly went mad following the orange, hungry. The wound was beating.

I looked for a green space to lie down. I found a garden with yellow flowers. I asked myself over and over again to dig deeper, to answer to myself honestly and from very deep, as if I was expecting that a soothing truth would be revealed from my unconscious and help me understand the coming back of the pain. But that day I couldn’t find anything. In fact, the deeper I asked the less I found, the more I told myself to look further for truth the less thoughts were left, until I reached a point when there was nothing really, nothing but myself asking and willing to be honest, and the only thing that popped out, from that depth, was that I wanted to live and I wanted to be happy. Nothing else. No revelation of how such life must be lived, no understanding of why I felt my life had been dripping from the scar for such a long time.

Then there was a remembrance of the girl I had been. The memory of that first story I wrote when I was nineteen, about that girl who finds her aunt dying into a tub, but doesn’t want to recognize that the woman is dying and pretends that the red water isn’t really blood, and enters the tub. Right now, while I write, I think about it and try to understand the significance of that story, what does it mean really, is it like a premonition of what is about to come? Is it a portrait of the woman I am inescapably? After the story, there came the time of destruction. First, against God. Then, everything else. Each phrase deconstructed, each thought followed and scrutinized–an essential mistrust and disbelief. Utter uncertainty. I reached a point where I thought there was always an argument against everything. My own thinking was a paradox, and there were no answers. I tried not to think, or else I would run into my desperation and restlessness and be reminded of how pointless life was. So I stopped. Avoid all sort of conversations, don’t say anything in class, only feel, feel, feel. And write as you feel–always running away from the desperate thought. Feel others, feel the sun penetrating the pores, burning the skin, feel the water, how sinking the feet into a bathtub is different of burying them in sand. Answer only this sort of questions–the immediate ones. Look for beauty: if you think that everything is possible, then everything might as well be beautiful. Ask what you like about the things you encounter, why the mushrooms on their plate are so gorgeous, why the sound of their voices makes you quiver. Laugh immediately if anything amuses you, respond fast, don’t think, avoid books and homework, there is no point to do anything after all, no point.

The only things that kept me alive were my sensory experiences. Every time it was necessary that I thought, I run away. I jumped over thinking as if over a tomb; I didn’t want to do it to avoid the fundamental question. Why don’t we all just die?

Then I studied the Enlightenment with Wendy. I tried to play the apathetic student’s part. Still, what we discussed in that class seemed to address my deepest questions. First it was Descartes. This is now a very distant memory; I can vaguely recall that he invented a system based on something he could not prove, God. But still I thought there was no explanation to why I should accept anything if, at the core of any thought, there lay a mere belief. It seemed so illogical, why didn’t everybody else see they were living such a lie. And, of course, I couldn’t say anything: all that I thought was also coming from a certain belief that I had.

There came Wendy, asking me to solve an addition.

This is what I knew is true for sure: that one plus one is two.

This is what I finally understood: to believe in something is inescapable. One plus one is two because we all decide it will be, it’s an arbitrary idea, and yet we decide it is true, and go on from there.

That’s what life takes. If I decide I will live, I am accepting that the way I make sense of the world is all that I have. There is no way not to start from some place. Dying is the alternative, but then again, the basic drive for life is so strong that I can’t deny it is here, bumping. There is a bigger truth in this desire, a truth that I can’t understand but that I feel.

That is how I accepted life again. It was not an immediate realization. I held this idea for months, slowly letting it illuminate everything else in my head. I started to feel regret. Regret for never having read Descartes or Bacon or any those guys before. Regret for having let myself wonder around alone, articulating thoughts that were flawed in some level, instead of reading the writing of people who went through the same thinking and did it more successfully. Or maybe they didn’t. But my regret was there nevertheless, the feeling that I had been alone and in pain for too long, and that there was really no need.

I went to see Wendy before I left, to say goodbye at the end of the semester. I told her how I was feeling, how I had felt for years, like I was a naked woman in the sidewalk, completely alone, but that now I felt as if I was waking up, a little late, covered by the heat of the 12pm sun. Then she said that she had felt alike–the violet image. That having gone through all of that was for her liberating.

The memory of Wendy turned sad that day in the park. I still held my wound, but I thought that maybe my experience wasn’t like Wendy’s. I thought that what I had been through was a psychological problem, not really an awakening, a sickness, not an enlightening experience. I still didn’t know how the wound had started to hurt so bad again. I tried to sleep for a while, near the yellow flowers, but my sleep was heavy and tiring. I remembered a part of an Anne Sexton’s poem, about the hope that one could row toward that island inside of oneself and look for God. An imperfect island, flawed, but one could row toward that place nevertheless and ask that the God in there embrace one’s inner gnawing rat.

Then I stood up and walked looking for a bus stop, many blocks down. I told myself I was still able to walk and take myself across the streets. Again, I imagined the sun and the wind through the bus window, over my face. How is this pretty? I asked, and made an effort to look for the beauty of Seventy Four Street. A bus stopped two blocks ahead, but left soon.