Do Not Turn Your Head and Look Away

An interesting conversation with someone important to me last week has me reflecting on these strands-- why blog? why tell tales? especially why be bluntly honest (as far as is possible) in relaying disintegration, suffering, turmoil, or happiness, love, "falling in love" (from a great and gruesome height, says Dar Williams), or really-- anything personal. Why disclose? Especially in a setting that is quasi-anonymous, where a core of people (if you can see this linked on FB, you're one of them) know who "good old Percy" is. 

Simultaneously, another important friend began a blog and forwarded the first post to me-- a searing, aching, bold, honest autobiographical narrative of discovering sexual pleasure, discovering the sacred, and the overlap between the sacred and sex, and along the way, being sexually assaulted. Brilliant and tender, naked and real.  

So these two things working together have "good old Percy" reflecting on the written arts of revealing, of autobiography, of disclosure and storytelling. Not on the process itself but on the main question: WHY do it? To what end? 

I have done no research at all on what must be a mountain of discourse regarding these questions. So I'm only free-forming here. 

Self-serving and self-indulgent motives include "processing by writing," the weird dialectic of not knowing what the actual fuck is going on and discovering at least the form of what it is by writing it down. It is a trip from nebulous to somewhat concrete, with all of those attendant dangers. And the trip absolutely does not have to be published anywhere. 

Lies, damn lies, and autobiography. 

Also, to get attention-- like having company in misery. Or to get sympathy. 

Or to seem smart, funny, twisted and interesting. 

There are probably other self-serving reasons. A lot of other self-serving reasons. Revenge, retaliation, self-pity, the desire to shock, etc. As a satirist of Bob Dylan in the Monty Python troupe says: "I suffered for my music. Now it's your turn."

Now of course everything we do is infused with darker motives, like Pilostyles within dyeweed. 

So it's a little bit of an endless and self-flagellating shitshow to be interrogating those darker motives all the time. Useful during therapy, stepwork, "growth periods." But oppressively fraught with constant second, third and fourth guessing otherwise. Eventually we just have to do what we are authentically moved to do and spin that wheel. 

On a more useful level (not as if the self-serving and the useful are mutually exclusive-- in fact, they are probably inextricably interwoven, as if noble altruism is endoparasitized by greed)--

Bearing witness to oneself. And giving other people the opportunity to bear witness. And then to identify, or compare. Maybe even to offer the opportunity for other people to feel better, since some can read and shake their heads and say "well, at least I'm not as fucked up as 'good old Percy'". A friendly Christmas gift?

But on a different level of exchange— one of the central tenets of Zen Peacekeepers, for example:

"Bearing witness to the joy and suffering of the world."

"It is the role of the Bodhisattva to bear witness. The Buddha can stay in the realm of not-knowing, the realm of blissful non-attachment. The Bodhisattva vows to save the world, and therefore to live in the world of attachment, for that is also the world of empathy, passion, and compassion. Ultimately, she accepts all the difficult feelings and experiences that arise as part of every-day life as nothing but ways of revelation, each pointing to the present moment as the moment of enlightenment.

Bearing witness gives birth to a deep and powerful intelligence that does not depend on study or action, but on presence.

We bear witness to the joy and suffering that we encounter. Rather than observing the situation, we become the situation. We became intimate with whatever it is – disease, war, poverty, death. When you bear witness you’re simply there, you don’t flee."-- Bernie Glassman

Now look, I ain't no fuckin' Bodhisattva. "We are not saints," said Bill W, and he knew. 

But I am learning more and more how to make space. And how to take myself seriously enough to demand space from other people in which I have a right to be seen and heard. The poet Norman Dubie used to say to the lyric poets who were his students: "Damn it, you have a right to breathe. You have a right to take up space." Because a lot of those lyric poets live tentatively. As if who they are is a stain, for which they have to apologize. "Sorry for breathing," say a lot of the hypersenstive empaths. "It would be better if I didn't exist, but I'm here, and dying makes a mess, so I'll just apologize every second of my life." 

As a white male, of course, I am given a default pass to take up physical space, the space of discourse and a lot of other kinds of space-- literal and metaphorical manspreading. So it might seem like privileged whining to talk about feeling silenced, censored and relegated to shadows. 

And this is an interesting space indeed-- quasi-anonymous, as befits an arena in which 12 step work is revealed. If "good old Percy" weren't in anonymous programs, this might not even be an anonymous blog. Because the great project of this narcissistic age, where we have instant access to publishing on a scale hitherto unimagineable, is in fact anti-narcissistic: full-glory humanity on display, warts and all, and what used to be considered too shameful or embarrassing to reveal in public? Ha, well, there's nothing off limits anymore. Of course, one could lament the loss of natural discretion that would prevent a person from having a public nervous breakdown, or talk about any of the other most intimate details of their lives. But it's too late. That horse left the barn a long time ago. 

No way this single BLOG POST can get at the root of "good old Percy's" enterprise. (mmmhmmm, I have a BLOG, he said, stroking his chin and imbued with the radioactive aura of precious self-importance)-- 

Somehow I'm reminded of an eerie satirical song by David Byrne, The Accident:

When you see an accident do not turn your head and look away
I can see detectives are sifting through the wreckage we have made

It starts with only one kiss
It changes everything

TV crews arrive on the scene
They say "See the man who lost everything"
He lies shattered like a glass on the ground
They say "Only you can bring him around
& set me free"

I became delirious
Palm trees gently swaying in the breeze
On a desert island, I haven't seen a human being for years

The house where we used to live
Described by witnesses
TV crews arrive on the scene
& the anchormen they break down and weep
Living proof that things are not what they seem
It takes all these wild and wonderful things -
To set me free