THE GREAT AMERICAN PASTIME

Last summer, while at a day’s retreat at a nude resort in New Jersey, I looked up from reclining on my beach towel and saw, in the look of another guest, the wry look of ridicule that I’d become accustomed to over the course of a lifetime.  Over a year previous, a familiar cycle of sexual innuendo had begun, something I had never thought would once again assail me so late in life.  The public review of my sex life had begun, with clever, sly references everywhere on the media.  But what I’m trying to say in the leading sentence of this blog entry is that I now knew with finality that my public pursuit and persecution had become encoded into the national DNA, a periodic American recreation.

The ideology of this public humiliation goes back decades.  The psychopath who was my neighbor on a crime ridden block in the mid ‘70s East Village could not let alone the fact that an otherwise unidentifiable single woman had compromised his standing in the drug-running mob world organizing the lives of the inhabitants on 9^th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A.  The result:  I was run out of my home, became first a vagabond, then an outcast, then a mental patient, this over the course of five years.  During this time, I was in the grips not only of a sneering public opinion, but of powers and principalities beyond my control.  Could I possibly be a prostitute?  Try it on for size.  Or, to reference a previous blog post, The Gay Octoroon, was I gay or straight?  The vector of public humiliation was an attempt to out me, way before bisexuals enjoyed any comfort zone in the gay community, at a time when gay liberation was not more than half a dozen years old, and I no more than in my early 30s.

This time, however, as the all too familiar oblique references began to play out in the work place, I made the determination to step down from my job, put a handle on my torment for the first time with the twin vows that:  1) this time it was my script; and 2) this time I was not going to be destroyed.  As the cornerstone of my personal/political philosophy is ‘everything happens for a reason’, and as the end result of having been stalked to a long familiar nude retreat in the nearby Mohonk Preserve, I ran home to research bisexual resources on Facebook.  I realized that the first step in my strategy for untying my chains had to be a firm commitment to my sexual orientation, shrugging off any compulsory identity as a monosexual, rejoicing in the both/and rather than the either/or.

I slowly came to an understanding of some of the routine slang:  batteries.  Yeah, OK, I needed public injury and insult in order to become the life of the party.  Yeah, sure, this makes perfect sense as people who are abused, including myself, want for nothing but to retreat and withdraw.  Makes for a good party, tho’.  Then, sadly, I realized that everything I said and did was instantly committed to public record; the aperture and the microphone imposed an aberrant lifestyle on me, and even now, at the start of the third year of this cycle, I carefully script and edit everything out of my mouth.  It’s too painful to speak too freely and expansively since this can only lead to social approbation.  Consequent to the realization that I was under unrelenting surveillance, it became a matter of simple determination that I had to “bolt” down everything I’d become committed to in life to prevent it’s being destroyed by ‘fear and malice’.

But I suppose the sum total of all of this, and what made it the Great American Pastime, is that the lights, camera and action of public scrutiny led to the concept of ‘auditions’.  In fact, I’d become the all American whore, with my brief sexual adventures in the halcyon days of the lower Manhattan culture of the mid-late ‘70s turning into folklore and legend.  I was the eternal Jezebel, born into life to be a lecherous woman, held simultaneously in contempt and in awe and watchfulness till the time of another performance. 

I came up to Newburgh and the Mid Hudson Valley now almost 14 years ago to go on yet another venture, becoming a homesteader along the way.  I was aghast at how all the apparatus and public expectation of almost 40 years ago were exhumed, taken out of mothballs in a bizarre dislocation of urbanity.  I was expected to stop traffic, have lines waiting to see me in public spaces.  This painful misunderstanding continues to this day.  Once again, I’ve taken refuge in the psychiatric community for understanding and hopefulness, but every time I venture out to do simple errands, I am jarred with the realization that I may never be seen by the world for who I truly am, will always be expected to accept the coin of the realm in bypassing my own interest in forming relationships and instead bowdlerize myself into obligatory sexual encounter.

No Soap, RADIO

I’d forgotten what it was like to listen to David Rothenberg’s Here of a Saturday Morning on WBAI, a radio show I religiously tuned into every weekend while still living in The City.  Suddenly, I’d turned the TV off and some of my old habits began floating to the top of my mind.

When I’d first made the determination to tune into FM radio and screen out the static and commercialism of television, I vacillated back and forth between NPR and listener sponsored WBAI, a station taking a more militant stand on matters of social change.  The problem seemed to be one of holding my attention, which wandered rather recklessly back and forth between the airwaves and the activities of the nearby fish tank.  Many I know keep TV, and perhaps also radio on as an aural backdrop, but I’ve always resisted the thought of doing this.  Even now living comfortably with myself involves a process of clearing away the energy of one activity and then moving with peace and intention on to the next.  In this context, background noise could only be a distraction.

Maybe what this blog post is about, rather than the choice of media, is making more unconventional and inventive use of leisure time.  We’re supposed to mainstream our leisure time, with television as a cornerstone.  I do admit I remember how pleasant it once was for me to think of coming downstairs from a nap to  the reassurance of a human face, but now I listen to WAMC’s All Things Considered, dismissing Wolf Blitzer and CNN’s Situation Room.  All this might seem somewhat severe, except that in the evening I sometimes take in a YouTube or Al Jazeera documentary.

People I know in the City of Newburgh have long since given up TV.  One couple watches DVDs, another tunes into Hulu if they get the urge.  I suppose my life has taken a more Spartan or stoic turn in this decision of how to structure my leisure time, but it’s taken on advantages in steering me away from the tiresome drone of advertising and into an at least occasional exploration of the Internet.  Not so bad, spending an evening delving into all the videos you’ve sequestered away from Facebook and into your YouTube Watch Later folder.

2ND AMENDMENT GANSTERISM

I originally wrote a December post on the Newtown, CT shooting, including an introductory link from the World Socialist Website; but when I pressed the preview button on Google, I got a prompt saying it had been published.  I subsequently looked at my blog and saw nothing.  As I’ve no idea how to retrieve anything out of the blogosphere, I’m rewriting my thoughts, subsequently updated.

At a recent gathering at my home at the Winter Solstice, conversation inevitably turned to our most recent school-shooting tragedy.  Someone had read an editorial in that Friday’s New York Times elaborating an opinion on Second Amendment rights.  I hadn’t known there was a conversation underway to repeal it.

And what was the reason for this amendment, he wondered, as he was particularly troubled by the use of the word ‘militia’.  I quickly jumped in, sensing an opportunity to connect my own personal dots on the subject.  The Constitution grants us the right to dissolve our governance if it improperly serves us, casts us into hopelessness and does not serve our wellbeing.  This undoubtedly was the reason for the use of that word.  How to assail the existing powers, however duly constituted, without arms?

Later I reflected on the growth of gun culture in the United States.  I’d recently been told by a colleague at my rehab program that guns are freely available, even placed on tables for sale at gun shows.  Then, in a 180 degree pivot that seems possible only in our culture, I heard in a television news announcement tonight that areas in some states are publishing information on the location of privately and legally held firearms, the disclosure of which was  not well received by all.

In evidence that the Civil War still stalks the political landscape in this country, there is a widespread affinity among some to display the Confederate flag.  Overcoming my repugnance, I now began to reflect upon the reactionary nature of this.  The rebel yell is alive today in the imagination of some who object to the indifference of American political life.  Into this sometimes also goes racial prejudice, jealousy in the workplace and a resentment of the openness of our immigration policies resulting in a concept of armed militias and a revolutionary resistance, however simplistic.

The missing ingredient in this stew of constitutionally allowable discontent is, simply, intellect.  The romance of bearing arms seems a reductio ad absurdum for the awesome undertaking of reconstituting government.  Among this subculture of discontented shooters, who would have the political imagination to forge a new constitution, a Bill of Rights?  I think my biggest single argument with American culture, besides its obsession with violence, is its discouragement of intellect.  In a clip I saw recently of the film Lincoln, he is arguing passionately for the phrase we hold these truths to be self evident.  Why would he be so emotionally moved by what we take to be a tautology?  Could it be because the power of his leadership lay in his ability to be moved by what is freely available to all, namely the simple use of logic and common sense?

We are then left with devastating explosions of murder/suicide.  The licentious availability of firearms coupled with the painful mental and emotional dislocations of American life from time to time produce monsters.  We can’t then just turn around and say the parents were oblivious, or our mental health system is deficient.  We lack wholesomeness in the way we conceive and think about our own governance.  Cynicism blunts intellect, and we all too frequently think not in threads of conversation, but in ideologies.  I’m not one to blindly salute authority, but perhaps before we resort to arms we should rethink our identity as Americans.

MENTAL ILLNESS

I am struck by how symptomatic states often resemble the despair and descent of poetry. Last month I had an extraordinary break with normality and was toppled into hopelessness, placing my hands against the window with only a memory of what it was like to be outside. A horrible summer of self-incarceration came to a conclusion when, too, in a state of rage, I sped my car over a curb and destroyed it. I’d never been in this part of hell before, and was discovered in a dream in a bone-chilling location that I am at a loss to describe. In the current psychiatric rehabilitation program I am engaged with, I was surprised with recollections of my first recovery. Apparently, in something called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, there is something called ‘Downward Descent.’ I recalled the strange vertigo of anxiety that was routinely triggered by inappropriate and destructive relationships. Working with a Sullivanian therapist, there was the classic moment of transference where I reached out for her hand, realizing for the first time that it was available. In a dream, a ship in the distance headed towards a beach to rescue me from an entrapment in another ikon of therapeutic relief. In my current flailings about with a Nook, it has occurred to me that I should download En Saison en Enfer. Not infrequently it crosses my mind in more frivolous moments that I should open a travel agency. Receiving etheric instructions to adhere to draconian discipline in purges of valuables, eating habits, social interaction and even suicide constitute a harrowing journey into a complete loneliness also impossible to describe. In the PROS program, sadness is often referred to and the word ‘despair’ omitted. The searing pain in my solar plexus I experienced while in a profound, clinical depression could be referred to as an ache, and the melancholia afflicting Abraham Lincoln was diagnosed as ‘dystemia’, a mild but chronic state of sadness and dysfunction. The extrapolation of mental and emotional states into scientific and systematized terminology is something like the duodecimal system of librarians or the organization of the botanical world. It provides practitioners with an objectivity essential to diagnosis, but that can also divorce them from the suffering of their clients. I often feel, in the process of group sharing, an insight into the conflicts of my peers, helpless, all the while, to help them professionally. It is only when I dip into literature, when writing poetry or reading it, that I can touch on the thin membrane that separates scientific distance from the truth of experience.

ANOTHER TESTAMENT

No one wants a slut in their congregation. I’ve been pushed out the door of more than one church due to perceived inhibitions in sexual conduct, consequently judged indecent and unworthy of tolerance. After a lifetime, if you want to consider 27 years a lifetime, I decided instead this past Sunday to purchase and read the Sunday New York Times. My premise for psychological growth has for at least the same interval of time been to identify and let go of, or rid myself of relationships to individuals, communities and institutions that have proven poisonous to my sense of dignity and self-esteem. There are a couple of old saws that are applicable here: looking for love in all the wrong places, and that there is something inherently hypocritical in organized religion. In the desperate sloughs of despond in my journey through life, I’ve resorted to Sunday worship, seeking community and relief from the heap of burning ashes my life had become…and this more than once. I’ve been a congregant in Baptist and United Church of Christ, Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian and even Unitarian churches; and with the possible exception of the muddied reception I got at Judson Memorial, I’ve been ostracized in one way or the other from all of them. There is a managerial imperative in being installed as a priest. The word of God needs to be shaped in such a way as is appealing to the majority of those who attend services, this, if for no other reason, than to insure financial viability. Secondarily, there need to be identified those who will volunteer their efforts and time in service to the congregation’s, or at least the presiding priest’s agenda. I think I was over doused in the work ethic to the point of being singed. Headlong I hurtled into committee attendance and even committee formation, also organizing forums on social issues, attending training courses on congregational enrichment, and very briefly, filling in for Sunday School. The returns on all this effort remain questionable. I have one true friend, a woman I met at Park Slope United Methodist. A true eccentric, she teaches medieval history at a military academy and as avocations, sings lieder, writes historic novels and quilts. I’ve spent more than a few happy hours with her at her home in Brooklyn. With her playful quirkiness, she existed far enough outside the complications of church social life that I could find some meaning in an association with her. My last attempt at connecting with a church community in Newburgh, one that I’d first been involved with for 10 years, then left, then went back to only to leave again, and then finally thought I had made a firm determination on, proved to me beyond a doubt that I could not navigate the bizarre social conventions leading to visibility as a ‘church lady’.

REHAB

            As once before in The City, I am again involved in what is otherwise known as ‘Day Treatment’, or psychiatric rehabilitation.  As I’ve suffered from mental health issues on and off throughout my life, I thought it would be interesting to reflect on some of the recurring themes involved in getting professional help.

            The umbrella organization in Orange County, NY is Occupations, and the specific offering for individuals such as myself is PROS, or Personalized Recovery Oriented Services.  I began at the Middletown branch, and have since moved to the much smaller population served at nearby New Windsor; but both have involved an acquaintanceship with staff and peers, resulting in a daunting learning curve.

            This may be a snarky or cynical framing of it, but my observation at times has been that some staff serving at these facilities have been tracked into a career that they reckoned would be easy work for a fat paycheck; in other words, a sophisticated form of babysitting.  The prime motivating reason for my departure from the Postgraduate Center for Mental health in NYC was being assigned to a counselor who seemed utterly passive in delivering services, a kind of psychiatric sponge.  Although a kindly person, I had determined I needed to escape from the sensation of being allowed to indulge in runaway logorrhea.

            Sometimes the result of this kind of professional passivity is a regrettable loss of control, at times unrecoverable.  I’ve seen individuals allowed to continue onward with cross conversation all the while others, struggling to be heard, are discounted or dismissed.  In one group, involving anger management, an Eastern European émigré struggled to express her anxieties, only to be waved away with a diagnosis of ‘acid reflux’ disease.  Driving back to Newburgh after this particularly chaotic workshop, I struggled with how this dismissive atmosphere had been allowed to thrive in what is supposed to be a caring environment.  In the same workshop, a younger woman held forth for a good 20 minutes with a looping complaint of how she would continue to refuse medication until and unless a stomach complaint was diagnosed.  At one point, she averred she’d previously been on meds for something like 26 years.  Later, since she’d been incarcerated, I figured it was more like crystal meth.  In no way had she been on psychotropic drugs for that length of time; too animated, ADD.  But then why had the facilitator just put up with her floor show?

            Then there are the New Age types who bring extensive texts on ‘Metta’ meditation, thoroughly confusing some clients.  A recitation of Buddhist maxims invites the question “Do we have to do this?”  Or the exasperating reliance on pages of boilerplate seemingly exempting the group leader from retrieving clinical information from her own memory bank.  “What,” I found myself thinking, “you can’t hold forth on guilt?”  Give me the group.  I’ve got a lot to say.

           

BERGDORF GOODMAN'S

As I was growing up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, then known as the working class neighborhood of Yorkville, I was subjected to the jumble of rich and poor residing within the width of the island as it existed at that point.  My father, being a German immigrant, came to the country unable to speak English and so put his shoulder to work as a laborer at a variety of jobs ending with the title of Receiving Clerk at the 57^th Street Stouffer’s restaurant.

Often, while I was still in grade school, my mother would bring me downtown and then my father and I would begin our stroll up Fifth Avenue and through Central Park until we got back home to 85^th Street.  We would always stop at FAO Schwartz, the classic kid’s paradise of toys, and spend at least half an hour there while I played.  (Subsequently, at Christmas, I could expect at least one thing I had especially enjoyed.)

But what this is all leading up to, is that on the other side of the Avenue was another store:  Bergdorf Goodman’s.  Every window contained a female manikin with a designer gown, stunning and gorgeous, but also containing a clear message:  this is something you cannot now and will never have.

Much later on in life while living on a sixth story walkup in Greenwich Village, a friend and I, while spending a day together, wound up there.  We accepted the challenge, and fully dressed in lesbian schlep, walked in.  It was a moment Tyler Durden would have savored.  There was nothing as welfare dykes that we could possibly consider purchasing, but I suppose our objective was more along the lines of shocking ourselves into role of guerrilla warriors in even daring to look.  All I remember seriously regarding was a silken scarf of some kind, handling it and turning it over in my hands.  We left without stealing anything, and considering our level of disgust and alienation, I suppose we deserved a subclass medal of some kind.

In reconsidering and reflecting on this as a subject for a blog entry, I came to the realization that there are all kinds of sign posts in our country directing traffic along gender, racial and ethnic and finally, along class lines.  And it’s the strangest thing, whenever I begin a serious reference to my working class roots, it brings up other people’s defenses:  suddenly everyone wants to be working class!  But why?  At the end of the day, being brought up working class means being psychically beaten to a pulp as frequently as is convenient by family, school and society.

Somehow, in the middle of all this, I was inspired by a high school teacher to regard myself as an intellectual.  I took the challenge seriously, but upon arriving in college the other more subterranean agenda took hold, which was to in some way to achieve this goal while being undermined by family dysfunction.  I was far from being a superior student, and it was not until later in life as a returning student that I came into the possession of the skill sets easily inherited by others of more affluent and comfortable backgrounds.  Even today, I am still galled that in having relocated to the Mid Hudson from The City that I thought my way into settlement here was to put my shoulder to the wheel and commit myself to volunteer work in every organization I could identify for myself.  Too, there are people in the arts world who are worker bees, but never achieve the degree of recognition they deserve.  Is all this because some of us have been brought up to believe that this is the only position we can or deserve to occupy in society?

My current circumstances involve living in the City of Newburgh, a crazy quilt pattern of neighborhoods varying in income levels, yet somehow peppered ethnically.  Too, my life has deposited me in the mental health community, a double edged sword of downward mobility but also an oasis of friendship and support.  Today is July 4^th, and the past year has led me to a surprising appreciation of my American citizenship.  As a high schooler, I was something of a hyper patriot, needing something to identify with and hold onto without the benefits of higher education.  Today I realize that we all forge both our identities and agree upon what we have to contribute to the world.