|
January 30th, Two Thousand Two: La Violenza, Mia Vita
I should preface this entry with a warning. Rather, I feel it
would be expected, out of courtesy, to preface this entry with
a warning, because it is painful and it is visceral and ugly in
parts, but for those reasons I would rather not say: If this will bother you, don't read this, look away, turn back,
oh man. If you'd prefer not to have a damper on your day, set
this aside.
I don't want to say those things because it has been occurring to me that
saying those things, that accepting that aversion and that denial;
our cultural or personal lack of the ability to deal with things
painful and ugly, is what keeps the painful and ugly so dark on
our doorsteps. And so I don't think it would be at all kind or
courteous, in the long haul, to suggest you do those things. I
would suggest you find a quiet moment, understand that some of
what I'm about to say may rub up against the raw parts of your
skin and go ahead and read as you usually do. And I hope I do
you a service in that, and I apologize in advance if any part
of this brings you undue suffering. If nothing else, and you must
turn your eyes, know that it is all me, though it certainly is
not a part of me I often have the time to address properly, and
is a part of me which I am usually very cautious in sharing. But
in doing that, I think I have been doing a little forcible aversion
of my own, and it's high time I stopped. If we are really all
that delicate, I think we really need to cut it the fuck out.
I wanted to work on an essay about violence in my life for another
publication here, in my journal, because I've found that with
the cool curtain of a publication removed, in a space where so
much of me is exposed on all levels, and in the company of people
who know me a bit better than a reader reading one isolated article
might and with whom I feel an intimacy, it's easiest for me to
bat around ideas and to just talk plainly. I apologize in advance
for its atrocious length and some of my rambling: it's difficult,
really, to talk about tragedies shortly; it feels as if one isn't
paying them the proper respect (so this is a draft, not a final).
And it is hard to do that while paying the proper respect to the
paragraph. How Jerry Kozinski did what he did with The Painted Bird in this respect is awe-inspiring.
Hatred and violence are in the hearts of human beings. - Thich Nhat Hanh
I began my day today with a quiet meditation on violence. I've
no doubt that appears a strange thing for a pacifist, for someone
who spends time in thought and action working towards nonviolence,
because it was not on nonviolence that I was meditating. It is
as much a part of my life, of my history and prehistory as anything
else; perhaps more so than many things. Violence and its relatives
have run through my life and my family like a harsh red thread,
etching scars into the surface that stop bleeding, which fade
slowly over time, some to nearly nothing, but even when they are
no longer visible they stay, permanently etched into the viscera
of my skin and soul. It is not a meditation that calms, or leaves
me empty. It is one which stirs the pit of my stomach to nausea,
which leaves my cheeks itching from salt, which sits, in the back
of my throat like a bad taste in my mouth I cannot be rid of,
no matter how much water I drink.
I was born to two parents whose lives were controlled by fear:
whose patriarchs controlled with belts and broken limbs; with
shouts or worse, silent stares; with stares that foreshadowed
pain that would come momentarily if their wishes were not granted,
a promise neither ever doubted. My father's brother once learned
those stares had meaning when he was thrown from a second-story
window to the ground below for doubting. He felt its meaning forever
in a limb that would always ache when the weather changed. Their
mothers -- my grandmothers -- would do little most of the time,
still fearful and aching from other violence they'd survived in
their lives: my paternal grandmother's loss of her first husband
in WW2, her own passage across the Atlantic to leave her country
behind for Mussolini to ravage, my maternal grandmothers life
of scrounging for food, for shelter, for love, for faith: her
life with profound poverty, the stepmother of violence. My father's
first love ended abruptly when, as she was sitting reading a book
on her windowsill amid the factories of urban Pennsylvania, a
stray bullet from a nearby street fight tossed her book aside
and took her life, and my father's residual droplet of innocence
with it.
When I was barely two, my paternal grandparents and my uncles
Albert, 13, Craig, 16, and Geoff, 17, went for a lazy drive through
the winding hills of rural Pennsylvania with their neighbors --
one of the great few days of peace and leisure in their young
lives, though overshadowed by a feeling of inexplicable dread
-- and their car was hit by a trucker short on sleep but tall
on amphetamines, and my two eldest uncles awoke with their crushed
younger brother on top of them, and the heads of my grandparents
at their feet. Being barely two, I wasn't told of the depth of
the accident; of its terrible reality, but I felt that violence
in the few years we stayed in my grandparents house, my mother
struggling to rear then not just one child she hadn't planned
on having, but two teenage boys whose personalities were ever
poisoned by what they had seen; by the guilt of being asleep on
the car floor, and thus, left physically unharmed. Being so young,
I would never know why for years the sight of either of my uncles
made me run away screaming, caused me to find a quick hiding place.
Even now, I cannot know for certain, early childhood being so
hazy. It may be one of them sought to release some of that anger
and guilt upon me forcefully, as some of my recollections suggest.
Yet, it may also simply be that I felt their anger in a quiet,
buzzing and perpetual seethe, that the sheer force of its presence,
there, under the surface and glistening on top, was terrifying.
My mother recalls the fuss my grandmother put up before they left
that day, carrying on in half-Italian half-English about how she
had this terrible feeling she would never see her granddaughter
again. My mother thought she was simply being dramatic, and that
hysteria would haunt her for years; one of the few fuzzy visual
images I carry of my paternal grandmother is of her waving goodbye
and kissing my cheek with a face wet from crying.
When I was six years old, shortly after my great-grandmother left
us in Pennsylvania for an apartment in Florida, her home was broken
into, and at the age of 76, she was robbed, raped and murdered.
Again, no one told me at 6 what had happened but that she had
died. But I felt the afterburn of it as we packed up and drove
back across the country to Chicago, in the heavy silences of my
parents; in the sadness and horror of their quiet breathing.
Not long after we moved, the arguing that was constant in my household
would erupt into full scale wars, with screaming, with crying,
with fighting well into almost every night, followed by hard,
stoic quiet in the morning. That anger lashed out at me at times,
like flames eating up one home sometimes lick the house next door.
My father left not long after, and as I hung my head out the apartment
window three stories up and begged him not to leave, and he cried
back that he was sorry, I hurled my teddy bear out the window
at him in anger, but ran down shortly to retrieve him, horrified
at my own small act of violence. Teddy was there on the sidewalk.
My father was gone.
When I was seven years old, just able to walk through my neighborhood
by myself, I took a shortcut to the park one day with a friend.
In the alley we walked in was a tripod of steel poles which looked
fit for climbing. I climbed to the top, then felt myself falling,
saw a moment of fear on my friends face and the next thing I knew
I awoke with a pain in my head and half my right hand two feet
away, with what remained a grisly pulp of skin and visible tendons
and bone. My friend was gone. I didn't panic -- my mother being
a nurse and a natural rescuer, I had attended many a grisly accident
scene with her and was used to seeing things like this by that
early in my life, from mangled motorcyclists to head-to-toe burn
victims. I was more afraid of being alone, and more angry at the
loss of my hand than anything else, and so I shouted mouthfuls
of obscenities until someone found me and then walked with a stranger,
carrying the remains of my hand in my palm to my mother. My hand
was reconstructed -- not perfectly, plastic surgery wasn't the
art it is today in the 70's, but all in all, pretty well -- but
I lost the ability to expertly do some things I had aspired to,
I felt what the price of even small freedoms could be, and I then
had very visible and obvious scars to go with my burgeoning emotional
ones.
Then, there was a period of my life in which violence did not
interrupt every peaceful moment. My mother and father were happier
no longer tethered together disharmoniously. I spent fanciful
weekends with my father, my mother filled the house late evenings
with the other nurses she worked with, laughing, sharing drinks,
acting like the girls most of them had never had the chance to
be. But it was during those years that anger crept into me softly
-- anger, brother to violence -- and it began to appear in small
things: in drawings, in childlike poetry too dark for its age,
in small cruelties to my younger sister, in the fist fights I
would dare neighborhood boys to enter into with me, in which I
would revel in feeling control and power, the two-headed mother
of violence, in which every bruise or spot of blood I would inflict,
or every cut or scrape I received myself was a trophy. I became
proud of my prowess, of my own violence, harbored uncomfortably
in pigtails and overalls, and which argued late at night with
its father living within me in tandem: fear.
Not long after, one date of my mothers would lead to more dates,
to dinners, to slow introductions that children aren't supposed
to see coming, but I did. And I hated him -- truly hated him --
on sight seen. At dinners he took us out to, I would kick him
repeatedly under the table throughout. I would try to sabotage
his attempts to woo my sister to his side, which were fruitless:
my sister never knew our father, and thus craved one of her own,
and likely any would do. My sister missed out on most of the fighting,
on our lives in Pennsylvania: she had no such anger, and she did
not have one of the few gifts exposure to violence gives us, which
is precognition of it, which while sometimes does appear in the
face of a cousin, paranoia, often is grounded very much in reality;
in a horrible knowing of its presence and its promises. My own
presence was stifling, and I was sent to live for a while in California
with my aunt. When I returned home, both I and violence had a
new family member: I had a stepfather, and its cousin, resentment,
had come to stay.
That same year, I nearly gained a stepmother as well, but she
opted instead to put a bullet into her head and was discovered
a day later, her two-year-old wandering about the apartment in
soiled diapers with bloody feet, crying.
Over the next few years, the coals of conflict would crackle with
embers waiting for kindling. The beginning of my puberty would
arrive synchronously with my mother's new marriage, with a move
to a home in which we were made to feel like guests, not residents,
in which the anger and violence I saw in the face of my stepfather
when he first entered our lives would come home to roost. First
it appeared in small things: in teasing and taunting that went
under the guise of good humor, little pokes and prods about how
fat or ugly I was, about how clumsy I was, about how much trouble
I was. The prods would go deeper and continue, spanning over years,
coupled with shouting, with the locking of my door, with more
hiding under the bed. Casual comments that everyone could see
the breasts I was developing eventually turned into night spent
forced to a chair, told in detail how those same breasts could
be mutilated. (Those years are a set of several in my life that
I simply am not yet comfortable talking about, for my privacy
and that of my family, in detail.) It was like a series of masks:
my mother turned into my grandmothers, mostly passive and silent,
my stepfather relived my grandfathers abuses on my parents with
me. I felt its legacy, deep in my gut, like how it feels when
you're hungry; how it feels painfully hollow, but not empty.
I stared smoking at 11. I snuck out of the house at 12, trying
to find joy in freedom, at least, until that same year I was sexually
assaulted by a gang of young men in the back of a van in a series
of events I will never be able to remember, in which being knocked
unconscious was a gift I will ever be grateful for. When violence
oversaturates, we begin to be thankful for those aspects of it
which cause only physical pain, and enough of it that we begin
to feel the raw edges wear off the emotional, making it harder
to cut so deep. I didn't open my mouth about the blood on the
toilet paper a week after my attack. I took up with bitterness,
cousin to violence by marriage to resentment. Over the next couple
of years, I tried to turn my fear and pain into angry power by
slashing myself with razors, by popping any pills and other assorted
chemicals -- organic and otherwise -- could find, by half-baked
suicide attempts, by stealing just because I could then passing
out my booty freely to gain favor and awe. I said yes when every
other girl would say no, to anyone who would ask, and I slid my
mouth over the genitals of others in a mishmosh of apathy, calculated
cool, and a deep longing to magically turn my pain into pleasure,
even if that pleasure wasn't mine.
When it all hit fever pitch, after an endless series of fights
and rows, nights on benches, locked doors, threats of commitment
and homes for delinquents, an angel fell unto my doorstep just
when I needed him, and I remembered some of my innocence, I remembered
not being so scared. I gained a pile of bravery -- not bravado,
my longtime companion and yet another cousin to violence, but
bravery -- and I shrugged off a lot of anger. But anger, violence,
is a tricky net: it pulls in those around you and even if one
of you lets go and squirms out, it still leaves others within
it, and so more times than not, you can only escape it one at
a time, and so I tried to go first. I got out of my home, I hurled
the blood and gore that followed me unto the sidewalk as I ran,
and I managed a few days of escapism before, like my father years
before, I found my actions and my renewal usurped by a bullet
to the head, by a police-taped apartment I walked around crying
in with bloody feet as I cleaned it. It took me years, really,
to see this -- and I only really saw it clearly recently -- that
when violence taints us, it leaves a very unique stain, and we
seek out others just as unwashable simply because they know, they
understand, what we carry. We do not have to try and fruitlessly
explain it, explain living violence to people for whom what is
televised or done with thousands of dollars of special effects
is the only visceral violence they know. But in doing to, we come
back to the net: we forget that those who share it with us may
well still be caught inside themselves, and some of them will
be unable to get out. My angel, my high school boyfriend, his
father had driven his car purposefully into a lake when Matthew
was just 2. His mother went insane, and when she took to chasing
him with knives, he was hurled from foster home to foster home;
he was beaten at three, molested at two. His way to get out of
the net was the same way he got in: with violence, in a haze of
Quaaludes and gunshots to the head.
It was overkill for me; the last bit of violence that close to
me that I could handle, and so for a long time, after a series
of days spent unable to speak or even eat from weeping and shock,
I did what most people seem to as a reaction to violence: I turned
off and I tuned out, which was extraordinarily easy to do. I set
myself into physically and emotionally dangerous situations to
see if I'd pass the test and still be left disaffected, taking
up with the sister to violence, despair. I spent much of the remaining
years of my adolescence that way, slowly digging myself out of
my own apathy and stupidity, but every step involved having to
revisit everything that hurt so much. I finally stopped testing
myself when it became clear that I'd either pass every test and
simply care less and less what happened to me or others, or I'd
die trying. It became clear that one of the lone powers I held
over violence was refusing to let it take me as a willing victim
as it had so many people and things dear to me. It became clear
that while it was a part of me, a part of my family, and a part
of the world I lived in, I didn't have to like it, and I didn't
have to let it have its way with me without some fight of my own.
I remembered that while violence was a part of me, a part of my
family's legacy, so was love, and so was nonviolence, something
I was perhaps more equipped this far down in my line to practice
than any member of my family before me.
Violence and its family -- its parents, fear and power, it's stepparents,
poverty and helplessness, its siblings, anger and despair, all
of its cousins, and its progeny, loss and injury -- are a part
of my family. And like family, you can leave, you can disown them,
you can even separate yourself entirely from them and never share
a word or a moment together again, but you cannot remove family
from yourself: you are they and they, you. At the end of the film
Amores Perros, the director's dedication was this (translated): "We are also
those whom we have lost." And we are, whether that loss has been
of those dear to use through violence, or whether it is the loss
or removal of that violence itself (though in our culture, there
is no fully escaping it). And it is why, abhor it as I do, and
work as I do to keep it out of my life, my actions and reactions,
out of my fears and worries, I have to also love it a little because
it is a part of who I am, and it is, in fact, the part which keeps
me from it and keeps me keenly aware of its influence, on me and
all around me, all at once. I cannot see violence and be apathetic
or detached. I cannot find it entertaining or fun, even when I
know it is fictional or fantasy.
And I do keep it close to me, rather than try and escape from
it. I study it, observe it, feel how it clenches powerfully in
my belly like the beast that it is. I have no doubt that some
of why I do that is out of fear; I keep it close to me, beside
me, because I am afraid that without that keen awareness, it will
creep back into my life like a viper and I will continue its horrible
legacy, likely in ways that are small and unnoticeable at first,
but which, by the time I have noticed them, will be more profound,
larger, unmanageable; which will have me back in its net with
others I have unwittingly dragged in with me. I am afraid that
if I allow myself distance from it, it will breed the apathy that
allows it to be permitted at best, and endorsed, celebrated, congratulated
at worst.
I have many readers -- enough to come as a great surprise to me
-- who are war veterans or people in the military. For a while,
I hadn't been able to figure out not only why they would want
to read me -- pacifistic antiwar me -- and certainly why most
of them seemed to agree about things I have said about violence,
things which have angered many people who most certainly had not
fought wars, or readied for battles. But it is clear why: because
it is their family too, violence is. They know it intimately too,
they have seen it without blinders or special lighting or the
distance of a television screen and it is a reality, not a concept,
for them. They are too wise to think not to revere it, or to take
it at all lightly, in any respect. We are blood relatives, they
and I, different, but linked closer than more benign commonalties
could make us.
But keeping it so close has its own pitfalls: when the attack
on the World Trade Center happened last September, I was not in
the shock many other people were. I was saddened, but I was neither
surprised nor shocked. And that acceptance of violence, that intimacy
with it can, on the surface, make one look cold or unfeeling.
On the other hand, my abhorrence of violence has often met with
anger or violence, with the sentiment that I simply must not understand
how violence may be needed or that it can have a nobility of its
own. Of course, I do know violence; certainly not as well as someone
who grew up in Bosnia or Cambodia, but I know it. Yet, I cannot
share my own history with every passerby, it is exhausting and
it is intimate and personal, and glossing over it in sound bytes
doesn't serve it with the proper respect and reverence I feel
it needs to be given to revere those it touched or took. While
I do believe that violent acts can, in rare circumstances be kinder
that not (such as, say, shooting a half-dead dog to remove his
pain), I don't think that most of us, myself included, have the
wisdom, the understanding of the consequences, nor enough experience
with life completely devoid of violence to be able to exercise
sound judgment as to when violence is "right" and when it is "wrong."
- vi-o-lence
n. Date: 14th century
1 a : exertion of physical force so as to injure or abuse (as
in effecting illegal entry into a house) b : an instance of violent
treatment or procedure
2 : injury by or as if by distortion, infringement, or profanation
: OUTRAGE
3 a : intense, turbulent, or furious and often destructive action
or force b : vehement feeling or expression : FERVOR; also : an
instance of such action or feeling c : a clashing or jarring quality
: DISCORDANCE
4 : undue alteration
It is the fourth definition, the most obtuse, of violence that
resonates most soundly with me. Once you get past the blood and
the gore, the sounds of squealing ties or smashing poles, the
screaming and the yelling or the horrible silences, the terrible,
terrible sound of a single bullet being fired, what you are left
with -- what remains and creates the legacy of violence, is that
undue alteration: of life, of living, of faith in things and people.
It is what should not have happened, but did, because someone
did not know their own power, or the power of another, or something
else. Because anger, self-hatred or helplessness became unbearable
and unmanageable. Because in a world where so few of us are empowered
in the most basic ways, violence is an easier way to get that
empowerment than waiting, or asking, or making it oneself. And
in many cases, because until any given act of violence occurred
or was done, we were not intimate enough with violence to understand
the depth of its power and its horror.
I will be 32 years old this year, and not a year of my life has
passed in which I was not exposed to some level of violence, and
in a good half of those years, in which I was living with it side-by-side.
I've studied it immensely, I have drowned myself in its presence,
I have thought about it, talked about it, created with it, courted
it, fought with it face-to-face, skin under my fingernails, and
I have watched it like a hawk and I still really don't understand
it. But I want to. I want to understand it perhaps more than I
want to understand anything, because what it all seems to boil
down to is that violence erupts -- when it is man-made -- from
a lack of understanding who violence is before it is too late.
I want to understand it because I know it is in me as much if
not more so than anything else, and if I cannot understand it,
then ultimately, I cannot understand myself, the world I live
in, and all the dark places I came from. And when I say "understand"
I do not mean to find the logic in. Violence is unbelievably logical
and rational, far more so that love, far more so than compassion.
When I say understand, I truly mean to accept, rather than fight;
so that I can accept it for what it is -- for what it really is,
as hard as that can be -- recognize and revere its power, rather
than giving it more fuel with fear and anger, let it pass by and
accept what its less recognized progeny, its bastard son, perhaps,
can be. If we really feel and understand the awful legacy of violence,
we can perhaps find the one fine thing it can create, an infant
child from its own rib: nonviolence and compassion.
But we have to protect it from its terrible parent. All too often
we let it eat its own young, and we stand, averting our eyes and
holding out the salt and pepper, dissociating ourselves from it,
convinced we are not a part of it, or if we are, that our part
is noble because we cannot consider the fact that it may not be.
But there we err, because we are a party of it, and it a part
of us. It is part of our -- and I know it is part of mine -- family. And to understand it, I don't know that there is any
other route besides letting it stir the stomach to nausea, swallowing
the salt from your cheeks, and putting down the water to stop
trying to wash the bad taste out.
|
