letters from barabbas

He's out there again today, right in front of the Mellow Mushroom, where a month ago he was improvising a song that went, "What we need is a universal love song, in a language everyone can understand." But this time he isn't singing or strumming his electric guitar without an amp. He's curled up in a ball on a bench in downtown Auburn, I can only assume he's praying for me.

A few weeks ago I was eating dinner alone at the Barbecue House, waiting forty-five minutes for an experiment to run so I could get home and wind down, stressed out from a hard week at school and depressed as hell watching people on the news wade through the toxic wasteland of New Orleans. I had revealed my own self-absorption when I started worrying about my chances of attending graduate school at Tulane next year, and I still didn't know what to do with all that self-disgust. I was fed up with all of us talking smugly from five hours away, nothing constructive or even sympathetic. So close, yet so far.

Six locals in the sunny restaurant had been interviewing a family from New Orleans through the steam coming off their Brunswick stew: whether they knew if their house was still standing, when they would get to go back and see, what they would do in the meantime. A woman with a loud political southern accent showing engagement rings to a sorority girl motioned to the television in the corner saying, "You know, watching all this, I almost feel selfish talking about diamonds in here."
I shook some more hot sauce into my stew and tried to think of something nice to say.

As the family rose to leave the woman said to them, "I'll give you a great deal. I get calls from people from all over the south who've heard about me from friends."
The sorority girl agreed emphatically, "Oh yes, she's the very best!"
The family smiled politely and walked out the door, driving off in their minivan to god knows where. I stared at the diamond hawker bitterly through the fizz coming off my third refill of Diet Coke and walked, pious and complacent, back to the lab to finish my procedure. That night I spent hours in Taylor's studying rather than going home to unwind, drinking down the dark roast like it was the Eucharist blood, sucking on my pencil like unleavened bread.

But it didn't cover my sins, nor hers, and my studies have done less than her diamonds for the people of Katrina.

The last three songs on Björk's Homogenic have been surprisingly motivating to me lately. It's a really angry album, about finding indepence after a bad relationship, but it ends with a sort of release, an acceptance of life's inconveniences and a move towards embracing humanity in its flaws, opening oneself up to love in spite of everything.

(favorite line: the less room you give me, the more space i've got)

Alarm Call

I have walked this earth and watched people
I can be sincere and say I like them
you can't say no to hope
can't say no to happiness

I want to go on a mountaintop
with a radio and good batteries
and play a joyous tune
and free the human race from suffering

I'm no fucking Buddhist
but this is enlightenment
the less room you give me
the more space I've got

this is an alarm-call so wake up wake up now
today has never happened
and it doesn't frighten me

Pluto

excuse me
but i just have to
explode
explode this body
off me

i'll wake up tomorrow
brand new

a little bit tired
but brand new

All is Full of Love

you'll be given love
you'll be taken care of
you'll be given love
you have to trust it

maybe not from the sources
you have poured yours

maybe not from the directions
you are staring at

trust your head around
it's all around you
all is full of love
all around you

all is full of love : you just ain't receiving
all is full of love : your phone is off the hook
all is full of love : your doors are all shut

all is full of love

As she lowered herself to a log, she could see how the pattern of the water changed as it made its way past a rock that jutted from the river. The river did not stop at its base, wailing, blocking all the water coming after it. No, it continued to flow, parted, foamed, but then became whole again after it had passed the rock, leaving its impact on the rock, just as the impact of every hour she had lived was still with her, shaping her like the people who had fed her dreams. All at once she felt as if she were the river, swirling in an ever-changing design around the rock, separating and coming together again without letting herself get snagged into scummy pools. Over the years, she had learned more from the river than from any one person, and what she'd been taught had always come with passion--intense pain or joy. It was the nature of the river to be both turbulent and gentle; to be abundant at times and lean at others; to be greedy and to yield pleasure. And it would always be the nature of the river to remember the dead who lay buried beneath its surface.
What the river was showing her now was that she could flow beyond the brokenness, redeem herself, and fuse once more. If that rock was her love for Hanna, she could let it stop her, block her--or she could acknowledge the rock and have respect for it, alter her course to move around it. She had to smile because, for a moment there, it looked as if the water were trying to crawl upstream, back across the surface of the rock in dozens of small hands, reaching against the stream, defying the current. And that was good. Over the years the rock would be transformed, just like the countless stones at the bottom of the riverbed, stones you couldn't see; they affected the flow but didn't impede its progress, its momentum, its destination. She could see how she had it in her to start out loving and become vindictive--and how she needed to take a look at her love and make sure it was whole before she could offer it to anyone.

--Stones from the River, by Ursula Hegi

It seems I'm in a constant state of self-improvement. To God's unending annoyance, no doubt. I've been thinking a lot about pain, and my problems that have resulted from that pain. I've also been watching some of my friends make decisions in response to their pain that I would not like to make for myself. I have felt the weight of vertigo begging me to fall into my pain with them. My college friendships have served to show me many things, and one of the most valuable lessons I have learned is about the many subtle ways in which I am selfish. I learned at Camp SAM that it really isn't that hard to love someone after all: even a total stranger, even if you're totally dysfunctional, even if you're the most selfish person in the world. You just make a conscious effort to get over yourself and look at the needs of that total stranger. No greater love than to lay down one's life for a friend. I succeeded, for the most part, in doing so for a week, with strangers that I never have to see again.
Back in the real world, however, I found myself less successful. The truth is, it is hard to make that decision. It's the hardest thing we'll ever have to do. But it's the only thing worth doing. Outrageously.

We were discussing anorexia in Reading the Body when someone called it, passingly, a "selfish problem." I was surprised by her wording, although she was getting at something else, and I got distracted by a tangent: all problems are selfish. I have these painful things that have happened in my life, that have messed up the way I see things, at times causing me to turn inward, retreat into well-defined defense mechanisms, exploit other people for my own desires. Everyone does. Ectopia cordis. We have these problems, caused by pain. As long as we think about ourselves, hold tightly to the pain, we are prisoners of the problems that the pain has caused.

To gain your life you have to lose it.

Not that we're supposed to reject our pain, act like it didn't happen, tell ourselves someone else must have felt something worse. Nor can we say that our pain is greater than another's, that what happened to us differentiates us, excuses us from the generous forgiveness Christ demonstrated. Hegi makes that point clear. "Ah, but we can't do that--compare our pain," says the Jew hiding from Nazis in the main character's house. "It minimizes what happens to us, distorts it. We need to say, yes, this is what happened to me, and this is what I'll do with it."

So, what am I going to do with it? Am I going to hold on to the painful experiences I've had to go through, and allow them to shape the way my life turns out? Or am I going to let the waters of life run around them, embrace them, softening them and transforming them into something positive, enriching, human? If you ever ask someone to pray with you for deliverance from some sort of sin pattern, that person will probably lead you, right from the start, through a prayer of forgiveness. Before you can be free from a real problem (we call this a "stronghold" in Christianese), you have to let go of the grudges you hold towards the people and circumstances who have caused you to develop the problem. I've done this, several times. But the ultimate choice remains mine every morning: will I fold gracefully around the stones in the river of my history? Or will I fight against them until I'm snagged in scummy pools, stagnant and stinky and alone?

September is a difficult month, because the sun beats down from that funny angle with all that it has, but the humidity is gone and you just know that this is its last effort. All around campus this week I've been coming across the dead bodies of locusts, white bellies to the sky and delicate wings disassembled by ravenous ants. That characteristic drone that provides a summer day its special air of comfortable oppression has grown softer, but somehow more desparate. The dwindling survivors must call louder to their few remaining friends, and every day someone else fails to call back.
September is like that.