We must remember, after all, that all of these happenings are in truth mysteries. Even though they happen a million times, they are still mysteries. If we lose our sense of the mysterious, or the numinous, if we lose our sense of awe, of humility, of having been struck dumb, if we lose our sense of good fortune, then we have lost a very real and basic human capacity and are diminished thereby.—Abraham H. Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences

Only after long observation does the sophisticated eye succeed in labeling these events as natural rather than miraculous.—Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe

In the winter of 1979–80
      when I commuted from Norridge to Niles by bus
            and did the final half-mile on foot
                  through the courtyard of a two-story motel
                        walking day after day under the porch-accessway
                              of upper units
I saw in the deep of February
      an outside-but-sheltered faucet left dripping
            and in the circle of evaporating water beneath it,
                  in colored rings at differing radii
                        from the steaming dropfall,
Life.

Across the gradient from "warm enough to steam in winter"
      to the sparkle of frost to beyond-frozen dry
Algaes and perhaps bacteria
      differing in requirement of and tolerance to moisture
            and cold
                  found their niches in circles defined by boundary conditions:
Colored rings of differing radii—
Life.

I  Welcoming

At seventeen I did not know that I had for years been standing
      unconscious, unhoping vigil
For the message of wisdom and friendship from one of my own kind and culture
      that must pass freely given from generation to generation,
            from older to younger,
                  neither in hope, expectation, nor speculation,
If children are not to become expert
      in the mute exploitation of each other and their world in strangerhood
Living all of their lives the desolate inverse
Of what they later can know only through instinct
They have utterly failed to have been given.

And so I encountered welcome in verse:

Crossed a line around the changes of the summer
Reaching out to call the color of the sky
Passed around a moment clothed in mornings
Faster than we see.—Jon Anderson and Steve Howe in Close to the Edge by Yes¹

To you this passage may well seem opaque
But having seen before age thirteen, in an instant, with the cogency of a physical blow,
The entire world reflected, implied, and promised
      in the algae growing at the base
            of one water-fountain jet
                  in a bicycled-to Portage Park
At once I knew it not only as corroboration
      that it had not been my imagination
            that without the prosthesis of technology
                  we can perceive ourselves affecting, and affected by,
                        nonfantastic Unseen
                              and are born with tools for so understanding
But also as a message of friendship
      to me from my culture
            that had come in song as a summons—
Not only to so Witnessing
      but also to so Teaching
For I had lived those hidden-in-plain-sight mornings long enough
      to understand that failure to so Perceive
            is to exist in perpetual bereavement
                  for unknown, fantastic lives
                        and storied, neverborn dead
And that only Perception's eternal dawn
Can dispel and banish that virtual, inculcated Shadow.

If you have not yet received that Message in your life
It may seem no less opaque when I tell you now
That regardless of its form, content, timing, sender, and recipient
      the only import it can and must convey
Is that only Being Loved
Teaches Love.

II  Stranger

Have you learn'd lessions only of those who admired you,
      and were tender with you, and stood aside for you?
Have you not learn'd great lessons from those who reject
      you, and brace themselves against you? or who treat you
      with contempt, or dispute the passage with you?—Walt Whitman, "Stronger Lessons"

One high school afternoon in 1972 or 1973
      a girl I had never seen before
            and could not subsequently recognize
                  walked quickly up to me through the throng
                        of between-classes passers
                              in the connector to the Learning Lab
                                    and without speaking
                                          viciously kicked me on an ankle
                                                and walked away.

From time to time since
      I have thought of her and the hate
            she must have ongoingly endured so young
                  to seek resolution of Thought
                        through accosting a stranger
                              in such desperate intimacy.

III  Outrage II

The need for safety, belongingness, love relations and for respect can be satisfied only by other people, i.e., only from outside the person. This means considerable dependence on the environment. A person in this dependent position cannot really be said to be governing himself, or in control of his own fate. He must be beholden to the sources of supply of needed gratifications. Their wishes, their whims, their rules and their laws govern him and must be appeased lest he jeopardize his sources of supply. He must be, to an extent, "other directed," and must be sensitive to other people's approval, affection, and good will....Because of this, the deficiency-motivated man must be more afraid of the environment, since there is always the possibility that it may fail or disappoint him. We know now that this kind of anxious dependence breeds hostility as well. All of which adds up to a lack of freedom, more or less, depending on the good fortune or bad fortune of the individual.—Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being²

It was at a family yard party in July of 1975
      that my brother's wife said to me,
"You don't need people, do you?"

Within the next two hours
      my brother, drunk,
            would laughingly set off a firecracker
                  on the porch railing
                        three feet from my right ear,
                              damaging my hearing
                                    for life
                                          and my uncle would work himself
                                                into a drunken tirade against me
                                                      for not sending money back
                                                            from my job a thousand miles away
                                                                  to help my father
                                                                        take care of my learning-disabled sister
                                                                              as everyone else at the party,
                                                                                    including my father, grandmother, sisters,
                                                                                          brother, aunt, and cousins, watched
                                                                                                in silence
                                                                                                      and I left by the alley gate
                                                                                                            in silence.

Later that year
      my brother's wife
            who had asked me
                  if I needed people
                        would give birth
                              and, later still, also having her reasons, abscond
                                    with her infant son.

In contrast, the self-actualizing individual, by definition gratified in his basic needs, is far less dependent, far less beholden, far more autonomous and self-directed. Far from needing other people, growth-motivated people may actually be hampered by them....Since they depend less on other people, they are less ambivalent about them, less anxious and also less hostile, less needful of their praise and their affection. They are less anxious for honors, prestige, and rewards.—Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being³

IV  Home

It was on the Jefferson Park el platform
Waiting for a train into the Loop to work
On a sun-bright morning in May 1977
That I heard a woman speak of how her daughter had just had a child
And then, considering the luminous spring-green trees at the top of the embankment
Across the tumbling inbound Kennedy,
Saw my own life in Life branching
And realized that there is no such thing
As Time.

V  Malingering

Called to teach Morse Code
      to a bedridden blind and deaf young woman
            in Seattle in late 1982
                  I bought a book on the manual alphabet
                        and built a tactile Morse-key-and-buzzer device
                              and squirted heat-curable gray epoxy on cardboard
                                    to make a chart of letter versus Braille versus Morse
                                          and in our several sessions spelled
                                                my sentences into her hands
                                                      the way I had seen my ex-girlfriend do
                                                            with American Sign Language
                                                                  as we first visited her together.

"You will find her compelling,"
      Susan had unncessarily said
            of C's unblinking, unfocused gaze
                  and strong voice
                        that toward the end of each teaching session waned
                              to weak and almost absently distant
                                    as she tired of the effort of communication
                                          and learning.

Across those sessions C imparted her story
      of becoming blind and deaf and bedridden
            across her late teens into her early twenties
                  after having been seeing- and hearing-normal
                        in childhood
                              so explaining her ability to speak clearly
                                    and the well-formedness of her speech
                                          and the lack of eye sunkenness and miscontrol
                                                usual in the congenitally blind.
Of her bedriddenness she explained that
      within the past five years she had developed
            chronic, widespread pain
                  and, with it, a distrust of doctors, who
                        could not find the basis for her pain
                              and were refusing to validate her claims for disability and supplemental aid
                                    despite her bedriddenness
                                          and the crutches
                                                and the wheelchair I could see
                                                      stored back in an alcove in the bare
                                                            hospitalroomlike apartment
                                                                  she inhabited in perpetual dusk.

C kept particular telephone times
      for an hour or so several nights a week
            during which, she said, volunteers came
                  and sat silently to translate the speech of the phone into her hands
                        in ASL
                              while she did the talking
                                    and one evening I complimented her translator
                                          in an aside
                                                that whoever it was was doing an excellent job
                                                      keeping up with the technicalities
                                                            of Morse Code and amateur radio
                                                                  and in our next meeting
                                                                        C upbraided me
                                                                              for talking to the translator
                                                                                    who is supposed to be transparent
                                                                                          and treated as if absent
And it was after this meeting
      that on the evening of our next meeting
            I realized that I did not feel like going
                  and also did not feel guilty
                        that I did not want to go again.

Because during my upbringing I had been conditioned to tolerate outrage
      and in doing so respond to depredation with analysis,
It had been this tiny disjunct in a logical flow of events—
That, almost certainly, it seemed to me, one translating,
      having intercepted a comment meant for translator
            and not for translatee, would have trapped the comment
                  and not passed it along to translatee—
And not C's astounding proposal, two meetings in,
      that I accompany her as aide on a trip to Texas,
            a statement I laughingly brushed off
                  as a frivolously outlandish compliment
I was not surprised at hearing from Susan
      several months later
            that during C's recuperation during subsequent hospitalization
                  for complications from an infection
                        related to urinary catheterization during her protracted bedriddenness
                              a sign placed on her door
                                    admonished visiting friends and volunteers
                                          not to use sign language
                                                and to speak normally
Because she could see them
And hear them.

VI  Edge

In the days two weeks before Christmas,
      mother, three children, and grandmother swept aboard
            the subway train at Park Place, in constellation centered
                  about the toddler girl in her stroller athwart the door,
                        big sister to one side with mother and grandmother,
                              the son, the eldest, on the other,
                                    each child clutching and reexamining
                                          a new toy,
                                                the boy's a blister-packaged set of plastic
                                                      rescue/emergency action figures, and mother,
                                                            handed the package to admire, said to her son,
"Those are the guys who tried to help
      your brother."

VII  Monstrosity

Never having received formal lessons
      in mimicking and speaking with the timbre and formants of the voice
            of my father
Yet I speak much as my father spoke,
      my voice immediately recognizable to his familiars
            as that of a son of the father
                  as the voice of my son
                        is immediately recognizable to mine.
So early imprinting and inculcation from Exemplar and Environment
      can operate in Creaturehood through Virtualization
Irrespective of their detectability and accessibility
In consciousness.

Were it not for its carrying
      on museumlike display
            the radioactive kernel
                  of its author's desolation,
                        "The Only Girl in the Car"
                              would merely fulfil its purpose as being
                                     introspectionless, well-written pornography
                                           for hire by an audience numbed by intellection
                                                 to its self-despising hunger
                                                       for sadism and self-degradation:

When I was in my teens, my mother told me that I didn't seem to like being held or touched as a child—I cringed, I grew stiff—so she and my father made a decision not to. They would wait until I came to them. And they waited and waited.—Kathy Dobie, "The Only Girl in the Car"⁴

Translation:
"Until you respond to our need for abjectly needful child's love
      as we expect it to be expressed
"We withhold love from you."

When Harlow placed his subjects in total isolation for the first eight months of life, denying them contact with other infants or with either type of surrogate mother, they were permanently damaged. Harlow and his colleagues repeated these experiments, subjecting infant monkeys to varied periods of motherlessness. They concluded that the impact of early maternal deprivation could be reversed in monkeys only if it had lasted less than 90 days, and estimated that the equivalent for humans was six months. After these critical periods, no amount of exposure to mothers or peers could alter the monkeys' abnormal behaviors and make up for the emotional damage that had already occurred.—The Adoption History Project⁵

Illegitimate hate
      is, at base, a refusal of healthful transaction
            within Mind
                  between Mind and its hosting Creaturehood
                        between creature and creature
                              between creature and environment.
The healthful transaction between parent and child
      is nurturance of child by parent.
Neglect of child by parent
Is hate.
Neglect of child by parent
      because the child's fluency in the language of Need
            is puzzling or incomplete
Is illegitimate hate.

Therefore, the translation of the translation:
"We hated you."

The first lesson in illegitimate hate
      is Being Illegitimately Hated
            and the imprinting and inculcation of hating in the parent-infant case
                  from hatred of the child by parent to hatred of Self and World by child
                        proves that one need not be conscious of being hated,
                              need only be illegitimately hated
                                    without recourse to healthfully defending against, fighting,
                                          neutralizing, or fleeing
                                                the Hater
For lessons of refusal of healthful transaction
      to imprint
For the habit of refusal of healthful transaction
      to begin to form.

Until we become sensitized to the small child's suffering, this wielding of power by adults will continue to be regarded as a normal aspect of the human condition, for hardly anyone pays attention to it or takes it seriously. Because the victims are "only children," their distress is trivialized. But in twenty years' time these children will be adults who feel compelled to pay it all back to their own children. They may consciously fight with vigor against cruelty in the world, yet carry within themselves an experience of cruelty that they may unconsciously inflict on others. As long as it remains hidden behind their idealized picture of a happy childhood, they will have no awareness of it and will therefore be unable to avoid passing it on.—Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child⁶

And who are We The Audience to the Writer?
We are the Writer's introjected They Who Illegitimately Hated The Writer—
      they who injured the writer but could not healthfully and successfully defended against,
            fought, fled, mourned, neutralized, or forgotten.
And who is the Writer to We The Audience?
She is Those Whose Degradation Fascinates Us Because We Are The Same—
      she who we despise to protect ourselves from realizing that we are the same.
And what is her writing to We The Audience?
Her writing to We The Audience is yet another trigger for thought that reinforces our habit of refusal
      of healthful transaction
            by returning us to the scenes of our own woundings from illegitimate hate
                  without illustrating its healthful resolution in the writer
                        and therefore without calling us to healthfully resolve it in ourselves.

Mark, who suffered under his perversion and constantly feared the rejection of others, bore within him the unconscious memory of his mother's rejection. Without knowing why, he was compelled to do things that his circle and society generally disapprove of and despise, although he feared the punishment he was provoking. If society were suddenly to have honored his form of perversion (as happens in certain circles), he would perhaps have had to change his compulsion, but that would never have freed him. What he was compelled to seek was not permission to use one or another fetish, but—with the hope of a better outcome—the digusted and horrified eyes.—Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child⁷

So roars the hurricanic engine
      of anger, risk-taking, and degradation-for-hire
            that drives hunger for brain-affecting chemicals
                  the Hate Industries
                        of megasports
                              mega-entertainment
                                    recreational drugs
                                          pornography
                                                shock jocks, shock movies, and shock music
                                                      "reality" television
                                                            the explosion in self-mutilation through tattooing and piercing:
Hunger for trying to forget
      that we cannot Forget
            cannot Fight,
                  cannot Flee,
                        cannot Neutralize,
                              through subjugation of Creaturehood and World
                                    to the raw siezure and exercise of "power"
                                           over any object, process, or creature, including Self,
                                                 by any means ready to hand
To no resolvable End.

That probably greatest of narcissistic wounds—not to have been loved just as one truly was—cannot heal without the work of mourning⁸ . . . . avoiding this mourning means that one remains at bottom the one who is despised.—Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child⁹

Without perceiving and understanding What Is
      we cannot understand the effects on us of What Was.
Without understanding the effects on us of What Was
      there can be no mourning for That Which Was But Can Neither Be Healthily Relived Nor Undone
            and no healthful disassembly of its life-warping continuity
                  in Mind.
Without that disassembly through understanding and mourning,
When we are not simultaneously hungering for and evading disgusted, horrified eyes
We are those eyes
Teaching by Example
      and through Environment
            lessons of refusal of healthful transaction
                  that will imprint with or without cognition
Strengthening the habit of refusal of healthful transaction
Or compelling it to begin to form.

VIII  The Refusal of Hate

The first lesson in Illegitimate Hatred
      is being illegitimately hated
            such that one's instinct to fight for flee
                  is triggered without recourse to its healthful resolution.
Once you have become another's object of illegitimate hate
      such that you cannot healthfully fight, flee, or neutralize the attack in real time
            you will be its vector
Until you refuse both roles—object and vector—
Through understanding and mourning.

Grandma's daughter liked to tell the story
That Grandma liked to tell the story
Of how Grandma had spanked the daughter at one
To force the daughter to try ice cream
"'And of course she liked it!'"

Grandma had trained the family to expect
That she would shriek and run
      at the sight of snakes
Printed in pictures in left-open books.

Grandma, who had for years been a first-grade teacher
And had risen to school administrator,
Dimissed, through incitement to cognitive dissonance,
      the distress of her young granddaughter,
            drink spilled into the grass at a family gathering:
"There was probably a bug in it, anyway."

As Grandma's husband lay dying
      I left Grandma's daughter's second son
            with his grandmother
                  to go to the grandfather in his hospital bed
                        and kiss his forehead
                              and hold his hand
                                    as his body failed
                                          consciousness flowing toward ebb

And on returning to Grandma's, found
      the grandson anxious
            and begging me to leave.
At the door, Grandma asked him for a kiss
      but he refused
            and Grandma said, before my eyes,
"But what if Santa Claus might not give you any presents
      if you don't give Grandma a kiss?"
And my son of four said, "I don't care—
"I just want to get out of here,"
And closed the door.

IX

It was four years before she split our family two ways,
      then three ways in emptying her household of males,
            that my first son's mother had secretly written,
                  carrying him six months before his birth,
"I really hope this baby is a girl baby
So I'll have something safe to cuddle."

X  The Awful Rowing Toward God¹⁰

The issue of whether or not there is in What Is an agency
      we would call God
            has already been decided out of human hands
                  beyond all possibility of negation or self-congratulatory affirmation
                        by human Knowing.
The hosting of surety of God in human Mind
      would therefore merely be
            no more or less important
                  or beautiful
                        that the arrangement of color on a butterfly's wing
                              were it not for the ignorance, discrimination,
                                    abuse, victim-seeking, and killing
That hosting of and subservience to Fantastic Authority
Drives.

Considering the ferocity and frequency
      of manipulation, discrimination, destruction, and killing perpetrated in the name of this fantasy
Discovery of the existence in an individual
      of belief in God
            must be followed by an assessment of damage and potential danger:
Is the belief the life-giving comfort
      of a gorgeously group-decorated magical confection
            shared lovingly with those of like mind
Or is the belief childhood-inculcated delusion
      that drives subjugation of Self,
            Peer, Life, and World to disrespect for the Unknown
                  such that it cannot be accepted as merely unknown
                        and to grimly intentional ignorance
                              of What Is
Or is the belief a cunning strategy
      to project, and use for personal and political power,
            introjected abusive childhood Authority
                  that could neither be safely ignored, rebuffed, nor questioned
                        into an overarching Beneficence the actions of which,
                              no matter how inscrutable, ruthless, or lethal,
Are defined as infinitely Intelligent and Loving
And always Good?

The next morning, after a rather silent breakfast, Dillard asks if I heard her during the night.
"No," I say. "Did you have a nightmare or something?"
"I was crying uncontrollably," she replies. "Those questions you were asking me about faith...."
"But how could I not?" I protest. "It threads through all your books."
"Just because I'm religious doesn't mean I'm insane," she replies, and cries some more.—Mary Cantwell, "A Pilgrim's Progress"¹¹

To search for Home
      requires belief and groundedness in,
            and a beginning from,
Homelessness.

In every home
      in every school
            in every church
That Homelessness is taught
      that the strictures and purveyances of these institutions
            might be inculcated
                  through shame, subordination, and threat of ostracization,
                        if not outright coercion and violence,
As its only remedy.

It is not insane to want lovedness, homedness, affirmedness, and peace
      and to ache for the insufficiency of their givenness
            before and since conscious memory began
To have been other than it was.
Tears at a song or another's questioning
      are the gift from Self to Self
            of a message
                  from clouded Knownness
                        deep in the internality of Creaturehood
                              as one trapped underground, hearing the faint, tentative nearing of Rescue,
                                    shouts and hammers all the harder—
The call to understanding why
      to living in the understanding of why
A creature can so desolately need That Which One Unequivocally Knows Not To Be Demonstrable
      As Fact
To be demonstrable as Fact.

Holding the world in contempt
      for being other than what one has been consciously and unconsciously taught to dream
            it must be
                  claims as its first and ongoing victim
                        its bearer.

"Spiritual path" is the hilarious popular term for those night-blind mesas and flayed hills in which people grope for decades on end, with the goal of knowing the absolute.—Annie Dillard, For the Time Being¹²

Although the concept of spiritual path is wrongheaded
      in that the Absolute is as near
            as the cells of one's own retinas
                  and the threshold of Understanding
                        lies open at all places,
                              for all people,
                                    at any and every instant,
                                          orthogonal to knowledge and experience,
                                                and a path to Understanding therefore can neither be discovered
                                                      nor described,
One who understands this does not characterize others' lostness or weakness,
      or living in the lack of Understanding,
            or belief or intimation that such a path might exist,
                  as hilarious
For yearning to live otherwise is healthy
      and living otherwise is our birthright
And no one who lives in Understanding
      intentionally acts as if they do not
For to do so is to act in contempt
Of Self and World.

How might this writer have been taught contempt?

She regarded children, even babies, as straight men. When Molly learned to crawl, Mother delighted in buying her gowns with drawstrings at the bottom, like Swee'pea's, because, as she explained energetically, you could easily step on the drawstring without the baby's noticing, so that she crawled and crawled and never got anywhere except into a small ball at the gown's top.
      . . . . During a family trip to the Highland Park Zoo, Mother and I were alone for a minute. She approached a young couple holding hands on a bench by the seals, and addressed the young man in dripping tones: "Where have you been? Still got those baby-blue eyes; always did slay me. And this"—a swift nod at the dumbstruck young woman, who had removed her hand from the man's—"must be the one you were telling me about. She's not so bad really, as you used to make out. But listen, you know how I miss you, you know where to reach me, same old place. And there's Ann over there—see how she's grown? See the blue eyes."
      And off she sashayed, taking me firmly by the hand, and leading us around briskly past the monkey house and away. She cocked an ear back, and both of us heard the desperate man begin, in a high-pitched wail, "I swear, I never heard of her before in my life . . ."—Annie Dillard, An American Childhood¹³

The sight gag could blur with the practical joke—not a noble form but a friendly one, which helps the years pass. My parents favored practical jokes of the sort you set up and then retire from, as one writes books, possibly because imagining people's reactions beats witnessing them.—Annie Dillard, An American Childhood¹⁴

(The key phrase, as one writes books, is buried.)

Amusement through the infliction, on any life, of frustration, discomfiture,
      confoundment, or consternation
            is contempt;
Its impetus, no species of friendliness
But rather ignorance
Of one's own hatred.

It is sane to want lovedness, homedness, affirmedness, and peace
      and to ache for the insufficiency of their givenness
            before and since conscious memory began
                  to have been other than it was
                        but Resolution cannot come
                              through human transactions underlain by contempt,
                                    nor through Fantasy
                                          of God, loving or otherwise,
For to turn from World
      to fantasies of Other Than World
Is to hold World itself
In contempt.

How long, I wondered, could you stretch this out? How boldly could you push an audience—not, in Mother's term, to "slay them"—but to please them in some grand way? How could you convince the listeners that you knew what you were doing, that the payoff would come? Or conversely, how long could you lead them to think you were stupid, a dumb blonde, to enhance their surprise at the punch line, and heighten their pleasure in the good story you had controlled all along?—Annie Dillard, An American Childhood¹⁵

XI  An Understanding of The Compulsion to Repeat

In The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller characterizes the presence of the compulsion to repeat—compulsive seeking and/or revisitation of relationships that more or less reproduce or resemble the environment of believed-past injuries—as coming from "the hope of a better outcome," and "a fascination with tormenting relationships." To me these characterizations are incomplete because they provide insight into neither why the compulsion is a compulsion nor why it repeats! Coming to an understanding of these whys, to the ability to observe the operation of the loop of compulsion in oneself in real time, can be healing—that is, can aid movement toward mourning, the only healthy, consciousness-participative resolution possible for the injuries that drive the compulsion. Understanding the mechanism of the compulsion to repeat begins with understanding the basis of Thought itself.

Thought is the error signal in a negative-feedback behavioral loop and ever seeks to resolve itself to zero through creaturehood Action. As an example, consider what happens as you enter a dark room from a lit room or hallway: (1) You sense that the room is dark. (2) You sense an impulse to switch on a light in the dark room. (3) The impulse to switch on the light vanishes after you switch on the light and perceive that the room is now sufficiently bright. The impulse at (2) and (3) is Thought itself—drive toward Action. As soon as Action produces the desired result, Thought (the particular stream engendered by the room's darkness, anyway) ceases. Unless something is amiss with your perceptual equipment, you do not keep trying to turn on the light—that is, you are not compelled to repeat the Action—because Action has succeeded in modifying your relationship with Environment to the satisfaction of your senses. This is an example of healthy Thought in action: Thought, a creaturehood tool that comes into being for a specific purpose, operates toward the achievement of that purpose, and is then discarded when that purpose has been fulfilled. (That we are habituated from very early ages to tolerate, even seek, Thought for its own sake, Thought that has no easy resolution to zero through straightforward, healthful Action, is telling. The book, music, magazine, television, and motion-picture industries—the mass media in general—are in business to sell Thought, of which emotions are a class, as snack foods.)

The compulsion to repeat is Thought—in particular, Thought instantiated as the impulse to fight or flee—that cannot truly be resolved to zero. I understand its mechanism to operate as follows:

When I am attacked, by instinct I seek to

fight

and/or

flee

and/or (after I have been sufficiently socialized)

negotiate

to end, or lessen the effects of, the attack. All of these are Action, which results from Thought seeking to resolve itself to zero.

But I am a child who cannot successfully (that is, to the cessation of the driving Thought) fight my tormentor, and/or I am a tiny child who cannot successfully flee from my torment, and/or I am a tiny (or not so tiny) child who cannot successfully negotiate with my tormentor to end or lessen my torment. So I am now the bearer of critically insistent Thought that I cannot through healthy and successful Action make go away.

All of my life—and I am getting older and older, farther and farther away from the actual situation, the actual event of my torment and the people responsible for it—I will harbor that unresolvable Thought because I Remember, consciously or otherwise. In effect, as far as my resolving this Thought is concerned, the proper recipients of my healthful Action toward that resolution have moved without leaving a forwarding address.

The reality is more complex, of course, and more compelling, because as all creatures do, I have available the tool of Memory. In Memory I have introjected, more or less consciously, my torment and my tormentors. Through introjection, unresolvable Thought caused by early torment is ever renewed. I seek to Act to make the Thought vanish—but I cannot, because stimulus and its resolution have been decoupled.

Moving through the world, I encounter situations that remind me of the tableaux of my torment and people that remind me of my tormentors—and/or of me being helpless at the hands of my tormentors. Always, because Thought seeks to resolve itself to zero and because I am far removed in space, time, and situation from the most healthful possible resolution of that thought, I instead seek to resolve that Thought through new people, new situations. I may even seek new tormentors, more or less consciously seeking to piggyback the resolution of Thought from unresolvable torment with resolution of "fight, flee, or negotiate" Thought arising from new tormentors in new situations. That's the feeling I'm after all along: That my torment is done because I have acted to reduce its drive in me to zero.

Except that this piggybacking doesn't work. Depending on my particular makeup and the nature of my torment, I may seek victim after victim, scapegoat after scapegoat, whose similarity to my tormentor and/or to Tormented Me so enrages me that I am compelled to torment or destroy them to end Thought. (I am Hitler or Stalin or a serial killer or anyone who seeks to destroy victim after victim.) Or I may seek victim after victim to save as I could not save myself. (I am Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu or anyone who habitually seeks to rescue total strangers, to Save The World through Great Works.) Now Action serves at least a dual purpose: Not only does it operate (unsuccessfully) to reduce its true driving Thought to zero, it also seeks to keep me from the introspection that would lead to my understanding my drives and motives. And now if I socialize my victim-seeking—Mother Theresa or Hitler, the underlying drive is exactly the same—such that I receive the adulation of followers (who themselves simultaneously seek victims [to save or kill] and avoidance of introspection), so much the better: I can sleepwalk all of my life; I can be famous; I may even be sainted or make millions. And yet through it all the unresolved Thought will remain, its drive ever ventriloquized, its origin and resolultion every obfuscated, its resolution ever deferred, by my ever looking Out when I should be looking In.

This I understand to be the "why" of the compulsion to repeat. It is not "a fascination with tormenting relationships," but the continued presence of unresolved, and renewedly unresolved, Thought, that drives us to relive and revisit old situations, and recreate the old conditions through new situations similar enough to the original crime scene(s), that we might somehow compel ourselves into Action such that that Thought might end. We have turned on the light, but our senses tell us that we remain in darkness. So the drive to turn on the light persists.

I believe that exactly this mechanism explains the horrible ending events of suicidal hostage-taking scenarios. The killer's victim-/scapegoat-seeking has reached the point of actual killing. Doing so should make the unbearable Thought vanish; that's what Action is for. But it doesn't. In the last instant, the perpetrator, who we know is at base a victim who has somehow evaded acquiring the ability to introspect, understand, and mourn, instantaneously realizes more or less consciously that the source of his or her drive is internal after all—a final horror among horrors. Then it seems that suicide is the only way to make Thought stop.

We may erroneously believe that because of the role Memory plays in the process of the compulsion to repeat, Memory is the culprit. If only we could forget! But this is wrongheaded: Memory is an essential tool of creaturehood; I could not go to bed, find my way to my work or back home, or even walk to my kitchen, without Memory, and I am therefore endowed by Nature with the facility of irresistibly acquiring memories involuntarily. It is true to say, however, that even as Memory—aided by witnesses who may know more about the details of our torment than we remember—is the key to processing ventriloquized torment through mourning, mourning must be ongoing, understanding ever deepening, precisely because we cannot forget.

In contrast to its primary basis in the escape of torment, I consider that there is a fourth foundation of the compulsion to repeat that I think is very real and instinctive, but which has so far been largely overlooked as a component of its drive. My understanding of this comes from my experience that not only self-preservation, but also preservation of others of one's kind, is instinctoid. With this in mind, I think that a very real component of the compulsion to repeat is the drive to rescue one's tormentor(s)—in effect, to rescue them from themselves, from their own torment, from being victims reduced to tormenting others. I have recognized in myself a clear wish to somehow go back into the past and hold my abusing father and love him at the time in his life when it would have mattered the way his love would have mattered to me. (Tears welled in my eyes as I typed that sentence.) And so, I mourn not only for me, but for him, and for our progenitors who inculcated this terrible sleepwalkingness from generation to generation.

XII  Teacher

Easy to sense the drift of life,
Hard to compel one creature out of its course.—Du Fu, "The Autumn Wastes," translated by A. C. Graham in Poems of the Late T'ang

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

When, at sixteen, she had first written to me—
      "I'm going to just step into your life"—
              it had been neither in comradeship
                     nor in the gladness of one newly, exploringly Giving
                           in nascent trajectory toward the distant sunlit peace of adult Matedhood
But as a declaration of Taking
By One Had Who Been Taken From.

On my invited first visit to her house
      in the days after Christmas of 1972
            her father declared me persona non grata,
                  unsuitable even as a friend for his child
                        because I had not also been raised as a loving Christian
                              as she and her mother witnessed this verbal beating in a protestless silence
                                    I now understand was not only agreement
But complicity.

Such behavior is no less than assault,
      and where such weaponry is maintained so baldly ready to hand
            for wielding in the humiliation of a mild, adolescent stranger
                  we must examine also the trajectory of the children of the house
                        extrapolating, as we must, a lethal atmosphere of displaced self-hatred
                              from such an unprovoked abuse of the vulnerable Weak
By the seemingly ascendant, exemplary Strong.

So vast to me at 17 did the surface of the superficial irony of the contradiction seem
      that Christ's storied militantly all-inclusive Love
            could be used as a bludgeon of bigoted discrimination toward
                  Exclusion
                        that at the moment of his violence toward me
                              I did not immediately understand that its perpetrator
Was no less a victim:
Religiously pious Adult is abused Child grown up unawakened
To the pedagogy that produced it.

"To me God is all there is," she wrote
      in her first letter to me after her father's assault,
            neither then nor since addressing its fact, meaning, or effects,
                  but rather—shockingly to me then—affirming its basis
                        in studiedly indirect
                              genericity.
Did I not, she wrote, also sense "the mellowness in the wind?"

The first lesson in illegitimate hate
      begins with Being Hated
            and the imprinting and inculcation of hating in the parent-infant case
                  from hatred of the child by parent to hatred of Self and World by child
                        proves that one need not be conscious of being illegitimately hated,
                              need only be attacked without recourse to healthfully defending against, fighting,
                                    neutralizing, or fleeing
                                          the attacker
For lessons of refusal of healthful transaction
      to imprint
For the habit of refusal of healthful transaction—
      of fleeing what must be fled from,
            fighting what must be fought,
                  mourning That Which Was And Should Not Have Been But Cannot Be Undone—
To begin to form.

"I hate you for knowing what you cannot know,"
      she wrote to me in the autumn of 1974
            on my calling her to both Love and Awakening, even as inarticulate Youth galvanized
                  through my having decoded enough of the tableau of her father's trespass
                        and the arc of her pious, world-saving drivenness
                              to understand that the hatred of her parents and their forebears
                                    was both its Origin
And, barring her awakening, its certain Destination.

That summer she had written to me,
"Be furious and forget!
"Be furious with those who will touch me
      while imagining nothing of you,"
            the first sentence relaying precisely
                  the creed of her nurturer-abusers
                        by whom even a glance of displeasure at their depredations,
                              far short of open fury,
                                    was met by further abuse,
Both sentences reflecting also
      the brilliance of the human mind for Escape
            through the inventiveness of torture of another,
                  which is always displaced self-torture,
                        which is always displaced hatred of introjected They Who Injured, in translation:
"Though the healthful response of Mind to Love
      is Gladness
            I have been taught to think by those who should have loved me
                  that Love is a strategy of influence and control
                        and therefore as my parents' response to me was Denial
                              even of their responsibility for my desolation at their hatred,
                                    so my response to you is Denial
                                          not only of your love but of responsibility for having given you
                                                cause to mourn
                                                      which through the same mechanism of unaffirmation
                                                            I call you to displace as anger
                                                                  that you might live in anger
"As I do,
"And so I taunt you instead to Forget,
      for we both know that there can be no forgetting,
            and preen myself by further taunting you that I anticipate in enjoyment your pain
                  at imagining me in anger throughout futurity,
                        even as I enjoin you to forget,
                              as being and having been won and possessed by multiple others who succeeded
"As you could not."
Revealing even more starkly its writer's misery
      at the hands of injuring Authority
            than its payload of sadism
                  is the presence in that passage of direct incitement to illegitimate hatred,
                        its calculus complete even to the identification and proffering of proxy-victims,
                              in translation:
"Direct your legitimate anger not at me
      but rather at those yet-unmet few whose sole unbeknownst transgression against you
            will be to have been granted by me
                  the agency in my life
"I would not grant to you."

By her own declaration
Such would be the true esteem in which she, unawakened,
Would go on to hold every one she would appear to love in her life:
Even unmet and unamed, each would long before have been betrayed and abandoned
In avoidance of necessary Mourning.

Minutes after our first interactive contact in over twenty years
      I received a long-distance telephone call from a child
            who asked if I was interested in supporting
                  Students Against Destructive Decisions.
A child!
A child.

Called to mourn,
She had hated.
Called to hatred,
I had mourned.
My coming to understand both trajectories
Would perhaps be her greatest teaching;
My articulation of that understanding,
Perhaps mine.

Our net Transaction viewed through the degreeless brilliance
      of Instinct, yet another Male had merely been rebuffed by yet another Female
            in the seeking, by both, of partnership
                  toward Offspring;
                        that Lifehood's Strategy of the Individual—"if not You,
                              Another"—might not also operate for each of us
                                    was never really in question,
                                          and as both of us did indeed go on to have
                                                our children—she her one and I my three—with others,
                                                      at my death I will acquiesce
                                                            to the ascendency of that Wisdom,
The only wisdom.

Our net Transaction viewed through Love's understanding that it is its own success,
      I had not, and could not have, failed—
            but Love, the answer to its own
                  questioning, is, in the ultimate, but the most splendid of solipsisms,
                        beginning, being, and ending
                              in the gladness of Lover.

Our net Transaction considered in terms
      of my having encountered a child schooled in hatred
            on the verge of herself becoming its teacher
                  and having sought to engender in her the self- and world-awareness
                        only through which can come the understanding
                              that must underlie its only possible healing
                                    through Mourning,
I had failed.

She was a teacher, or rather had been one. She was affectionate and kindly, and this had almost become a routine. She said she had taught for over twenty-five years and had been happy in it; and although towards the end she had wanted to get away from the whole thing, she had stuck to it. Recently she had begun to realize what was deeply buried in her nature. She had suddenly discovered it during one of the discussions, and it had really surprised and shocked her. It was there, and it wasn't a mere self-accusation; and as she looked back through the years she could now see that it had always been there. She really hated. It was not hatred of anyone in particular, but a feeling of general hate, a suppressed antagonism towards everyone and everything. When she first discovered it, she thought it was something very superficial which she could easily throw off; but as the days went by she found that it wasn't just a mild affair, but a deep-rooted hatred that had been going on all her life. What shocked her was that she had always thought she was affectionate and kind.—J. Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living, Second Series¹⁸

XIII  Ending Without End

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.—Samuel Beckett, Murphy¹⁹

So says Mind to itself
And yet the Universe,
Unfolding in the eternal durationless instant of Now,
Is only New.

For man did fall; even to an unbeliever and evolutionist like Darwin. Man fell from the grace of instinct into a confused and troubled cultural realm beyond nature, much as in the old theology man fell from a state of innocence into carnal knowledge.—Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe²⁰

So says human Mind to itself
Yet man never operates, cannot operate, outside of the unlearned facility
      of Creaturehood knowledge that is Instinct
            the tools of Intellect merely providing higher resolution
                  in the acquisition by Subject
Of target Object.

A month ago, after a passage of many years, I stood above my mother's grave in a place called Wyuka. We, she and I, were close to being one now, lying like the skeletons of last year's leaves in a fence corner. And it was all nothing. Nothing, do you understand? All the pain, all the anguish. Nothing. We were, both of us, merely the debris life always leaves in its passing. . . . It was for nothing. It has taken me all my life to grasp this one fact.—Loren Eiseley, All the Strange Hours²¹

So says Mind to itself
And yet, because nowhere
Is there Nothing
Anywhere
Ever,
No thing
Has been, is, or can be
Nothing
And the strategic ascription by Mind to Thing or Event
Of Nothingness, Causelessness, or Effectlessness
Is itself a Something—no less
      a Causedness,
            a Causingness,
An Effect.

I learned under the night sky of the utter homelessness of man.—Loren Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe²²

So says Mind to itself
And yet
There being only All There Is,
Man, being of All There Is,
Can never be anywhere other
Than Home.

It could be seen as entertaining
That Consciousness hosted in All There Is, Has Been, And Will Ever Be
Could feel itself Homeless
And thereby find itself compelled to invent an Elsewhere
Other than All There Is
In which to find the peace of Homedness
But finding Entertainment in the suffering of another
Is Contempt.

It could somehow be amusing
That Consciousness hosted by Creaturehood
In Universe that is always new
Would engage itself in having imagined
The Nothing New
But Amusement at witnessing, in any life, frustration, discomfiture,
      confoundment, or consternation
Is Hatred.

It could even be laughable
That though there is never Nothing anywhere ever
Serial Thought values imagining it.
But mirth at witnessing, in any life, pain or sorrow
      or self-defeating or self- and world-injuring Action
Is Contempt
And contempt is always Hatred by proxy,
      its source—its victim-practitioner teachers—discoverable
            through Introspection
Its healthy processing, achievable
Only through the gladness
Of mourning.

Therefore it can never be enough
Merely to note the absurdity
That a creature,
Self-reflexively Something,
      and, through Participance—
            the participance in its Being
                  of every energy, substance, effect
                        and agent that acts and has acted
                              in its course, vector, presence, and history—
                                    therefore self-proof
                                          of the Somethingness not only of itself
                                                but of its progenitors and their progenitors
                                                      and everything contributive to the establishment and maintenance
                                                            of their necessary prior existence
                                                                  and the necessary prior existence of the Universe itself
                                                                        across prior Entropic Time,
Could signify to itself,
      and congratulate itself on its artifice in having so signified,
            that any aspect of its Being is "nothing"
            that being utterly of What Is it is nonetheless somehow Homeless
For the only healthy externalized expression of understanding such Confusion,
      no matter how self-referentially, ebulliently celebratory,
            as Suffering
Is Compassion.

Those taught Hatred of Self and World,
      which is, at base, Hatred of Life and World,
            inevitably go on to teach Nullity, Homelessess, and Hatred,
                  sleepwalking from generation to generation, What Is
                        abiding,
                              proceeding,
                                    subsuming,
With or without the awakening of Consciousness subsumed
To the ramifying damage of its depredations
And the electiveness of its suffering:

They suffer by Choice the Universe
Multiply suffering by Choice in Universe
They who do not realize
They are Universe.

In the winter of 1979–80
      when I commuted from Norridge to Niles by bus
            and did the final half-mile on foot
                  through the courtyard of a two-story motel
                        walking day after day under the porch-accessway
                              of upper units
I saw in the deep of February
      an outside-but-sheltered faucet left dripping
            and in the circle of evaporating water beneath it,
                  in colored rings at differing radii
                        from the steaming dropfall,
Life.

Across the gradient from "warm enough to steam in winter"
      to the sparkle of frost to beyond-frozen dry
Algaes and perhaps bacteria
      differing in requirement of and tolerance to moisture
            and cold
                  found their niches in circles defined by boundary conditions:
Colored rings of differing radii—
Life.

Days running I watched the rings deepen
      in color and delineation
Until a day
      when I saw that the faucet had been turned more tightly
            its drip ceasing
And the warm island
      its bustling and burgeoning
Vanished.

This was not the end of the story
For as its witness
I was part of the story,
I and It subsumed by a What Is extant
      before,
            during, and
                  after—
With and without—
Us.

And yet our Having Been—
      our having contributed to Being's unfolding
            and therefore to the Stateness
                  of every subsequent state of Being—
Was,
Would be,
Eternal.