For its own Sake

I think today must mark the beginning of monsoon season. I'm sitting here at Bicycle Academy in front of the portable heater attempting to dry my soaking-wet sneakers and pant-legs. The ten-minute walk to work has never been so unpleasant, and struggling against the wind on my way here, my umbrella turned inside out, splaying its chintzy metal skeleton in eight different directions, mockingly making its escape from its vinyl sheath while drenching me in the process. Right now I am watching the teabag in my glass cup seep. It's a gradual, wavy descent, much like cigarette smoke making its way to the ceiling. My life, like everyone's, has been reduced to this—waiting for the flavour to peak, watching the effervescence die down, patiently allowing it to go tepid before sipping, ever-so-cautiously.

I've felt remarkably depressed this week. I don't know how or why it started, but it seems worse than it's been in some time.

My exhaustion is terrible. I fall asleep at my desk at work and wake up, head nodding like a spring-loaded ping-pong ball. If I squint my eyes a certain way, open just a third or a quarter, I think I see things that aren't quite there. I make out shapes in the pattern of the wood, arrows, faces, shadows. In the dreams I have at night, no one speaks, but lately I've been seeing words, like in books I've read, open to certain pages. I start reading these seemingly giant books within my dreams and try to make sense of them there. I read sentences over and over again until the dreaming me becomes very tired and decides to lie down, at which point, my actual physical self inevitably becomes obligated to swat the piercingly loud alarm clock off her night table… Generally, I guess I'm feeling worn out and lonely and oddly philosophical.

Somewhere, it must have been in a book, I got the idea that people don't live for the sake of life, but rather to enrich themselves. Basically, it's the glimmer of optimism at the end of a dark hallway that makes people brave enough to keep walking. We expect all these rewards out of existence: "If I work hard at school, I'll go to university and get a great job and earn lots of money. If I'm kind and truthful, I'll have lots of friends and everyone will like me, If I slave away at a job I find (at least) mildly distasteful for the next forty years, I can retire and sit in the sun and let the UV rays deepen my wrinkles. If I'm a decent person until the day I die and follow my conscience, I'll go to Heaven." Generally, it seems like a really selfish reason to keep on breathing, this anticipation of some reward, divine or otherwise. To do something, anything, really, for its own sake seems both redundant and complex at the same time. It almost verges on the impossible or questionable, like counting blades of grass because you can, or putting together an all-black five-thousand piece puzzle.

Pater once talked about creating "art for art's sake." And whether or not anyone can actually appreciate something for its intrinsic value, for the process and the head-scratching and all the unpleasant moments in-between, is something I feel is both idealistic and doubtable. Many people consider me to be a very cynical person, but if that's what realism comes down to, what does it say about the state of our day-to-day lives, really? Pater's suggestion can imply deriving joy and peace from splattering paint, delicate brush-strokes, or from sliding one's finger's through clay. It doesn't matter, really. The end-result has nothing to do, ultimately, with the respective concepts behind this sort of art.

And, like the art we are all so capable of producing as humans, our own end results are pretty much predictable, not really worthy of honourable mention, maybe discussed briefly over drinks, a morbid little gallery gathering: "Yes, she was very beautiful." All this, before the spectators of our lives' events move on to more interesting, lively "pieces," those that make them question themselves, their motives, their previous perceptions of their respective emotional ranges and ability to feel anything at all.

What I'm getting at is difficult to articulate, I suppose. It's not that I'm genuinely unhappy at the moment. I know I am very lucky to be here, doing what I'm doing, but some days are extremely difficult for me. If I had no one to see on the weekends and nothing to look forward to, I'd be very sad and lonely and without much purpose. I can't (at this point) fathom life for life's sake and were things worse, I may have already thrown in that figurative towel, only slightly damp, since my relatively shallow life has been anything but invigoratingly, dangerously colourful. Think wading-pool versus the hope for some amazing coral reef: basically you can find a way to drown in either, but when it comes down to it, which is more pathetic, really?

Basically, I've come to understand that if anything, most people's harsh biases and prejudices concern themselves rather than other people. And when we finally manage to escape ourselves when we fall asleep and let our personalities crumble away, our sharp edges rounding off in the blurriness of most dreamscapes, then I guess we can finally perceive things like a newborn in a strange world, a clean chalkboard; and all our emotional precedents and fears cease to exist, because falling over the edge here, in the land of sleep, doesn't necessarily mean death.

How can I write about how I feel lately? Other than by stepping outside myself as the writer of my life and thoughts, and writing about someone who is slightly more difficult to recognize (the thoughts she has the audacity to have!), I simply do not know.

She feels the word forming on her lips; her tongue goes into position, raised behind her front teeth, as it moves downwards and in. "Love." She is amused with herself for uttering such…such…what? In a crowded bar, music playing, people sprawled on floor cushions sipping expensive drinks, laughing, a little intoxicated by tobacco, incense and their own taste of temporary unreality, she cups her hands over an ear made recently more accessible by a very short haircut, and quite audibly, she speaks. She knows herself, realizes that she is often dismissive of most emotionality, that she regards outward shows of anything too strong to be part contrivance, part 'telling them what they want to hear.' But tonight, her face is calm, her heart beats normally (which for her means a little faster than the usual molasses way). In fact, despite the peopled setting, the red-tied waiters zipping around with Mojitos and Margaritas, she is all alone, uttering a sot of monologue, a bit breathy, but never doubting what she says. For the girl, though it's the first time she's said it to someone, the word escapes from her mouth smoothly, no strangulated tightness, no death of sound on the third and fourth letters. Later, she hardly even thinks about it, it's become so ingrained in her new sense of reality. Later in bed, when he asks her if what she said before was true; she simply says "yeah," because what else is there to say, really?

'Love' is one of those concepts that have generally assumed a sort of backseat in my cynical little mind. So many people have tried to define it that it's almost become corrupted, very lame and embarrassing for one such as myself to admit to feeling. I remember when I was young and sitting in the car with my mother-- a generally rather bitter woman with a tight mouth when I was growing up-- how, if we'd pass a church where a wedding was taking place, or go by a procession of car antennas bedecked with dollar-store crepe streamers and paper pompoms, she'd click her tongue and laugh, shaking her head. "Fools…" she'd mutter as we drove by, "They'll see." I know my mother's marriage was anything but happy, but I can't help but shake the feeling that her attitude about the nature of genuine affection sort of set a negative tone concerning relationship expectations, as well as a general sense of shame about happiness for me.

I realize some might say that I'm not old enough or experienced enough to know what I'm talking about, that I will, in fact, "see." It's just that 'love' to me is one of those words that people throw about like money, buying cigarettes at one store, groceries at another, and being frivolous on the weekends, never worrying about their impulsive or unnecessary shopping until they're broke or have become addicted to something, be it a certain delicacy, brand of alcohol, or tobacco. And then there are the fun bits you regret after you're in too deep: lung cancer, obesity, alcoholism, and anything else rehab might not be able to cure.

I think maybe that 'love' should be un-definable, that there shouldn't even be a word, because attaching something as simplistic, as shallow, as letters to something so inexplicably difficult to understand or express, robs the feeling of its intrinsic meaning. And people who actively search for it, the feeling they've head people call 'love', wanting to have love for love's sake 'just because,' all seems rather consumerist and crass to me.

Essentially, there are no rulebooks or courtship etiquette manuals (sorry Ovid…) that can make anyone feel more strongly or compassionately toward another human being. It's just there, in concept, I think, waiting patiently in a sort of soap-bubble above two heads. Sometimes it pops and falls to Earth like a virus, (or a blessing if you're an optimistic, "the glass is half-full" sort of person) and like a delicacy that can give you a stomach-ache at times, but keeps you wanting more, is greedily consumed. Other times, the pseudo-bubble rises and burns up in the atmosphere and disappears forever, simple as that, the moment having passed.

Basically, though it may seem hypocritical of me given my current writing on the subject, it is my opinion that while 'love' is nice and all, the more people worry about the status of the word, the less time there is to actually put it into practice (like obeying the letter, but not the law).

The past few years, I've told many people about my view of existence, the constantly fluctuating states of entropy—the breakdown of organic material—and optimism—an elevated state of mind that makes one able to get up and continue on in the morning. That is all I believe. That is all I know to be true. It's something that's true not only for the planet and for nations—after wars, when large areas of earth have been destroyed, it's the potential to start again, a sort of hope that makes rebuilding, regeneration, possible—but for people too, since as the metaphysical poets once suggested, man, made of the same elements as his planet, is a microcosm of the universe.

As individual beings, we become weak, we fade away. Our flesh begins to die. We are not built to last, and we know it, yet, holding tightly, desperately, some might say, to that 'hope', the one virtue Pandora was able to regain for humanity, we seem to accept that we are part of a morbid sort of duality—nihilism on the one hand, and the inclining of the heart toward love (for the sake of love, sometimes) on the other. And, I've always been hesitant, because I thought, 'Why should I hope?" when I know that 'love' is like a sort of sympathetic embrace of that which is doomed to decay, either in body or in mind. It makes me very sad, but that's just me, I guess, far too concerned and afraid about my flesh and its consumption, either by entropy or by love.

The Abridged Version

A few years back I took a course at Carleton called "Myth and Symbol." Like most university courses, given the heavy assignment-loads and the number of other courses to juggle, only a little bit of what was taught remains in my mind. One particular idea we were constantly reminded of was Joseph Campbell's "Hero Cycle" which essentially shows the circular pattern in any protagonist's life—usually he or she is born, grows up under difficult circumstances, overcomes some adversity or other, then is called away on some journey of sorts, whether literal or figurative. The hero is forced to struggle, battling monsters and those who would wish to see him fail; he or she prevails in doing so until the story's climax when the hero descends into an Underworld of sorts—for Odysseus it was the Land of the Dead, Hades' Realm, as it was for the majority of Classical Greek heroes; for the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins it was the dark caves on his way to find Smog, the dragon; for more modern writers, however, those who wrote of existential crises and emotional hell, Sartre, Hesse, Joyce, their Underworlds are within themselves, those deep murky pools of depression in which a person may easily perish.

Emerging from the Underworld is the hero's biggest challenge. Sometimes it takes years. Often, he barely makes it out alive and lives the rest of his life recounting his darkest moments, unable to escape them, though he is lauded at home or honoured among the Gods or figure-heads of his respective country. In his nightmares, he still struggles; like one who has overcome a disease, he is humbled and wiser; maybe he thinks things through longer, moves a little slower. In short, he is changed. A bona-fide hero, though somehow a more static-y, cautious version of his former self. The golden sheen has dulled. And, unsure of how to end, the Classical writers suggest "Happy Ever After" endings, while modernists come full-circle, implying multiple heroic cycles, ups and downs, in any one person's life. The golden sheen, then, is replaced by the bedraggled look of exhaustion, finality.

I think it suggests that we die and are reborn many times in life, like the mythical phoenix, which perishes in a self-induced ball of fire every 500 years and proceeds to rise form its ashes more beautiful than ever. It is important of course, as a requirement to fulfil Joseph Campbell's notion of the hero, which was influenced by Jung, especially as modern man's psyche is concerned.

In another course I took at Carleton the year before, "Children's Literature," where we learned a bit about Fairy Tales, one of my favourite subjects on this earth, it was implied that the darkest, most terrifying monsters that figured within, as well as the most beautiful, ethereal and ridiculous creatures, were all representative of the deepest fantasies and anxieties of young children. Fear of abandonment, for instance, is a problem that comes up a lot, as does being despised by one's parents, being sent out into a harsh world, or being betrayed by a trusted friend. Cast out to starve in a dark forest wherein dwelt a cannibalistic witch (who conveniently turns out to be their awful, antagonistic stepmother), Hansel and Gretel are a perfect example of one of childhood's greatest fears realized. As they wandered, wind howling, stomachs turning, ready to drop where they stood; as the tree's shadows loomed heavily overhead, blocking out any ray of moonlight, they were living every child's worst nightmare, while serving some might say, as a rather harsh warning to the children reading this original, un-bowlderized Grimm Brothers' version, to be filial, obedient, good little children…or else.

Essentially, Fairy Tales were initially exaggerated threats to terrify children. And, in the unfortunate child's mind, the wicked witches, awful ogres, big bad wolves and whole scores of artful robbers and tricksters, took on the forms and assumed the faces of those who were familiar to them. A cruel father could be a "fee-fi-fo-fumming" giant set to destroy, or perhaps a selfish, restrictive king locking his daughter up in a tower or turning her to gold or stone. An unkind, jealous mother, on the other hand, could most definitely be one of the many representative female demons, witches or fiends who devoured little children, the most satisfying of sweet-breads, a constant threat as the most deceptive of horrors, unlike male monsters whose evilness was never masked. Remember how the wicked witch offered the hungry children candy, how the big bad wolf dressed up as Red Robin Hood's sweet, sickly old grandmother, and how Snow White's jealous Queen offered up a delicious-looking red apple, the color of blood, urgency and rubies, all at once evil masked with beauty.

This notion, the fear that is, of being 'devoured,' consumed, is one I understand very well. It's like being used up, a pawn on one parent's side. And mostly, I think, it's a fear of authority and the unknown, both of which figure so predominately in the minds of children. I think it's also a sort of inability to understand the adult world, this land of giants who rarely reveal themselves as weak, scared, on the same level as their cloudy eyed (though troubled) little offspring.

As a child, and even now as an adult, I was (and am) told many things I did not (and still do not) believe. Little tricks, magic beans, I guess, to lead me happy on my way. As a child, I knew a lot about lies and I was frustrated that I'd never be able to consider my parents on my level, low or middling as it may have been. At a certain point, convinced that nothing said to me could be considered entirely truthful, I grew tired. I am a very precise person and I find worrying over half-truths to be an exhausting past-time. I would lose sleep trying to make myself understand the abridged version of what had been told to me, bit by bit, but like my childhood jigsaw puzzles, bought at flea-markets or jumble-sales, the most vital pieces were always missing, like a giant hole where one's face should be. As I grew older, the blank spaces were filled, mostly by hearsay, the secrets whispered to me by my older sister as I tried to sleep on her green-carpeted bedroom floor, searching for monsters under her bed, attempting to shut out the sounds of the furnace and the breathing below us in the basement, a terrifying place, unlit, creaking, nearly alive or almost dead—I still don't know which frightens me more.

Downstairs was a place to tiptoe. The clank of metal weights, the eerie pumping, breathing sound of the 'stair-master,' stains on the yellow carpet of the 'gym.' I always liked the large mirror with the crack grinning up its side.

My mother's room was blue and cold with no lights save a yellow-brown Tiffany lamp with a chained wire plugged into the wall. The door was made of pressed wood/plywood and had a hook lock that broke every few days with just a little bit of force. Many things were said in this room that I never knew about and which I often speculate on, even today. Sometimes, ear to the vent in my bedroom, I tried to listen in-between the gusts of warmish air and the hum of my humidifier. The words were usually skewed, muffled, though other sounds were clearer and more obvious.

Down the blue-painted steps from my mother's room, were the depths of our house, its figurative intestinal tract, full of cat litter boxes, the overwhelming smell of urine, and spiders brought in with the wood stacked up against the wall. Opening the furnace doors, the red hot embers glowed as the room filled with thick, choking smoke that greyed the white walls. Later, my parents painted them grey-blue, like the steps. I hated being here and I usually only passed through during the daytime or in the summer to get outside through the door leading under the porch where my swing and the little trampoline were kept. I remember the crumbly jip-rock walls under the porch step and how I used to use the fallen bits as chalk to draw pictures on the splintery brown wood.

Occasionally, I'd sit on the box-freezer (my father kept a lot of zucchini here) in the basement as my mother did laundry. Looking for attention, I'd try to impress her with my reading ability, but reciting, some would say, in a highly monotonous voice, it was clear she never listened, always something else to think about. "Mm-hhmm," she'd say, "uh huh." It bothered me.

The most forbidden (and therefore appealing) room in our house was just off this awful dark furnace space. Housing African statues, knives, strange ornaments and drums, it smelled of pouch tobacco, incense and something I've never quite smelled again. Perhaps it was a combination of everything it housed together that produced such a strange odour, like fog, excitement and the unknown. We weren't supposed to go in unless we were told to get something, or to wake up the inevitably sleeping giant within, my father, as he puffed and snored loudly, practically impossible to rouse. A thick red curtain hung over the tiny window that I loved trying to scramble through during summer games of tag or hide-and-seek, and the carpet was a similar shade of burgundy flecked with black. I don't remember ever seeing light in this place. We all called it the 'red-carpet-room' with a general air of solemnity, like it was a place of secrets, Pandora's box, or a terrible cave, wherein dwelt something truly fearful. It was of course, my father's room. He slept there during the day, or when he and my mother were fighting or repulsed by each other, which I suppose was often.

One thing I remember well was the wall beside his bed, which was white stucco, flecked with shimmering pieces of what I always thought looked like glitter. I would try to pick them out, unsuccessfully, whenever my father let me in. It must be a magic room, I thought, which is why it was so shut off, something special that I wasn't good enough for. When I think about it now, of course, it was probably just a place for him to sleep (the walls were relatively thicker than those of the rest of the house, I think, as part of the foundation—at least I never heard anything from above, as it was directly under the bathroom and Danny's room) and probably smoke pot or beadies or whatever else.

In the life of my childhood, this house is representative, as we lived here until I was 13 years old. In life, we are all the protagonists of our own stories and most of us experience many deaths and rebirths, trips to the Underworld and tired, quiet victories. I stopped feeling like a child (not that I ever thought about what it felt like to be a child while I actually was one) early on, but it was close enough to this time to be applicable. When my childhood fizzled out, like flat grape crush, my favourite, the last hint of effervescence gone, I was reborn as a quieter, angrier, more apathetic and infinitely tougher version of the girl who loved little porcelain unicorn statues and dressing her kitten up in doll's clothing. The child who used to cry at the drop of a hat realized that to the giant, it made her weak, pliable. It was used against her. Other times, her tears of frustration were ignored behind a door held closed with the weight of her back, superhuman strength at those times.

I haven't died and I haven't been reborn since then, which is troubling. I still find that I remember everything so clearly, like I'm still in that life, though everything from my body to my heart has changed, if only slightly. I have struggled and continue to do so with many demons. I am terrified of the descent that may potentially come, and whatever changes will occur to make me more cautious, different.

When I was a child, the basement where my parents slept and loved (in their own twisted fashion) and fought, was my Underworld, a place of monsters, both frightening and indifferent. I was always terrified of it and its secrets, yet was so frequently compelled to descend. On my last night in the house in Bolton Centre, I looked into the red carpet room, empty, the curtain gone as sun shone in, twirling bits of dust and cat hair sporadically. The carpet had vacuum marks in it where my mother had cleaned; the white wall was yellowed, stained with rusty water leaks and cigarette smoke. It was no longer a fearful place. It was actually very calm, no ghosts left. Though I was angry that we'd be returning to my childhood monster (boogie-man, bakru and joombie rolled up into one greasy package), a step backwards, I thought, I still had this feeling like I was victorious, that I'd conquered the Underworld and become a heroine, armed with the knowledge to avoid ever being consumed again. When I saw this beast next, I'd have the advantage, and in later years, reminiscent of how easy I used to be to mold, how compliant, how quickly my eyes would fill with apologetic tears, he would tell me that I'd changed, that I'd become very controlling, that I caused tension and misery to everyone in the house with my silence and absence. I'd nod and return to whatever I was doing, as he'd go on about what a sweet child I'd been, how I'd been his favourite, once.

I never cried in front of him again, and the last time I ever saw him, he was blubbering, toothless (a disarmed monster), like a pathetic child as I sat there, repulsed and stoic, slightly confused at seeing this, one of my monsters, as human for the first time. Here, he revealed to me his version of all those secrets I had wished to know for so long, and for the first time in my life, at 18, I felt like part of that monster's adult-world. I barely listened to his revelations. In truth, for the first time, I really didn't care. It had all entered the realm of make-believe. Instead, my thoughts were centered about the idea that I was half my father's daughter, which quite frankly made me venomously sick.

It's like realizing we can't choose our families and the idea that the blood of a being I hated so severely flowed in my veins, left me with very mixed feeling. Like Antigone, I struggle with my origins. Considering them, and all the information I'll never hear is very overwhelming to me. You know how expert liars tell stories so well that they make them real, even to themselves, to the point where the truth has become so indecipherable, so impossible to decode that it's not worth even trying? Well, it feels sort of like that to me, like an undeniable, discouraging, stamped out sense of finality, like a cigarette butt under an especially sharp heel.

Anyway, I am especially exhausted this week. Today, I felt the need to stay in bed until an hour before work. This week, I've written 2 paragraph commentaries on all my students and submitted 2 months worth of lesson plans (and syllabi for the books I use) for each of my classes. The only thing I'd like to do is shut my eyes and keep them closed, sometimes.

I've been here exactly 6 months today. I really need a vacation. I wonder if I'll be allowed to take a week off in June. Right now, I'm getting over another cold. All my students are coughing and sniffling and so, I'm sure it will be impossible for me to ever get entirely better before they all do. Also, last week, there was a report of yellow dust (it comes from China, apparently) that blows into Korea on the wind and can do serious damage to one's throat and lungs, just what I need…Most people here wear SARS face masks outside because they'd rather not get infected, or come down with pneumonia. Personally, I think I was just worn out before I even came here, and right now, I'm close to tearing (were I a figurative piece of fabric).

In any case, I'm attempting to keep a grasp, however slippery, of my current plateau, at least until I leave Korea I another 6 months. I'll decide what to do next, then. That is all.