where the wise man walked

[first weekly self-therapy assignment, as revised at the advice of fellow patients and therapist.]

They told us that our beach is a holy place, and we always believed them. Preacher said God is everywhere, so of course God is here. They prayed as they waited by the shining waves, so I knew they were people who liked preacher talk. I told them that God is everywhere, and they said, “not like this, little baby, not like this.”

My sisters and I used to see them walk onto the beach in the morning, but we never saw them leave. We three decided that they must’ve left late at night, after the salt dried in their clothes. We never spent all day watching them. We have seen our brothers play, the hermit who walked the stepping-stones, the waves that swallowed the waiting people, the people who wanted so much to be swallowed. This is where we live.

The men who watch saw things we didn’t.

The waiting people never swam, which I think is silly. They just stood and let the waves wash over them. Sometimes they whispered about riptides and people who drowned here, just because a wave caught them. I imagine they fancied themselves brave, allowing themselves to be caught, believing they would not drown.

We swam all the time. Ocean water is cool, and it helps scrapes and bruises heal. I know because the hermit told me when I was very small. He taught me about healing, about the way time and God and the ocean make everything better. The hermit spent a lot of time with the ocean, out on the sandbar or on the stepping-stones near it, walking and sitting and thinking. We liked to watch him jump from stone to stone, his calluses holding fast to the slippery rock.

Everyone knew the hermit was very wise. Only a wise man would be so alone.

When the hermit left, he didn’t say good-bye. My sisters and I swam to the sandbar and looked for him, squinted our eyes tight against the shining waves, but we couldn’t see him anywhere. We asked our father again and again where he had gone, but he did not answer. He did not even shake his head.

We didn’t mind terribly, of course. It was still our beach, and the water still healed us when we hurt. The hermit didn’t need to be around to remind us. Once or twice, we even swam out to where he had walked and sat and thought, though we never did acquire his knack for jumping the stepping-stones. With time and practice, I know we could have.

My brothers started worrying about the hermit once a watching man descended from the high-rise to the sand where they built castles. One day he came down with a yellow plastic folding chair, and there he sat until after dark, gray and serious and still. At first I laughed at him, sitting like a rock on a canary’s back.

Every day he came down with that chair, the sight of which grew less and less funny as time passed. The hermit’s absence had not hurt us, but the watching man’s presence wore on us all. He watched, pinstriped, from behind mirrored sunglasses. At first our brothers ignored him, or pretended to ignore him. At last they grew too nervous, and stopped playing by the shining waves. Our two brothers asked our father where the hermit had gone, why the watching man had come. Our father did not answer, not even then, not even for his sons.

Our home seemed more crowded after that, as our brothers stayed indoors, as we walked to the shore less and less. Our father was the only one who left when the sun rose, and his absence hurt us. His laughter did not echo in the kitchen; his footprints did not disturb the patio dust. An unfamiliar silence nestled in the walls. The boys played marbles, and the clicks of glass on glass shot holes through the quiet of days.

My mother’s lips grew thinner, her shoulders hunched, her eyes tired. When I saw the yellow chair, or the vacant air above the sand bar, I no longer thought of the hermit: I thought of my father. Our mother assured us that he was out working very hard for us, his family, but the words spilled out too sober and quick. The time came when I never saw my father, not even before the sun rose. Sometimes, in my sleep, I felt his kiss on my forehead, but I was never sure if his touch woke me, or if I was only dreaming of him.

I saw sadness in the faces of my sisters, and I knew they dreamt the same dreams. We stayed close. We were wary of our brothers, whose laughter was too high and hollow, too unlike our father’s.

My sisters and I turned to our mother, then, and asked in the language boys never learned (lest they overhear):

“Where has the hermit gone?”

I knew that, secretly, our mother had liked to watch the hermit walk and sit and think, as we had; I knew, also, that she saw my father in that empty place in the shining waves. Even so, when we asked her, she just stared at the onion skins in her apron and tried not to tell us. She did not look at us. We asked her again, and again she did not look at us. She has a way of not looking, our mother. We sisters drew closer together, more afraid, more alone. Quiet days passed. Marbles clattered, but our footfalls were soft.

One day, she saw the watching man in his yellow chair on the white sand, where no son of hers played, where no castles stood. She looked at us then, and we looked back. She told us:

“The watching men were afraid of him. They took him away.”

I think we all laughed, because we had never been afraid of the hermit who walked the stepping-stones. For a moment, the silence broke. When our mother went back to not looking, we stopped laughing. She stirred the soup above the fire, and looked only at the potatoes floating in the kettle. Something was wrong –– so wrong that there were no words for it.

Later, maybe an hour later or maybe a week later, I asked my mother:

“Why are the watching men afraid of our hermit?”

She was hanging linens, and her skin was dark against the white sheets. For a long time she pretended I was not there, and she almost convinced me I was not there.

I asked her again, listening to my own voice with an interested ear. I sounded as if I were about to cry. She clipped a sheet’s last corner to the line, and she turned to me. She knelt in front of me, and I saw her eyes were blue. I had never seen her eyes so close. I could not hear tears in her voice, but I think I saw them, waiting in her eyes.

“You know the watching men are far away, little baby?”

“Yes, mama.”

“And you know it’s hard to see things from far away.”

“Yes, mama.”

“The men that watch see things we don’t. You understand?”

I did not understand, and I told her so. She breathed a long breath, and picked up another white sheet, and did not cry. I knew it was time to give up, so I did.

Slowly, the beach changed. The waiting people came later to the shining waves, and some left before dark, before the salt dried in their clothes. The watching man stopped sitting in his chair all day. He walked up and down the beach with a black vine on his head, and spoke softly to himself as he watched.

One day I heard him whispering, and I remembered how the waiting people whispered before they stepped down to be swallowed. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but that didn’t worry me, because I can only understand what the waiting people say about half the time. They always understand me.

The sun shone brightly that day. I think the light made me crazy and made me forget the quiet and melancholy in the air at home, and that’s why I decided to talk to the watching man.

I walked next to him for a few steps before he noticed me. He looked at me, then went back to watching. I tugged on his jacket. He looked back.

“This beach is a holy place,” I told him, in the language boys learn.

He was quiet for a moment, and after looking this way and that, his eyes settled on mine. Before that moment, I had felt invincible. I remembered then that I should probably be afraid of this watching man.

“We know,” he answered. His voice was friendlier than his face.

“But God is everywhere. Not just here.”

“Especially here,” he chided me, like they all do. “This place is God’s favorite.”

I blinked. I had never thought that way. “But favorites aren’t fair. God mustn’t have favorites.”

The watching man stopped walking, and pressed on a knot in the vine on his head. He crouched down, so he was only a little taller than me. I couldn’t see his eyes past his sunglasses. He could see me, though. I knew he could see me.

“I don’t think favorites are fair, either,” he said. His voice was soft, real soft. “I wish God would play fair.”

He smiled, but not happily. I wasn’t sure what to say to him, but I said something anyway.

“Why were you afraid of the hermit?”

Quiet. “What?”

“We had a hermit. He walked on the stepping-stones, out in the waves. Mama told me you watching men took him away, because you were afraid of him.”

The watching man was still confused. He stood up.

“Will you show me the stones?”

Why not? I thought. They’re only stones. Soon, of course, I would understand how much more they were –– infinitely more.

“Okay,” I said.

I walked down the shore, past the line of people waiting for the waves to come up and swallow them. Some of them looked afraid of the watching man, but some of their eyes turned to watch us. The waves lapped at their feet, and then their feet turned and followed us too. I felt strange, with so many people following me. I’m no one important; why should they follow me? They hadn’t even asked where I was going.

I stopped and pointed to the place where the hermit used to walk the stepping-stones. His absence hit me like a stone to the chest, like the sound of glass striking glass.

“There –– you took him from there.”

The watching man and all the waiting people looked out for what seemed like a long time. At last the watching man took off his sunglasses. His eyes were dark, dark brown, and they squinted at the shining waves.

“I don’t see any stones,” he said slowly. “None of us saw them.”

A long silence followed.

“What did you think the hermit was walking on?” I asked the watching man. I was almost laughing, crazy in the sun’s heat.

He looked down at me. A deep shadow hid his eyes from me, but the watching man breathed slowly as he answered: “Water.”

I smiled up at him, uncertain of what I had heard, but sure that this wasn’t funny, either. Nothing seemed funny anymore. Past him, I saw all the waiting people were looking at me, just as confused as the watching-man.

“Water?”

A hesitant nod rippled through the entire crowd that followed me, as if a wave had broken out of the ocean into the sea of bodies. I shook my head; I shook it so fast and hard that my braids whipped my face.

“Anyone can walk out there!” I cried. More than anything, I wanted them all to hear. “Haven’t you ever gone swimming, ever, any of you?”

I kicked off my sandals and dropped my bracelets in the sand. The watching man dropped his jacket and his polished shoes, and tore the black vine off of his head. I looked at all the waiting people, one by one. Their eyes were afraid, but locked on me, as if I were their way out of a dark maze: A child with sun in her eyes. I must have been glowing like a torch.

They stood still as I walked onto the wet sand. They did not follow when my feet left the shore and kicked against the tide. The white lines would dry into my dress later. I wasn’t thinking about white lines then.

The cool, satiny feel of the ocean on my skin relieved me of everything. Every fear, every sadness, every brave and brazen moment washed away. I just wanted to swim. I love the water, and I know it loves me, because it bears me up just like my father did once, like he always will, while I sleep.

From the crest of the first wave, high as his shoulders, I could see the stepping-stones. The next wave dropped me there gently, and I stood and turned to face the waiting people. They looked horrified. More watching men came over the dunes, and each one dropped his sunglasses and jacket and polished shoes in the sand.

“Swim out!” I cried to them. My voice left my lips without asking my brain. I hardly knew what was happening, but I knew it needed to happen for everyone there –– especially for me. “Don’t just stand there watching, waiting like you always do!”

I leapt to the next stone and clung there with my toes. I did not slip; I did not fall. When I looked back, the crowd was following, wading into the shining waves. My heart swelled, filled with the sunlight: They were too old to learn how to swim for the first time, but there they all were, learning anyway. I was teaching them. The ocean was teaching them, healing them, making up for all the time they had lost just standing on the shore.

Coming over the dune, behind the watching men, I made out five familiar figures, four small and one bigger; the last figure wore a clean white apron over a long brown dress. My eyes strained for a sixth, but he did not come. That’s okay. I felt as though, if I turned around fast enough, I’d catch him standing just behind me, and the look on my face would make him laugh.

the storm that loved Callie

[granted the afflicted admittance into a select ward for constructive treatment and therapy, i.e. CWR fiction. recently very slightly edited for yet another similar application.]

Callie was, in most respects, an unremarkable girl: agreeable, hardworking, and apparently destined to lead a comfortable (if unremarkable) life. She wanted to be a nurse in the city; she wanted to marry a handsome doctor and have three beautiful children. She was headed to a good state school in the fall, where she had elected to live in a substance-free dorm. She liked to swim and ride horses and read romance novels.

The storm fell in love with Callie in the Midwest, where it saw her from a distance. Her family had flown to Omaha to attend the wedding of a cousin whom none of them knew particularly well. Her manner was pleasant and quiet and her eyes were dark, dark brown, but she never wore colored contacts or makeup to change them. Callie did not mind being unremarkable. She did not speak much at the reception, but she smiled and, time and again, informed those who asked where she was going to college in the fall and what she planned to study.

The storm saw Callie’s brown eyes first, as it kicked up dust and darkened the skies above cornfields. The eyes were leaving the wedding early, in the dusk, their color made warm by the red sunset. Next the storm saw Callie’s olive skin, and it reached out a fingertip to touch her cheek.

Callie wiped the sweat from her forehead; the humidity of the Midwest surprised her. Her family ducked into their rented car and turned on the air conditioning, and the storm lamented and broke overhead, spattering the windshield and moon roof with round tears, for the storm was not as young as it used to be. It could not follow Callie as quickly as her family’s rented car could drive back to her hotel.

Instead, it waited. From a distance it saw Callie’s short brown hair bob from the car to the automatic doors of the hotel lobby, and it wept all over Nebraska, soaking the fields and the flat, gridded roads.

She was so different, Callie. Callie was so real.

That night, before sleeping, the girl the storm loved read a few pages of her latest romance novel. She dreamt of an olive-skinned, dirty blonde man holding her tightly, like no one ever had, his chest wetter than water, his touch prickling and static. Upon waking, she knew that she had dreamt something wonderful, but she could not hold onto anything but sobbing, the small, sorrowful noises dampened by her shoulder, where the stranger hid his eyes. She remembered the sound of her dream-lover crying every time she heard the roll of thunder.

Callie’s family had an early morning flight to Chicago, and the storm could not rush to the airport in time to stop her from leaving. It arrived minutes too late and it wept all over the 737 jets, and a hundred flights were canceled. Most of the wedding guests had to stay overnight at the groom’s house.

The storm had seen Callie’s round, callused toes in their flip-flops as they stepped from taxi to terminal. Callie had never had a pedicure. She didn’t like silly things like pedicures.

The storm hurried after her plane, stirring up tornadoes in its wake, destroying houses, ripping up trees by their roots. Callie watched its thunderheads trail behind her, and thought she saw a man’s bearded face in one of them, eyes wide open, mouth trying to say something without moving. The flight attendant gave her a plastic cup of water, and when she drank, she remembered a kiss. It seemed to have happened years and years ago, but Callie had never kissed anyone, not like that. When she next looked out the window, the thunderhead had scattered into a meaningless pile of vapor, soft and distant.

Callie missed the storm again in Chicago. Another storm was on its way out, and during her layover, she watched the sun’s reflection move across the drenched tarmac. She missed someone, but wasn’t sure whom. Before sunset, she realized she missed something in her dream, something that had been like a man out of her romance novel, rippling with sweat, gentle but strong – a force of nature.

Eventually, she made her way back to the East. During her entire trip, Callie had felt tired and lonely without really understanding why. She heard her mother talking about the rain in the Midwest, the flooding in Ohio, all the damage being done. She thought about global warming and climate patterns changing.

For weeks she had been bored of weather – not just of sun or rain or gray clouds, but all weather, anything at all. Why couldn’t it rain frogs? Why couldn’t there be a hundred rainbows at once? And why did the news always cover weather happening miles and miles away, instead of important, immediate things?

If only there were new weather, thought Callie: new weather for me, a preview of the rapture, insane and catastrophic and different and here. (Callie did not often have such thoughts. She was slightly worried that she had become possessed, or a normal teenager with an overactive imagination, or possibly both.)

Days passed. One day, Callie’s family took a drive up north, their destination a mountain lake, their objective to swim and sunbathe. It was hot, humid and mercilessly cloudless, and Callie was happy to have the cool water all around her, sapping her warmth and, somehow, her loneliness. She lay on her back in the lake and wished for rain.

The storm, miles and miles south of the lake where its true love swam, saw her through the metallic heat haze. Fuming, its dwindling hope rekindled by the sight of her long legs glistening under the lake’s dark water, by the warmth of her eyes, it tumbled over itself in a mad rush to reach her. It knocked out power lines, triggered warning sirens, and drove those in its path into cellars with candles and flashlights. There was Callie, in the northern lake: beautiful, simple, wrapped in the tears of all storms that had loved and died, the laments of rivers, the deaths of tremendous glaciers, and the storm knew: she missed the rain. The sun darkened her beautiful skin, hurt her, parched her red heart – the storm would quench it – yes –

– but not yet; the way was still long, and when Callie’s family left the beach to eat dinner in a lakeside restaurant, clouds were only just beginning to appear on the western horizon. They made the sunset spectacular, and Callie watched as she sipped her glass of water, remembering cold lips, a slick body against hers. The air became hazy, the entire world pink with the last daylight.

Her parents argued over silly things, as they often did: how many drinks they would allow each other, how much money they could spend, and, of course, who would drive home. Callie had developed a habit of being silent and still around her parents when they argued, knowing too well that the slightest motion would hurt, that the knot would only bind her more tightly as she squirmed. Callie never chose to be silent. She just was.

It was decided, at last, that Callie would drive home, as the evening turned purple with clouds and night. Callie liked to drive, especially when her parents argued, because it replaced the angry, white-hot whispers with cool, concerned silence. It was a small way she could move without moving, speak without speaking. The highway was beautiful that night: clouds slowly enveloped the sky, blackening the forest and foothills long before nightfall’s normal hour. Callie soaked in the silent dark as if it were the one true cure to her sorrow, her longing that seemed so suddenly different: here was a brand of chaos she could love, from which she did not want to escape.

The lightning came slowly at first, an occasional hairline or formless flash on the horizon; slowly it thickened into a light show in countless colors and shapes. She could not understand why her heart leapt with every strike, but it leapt and it leapt, and she fought to keep her eyes on the road. Her parents had fallen asleep, and Callie drove carefully. She drove five miles per hour below the speed limit. She kept her finger on the windshield wiper control, waiting for the perfect moment, the first drop of rain.

It did not come. Callie pulled into her driveway and gently stirred her parents, who woke up just enough to relocate into their beds in their red brick house. Their daughter locked the car and walked slowly into the backyard, where thunder rumbled softly overhead.

Callie looked up and saw the storm.

“You’ve been following me,” she observed.

The storm did not reply, at least not in any way that she could understand.
“It’s okay,” she continued, pressing the storm to speak to her, to confess. She felt the static in the air, a touch she remembered on her olive skin. Lightning crackled here and there, quietly, brightly.

She dropped her purse in the grass and walked further from her house. “I don’t really know how to feel,” she admitted to the dark sky. “You followed me here – you followed me too quickly. You hurt a lot of people.”

The storm thundered apologetically. The clouds were shifting slowly, like feet covering themselves in sand. Callie understood. She lay down in the grass and closed her warm, dark eyes.

“Rain,” she breathed.

the gates of bone and ivory

[written because it needed to be, and because my English teacher happened to want it - how convenient for one under the influence of the syndrome.]

It occurred to me, not a month ago, that I really dislike sleep. I dislike that I need it; I dislike that it consumes me; I dislike what seems like the majority of my dreams. I often find myself the last of my friends awake at night, and I dislike sleep because it takes them from me. Sleep is comforting to them when I cannot be.

All of this occurred to me before I realized the incredible literary value of sleep as a metaphor for existential unawareness, especially as demonstrated in Hamlet. The extent to which I share both literal and figurative feelings towards sleep with our tragic hero is fascinating and –– I cannot tell a lie –– somewhat creepy. (I am not, as it were, suicidal, although perhaps a tiny bit hyperaware. No need to call the parents.)

Hamlet’s issue with sleep comes up in two main places. The first is Act II, scene 2, in which he relates to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the brief but heavy line “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” Ignoring for a moment the implications for his relationship with this pair, let’s look to the “to be or not to be” soliloquy in Act III, scene 1:

“. . . To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: . . .”

Taking these two references to sleep together, we see that Hamlet finds “sleep” comforting, while “dreams” are the root of all his problems. Sleep is strongly connected to death and blissful existential unconsciousness, as it is in Sartre’s No Exit; dreams, on the other hand, do not signify mere life so much as living awareness.

As we see in both examples, Hamlet is (understandably) sick and tired of being aware. In the famous soliloquy, he contemplates suicide –– or, as the case may be, existential suicide, abandoning his prescribed purpose in favor of what he views as a “normal,” untroubled life. The possibility of an afterlife, continued awareness after his literal or figurative death, troubles him immensely, as awareness is exactly what he seeks to escape.

Although we haven’t covered it in class, the movie Waking Life, to which I bore delighted witness in company of the Cinema and Fine Tea Club, provides one example of what life after death –– an afterlife very literally taking place in dreams –– might be like. (I imagine Hamlet would have found such a dream of philosophizing and contorted imagery harmless, if not out and out dull, compared to his life as depicted in these four acts.) Persistent “waking dreams,” or dreams from which one believes oneself to have risen only to discover one is still dreaming, are an important characteristic of the film. One is introduced, by way of the movie, to an interpretation of the play which would suggest that Hamlet the younger died on his way home from school, but was ironically unaware of his own demise. This would explain the more absurd aspects of the play, such as the ghost’s appearance and the enforced story-arc ending, as well as Hamlet’s hyperaware state of mind, since, at least in my experience, no living human being is so constantly troubled, quick-thinking, and silver-tongued as he.

Poor guy –– thinking about killing himself, and he’s already dead. I don’t think it gets much worse than that.

On the other side of Hamlet’s issue with sleep and awareness, we have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are cruelly kicked around by the plot until their death. As they first talk with Hamlet, they strike the reader –– provided the reader is in the tragic hero’s camp –– as hollow men. They persistently misread the melancholy Dane’s highfalutin metaphors, such that he eventually just gives up and makes fun of them for it –– not that they’re aware of it, of course. His reference to being bound in a nutshell is, to me, a dry joke at the expense of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Evidently, they suffer from no bad dreams: their concerns are worldly and they are content, although they are only dimly aware of their own insignificance in the grand scheme of things. In this, they count themselves kings not only in spite of but because of their smallness.

Shakespeare’s habit of laying an equally dark cast over all his characters lets the reader’s (or watcher’s) own prejudices fill in who the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are, and it’s a matter of dispute who is more admirable: Hamlet, for dwelling on his consciousness, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, for cheerfully eschewing issues of the metaphysical. Although I sympathize with Hamlet more, I have some degree of respect (and some degree of envy) for the ever-together pair, who sleep without dreaming.

Below find an effort to further explain the theme and possibly exorcise the Hamlet-geist rattling about in my ribcage. Enjoy. (Also note well that I had to go back and correct the horrific, exhaustion-induced hanging prepositions previously contained in this and other journals. I apologize for any I may have missed. Zzzzzz.)

i -

my eyes are tired and my mother is asking
why I’m still awake, and I gently refer her to
a haiku I had to scribble down
before turning out the light to avoid
the customary lecture, roaring whisper:

three in the morning
filled with beautiful thoughts
ruining my health

ii -

when I was younger, I liked
hiding in small places
warm, dark, with everyone looking for me

so tell me:
is it cozy in there?
is there room for me to lie curled into you
like a walnut
draped around its better half?

iii -

if I am your hell
and your dream, then sleep is
your silent mistress waiting wide-eyed ––
she creates a velvet dark as I lonely stand
at your threshold, fingertips too weak
too worried, too cold
to turn on the light.