Midwest Silence

1.

I didn't go to Michigan this year for Christmas. Instead, I watched Alexander Payne's new film, Nebraska.

It wasn't a planned substitution. But as soon as I saw those leaning little frame houses and their careless furniture and their lumpy, extraordinarily real-looking people, I thought: well, here I am. Home.  

I also recognized a kind of silence. A running joke that blossoms into an important force in the emotional action of the film is the fathomless reticence of elderly father Woody. (Five seconds later I look back on the last sentence to find my fingers have substituted resonance for that noun. Well, yes.) He's no anomaly, we learn; this is simply the make of the men in the family and in the small Nebraska town they're from. Their silence is produced not so much by a stiff upper lip as by a state of low-level bewilderment at the emotional and social duties the world has been trying to rouse them to all their lives. Literally and economically, they inhabit a rough landscape. Isn't their survival within the laws of the land enough?

The women, though: they talk. Some, such as the mother, are ebullient monsters on the model of The Night of the Hunter's Icey Spoon—masters of gossip that appears to pour out so spontaneously as to preclude any suspicion of malevolence. Others are warm and kind or loudly demanding, but as far as the vocabulary of this and perhaps the main of American film is concerned, taciturn lacks a feminine form.

It should be uncontroversial to note that silence is gendered. This has been the basis for many a sitcom and standup act. The women: why, they never shut up. The men: how impossible to get them to utter a feeling. Certainly, a man can be a great talker and draw no criticism for that—consider the livelihood of those very comics, after all—and very talkative women can be condemned as annoyances or worse.

But a woman inclined to silence is something odd. I know, because I am one. It has happened that even when I think I have been practically dominating the conversation on a given evening, it will come back to me later that I have been pegged as the quiet one. People have picked at me for this trait throughout most of my life—not constantly, but regularly enough. (Of course, there's nothing more likely to drive a quiet person deeper into silence than the accusation that she is too close-mouthed.)

The incident that stands out most is this: I was waiting tables. The restaurant was rather busy, and I was carrying a bowl of soup; ahead of me passing from the kitchen to the dining room was a veteran waiter named Ali, a middle-aged man with a veneer of deliberate sweetness and formality brittlely coating some deep frustration with the world. Perhaps having forgotten something, Ali stopped short and whirled around in the other direction; in a flash we collided. The soup splashed dramatically over his crisp white shirt and black vest.

I gaped and apologized, even if I'd been splattered too and, had we been on the road, he'd clearly have been found at fault for the accident. But Ali would not be placated. Despite his civility I had never felt he liked me, and now he disburdened himself of the offense my very existence caused him.

"Why did you do this!" he shouted, eyes flashing. "What is wrong with you! You go around and don't even say anything. You never talk, you are not even human!"

I have received this damning criticism mostly, now I think of it, from older men trying to correct my behavior or badger me into flattering them—though also from bosses and even, once, from a subordinate. When I try mentally to substitute a similarly quiet man into situations like these, I simply cannot see him drawing as much disapproval, or even any particular notice. The women in his life might sigh over his uncommunicative nature, but they'd likely lump him in with the rest of his sex. As long as a man does more than grunt he will probably not fall too far beyond the pale of socially acceptable behavior.

I have sat uncomfortably through conversations in which female friends lamented the quiet men in their lives, framing their silence as being explicitly a male thing and even a rather unenlightened male thing; surely a guy more comfortable with the feminine mode of experience would lapse naturally into long conversations about his and everyone's feelings. To someone of this mind, talk is the glue that binds people together; neglect it and you float alone somewhere away from the human planet, probably judging all the voices that drift your way. If your mouth is not busy with something inoffensive, your mind is probably busy with something bad. 

2.

Quiet guys anchored the sighs of many '60s girl-group hits, and they apparently retain their dreaminess today. Some comparative Google results:

"He's shy": About 122,000,000 results. The first page is filled with tips for women on reading the body language of the shy man and, above all, figuring out whether he likes them. Bits of pop culture such as The Pointer Sisters' "He's So Shy" and One Direction fan fiction appear, too. Shy men are fascinating puzzles to be carefully and sensitively decoded—when they're ready, of course.

"She's shy": About 30 thousand fewer results. On the first page here we also find tips for guys on dating shy women, but the focus is a little different. The goal is not to understand and decode but to meet and "score" shy girls. (There's also a link to a page of tips on managing your shy daughter's behavior.) Pop-culture symbols of female shyness are absent. Is a man's silence a deep pool to stare into, a woman's a closed door to bang against?

3.

Part of what makes my several homes feel like home for me is that when I am there this sense of gender variance seems to fade. My girlfriend is, if anything, even more inclined toward stillness than I, and I even worry sometimes that I annoy her by gabbing on about inconsequential things. At those times I fear that I'm lapsing into my mother's habit of space-filling chatter, which would, like a rhetorical question, seem to require no answer. Until it turns out that it does, and she's wounded, and I'm unjustly annoyed.

Unfortunately for her, she's pretty well alone in this tendency among our family. My grandmother is another quiet woman; my grandfathers, uncle, cousins, and father are all of this stoic Midwestern breed in varying proportions. To make my uncle laugh is a cause for pride, for I know that it takes some substantial force to break the silence. I do not mean to give the impression that we all sit around the turkey chewing wordlessly, but we most of us speak when we have something particular to say, not to be congenial.

Many of the silences in Nebraska are heavy with pathos. Had Woody been able to summon a definite opinion into words more often, he'd likely be happier with his life. However often I've cast wistful thoughts in the direction of monastic orders who hold it as a requirement for holy living, silence in itself is surely not a virtue. Certainly it can lead to missed connections, to regrets. But when I consider it as a trait I share with a larger Midwestern type of spirit, silence does not feel so lonely after all.

Busy Bodies (Or, My Fitness Blog)

I've started a regimen of physical fitness. Ha! Just days ago Joseph invited me to a yoga class his friend was teaching.

"Jos, you know me. Do I seem to you like a yoga person?" I asked.

My body is what's inevitably going to let me down, after all—hardly the sort of thing I want to curl up and relax with. Under the best of circumstances it'll begin circumscribing my motions in a couple decades' time, fortress walls crumbling and opening nothing up, but rather blocking all the doors with fallen rubble. I've managed the business of having a body as someone trapped in a yard with a sleepy but presumably vicious dog: no sudden moves, and things will probably be okay. Avoid eye contact.

Of course, it makes no sense to say these things. My brain is body. My eyes, my ears, my tongue. But useless to deny the sense of separation, too. I relentlessly knock my hips and shoulders against doorframes I've passed through thousands of times, take steps that fail and trip me for no reason I can understand. What am I, to the section of my mind that runs my motions? A camera mounted on a broomstick? Or something smoothly limbless like a water-snake; but nothing I inhabit is calm water.

As I write my foot has fallen asleep. Without ticklishness I run my fingers down the sole. Curiously, it registers the chill of my hand, and nothing else. My circulation is poor, as forgetful of my extremities as my primary motor cortex. When I was very young and had not crawled out as far yet from my flesh I would say: my foot is dizzy. Limbs, nerves are brain.

I've groaned and rolled my eyes at the thought of "working out" for years. It certainly was not a punk rock thing to do, and later it seemed unrelated to the life of the mind. Sometimes I've gone for runs when my body's grown twitchy from too much sitting around. I overdo it immediately, which doesn't take much. To sprint is more fun. I bike about 20 miles on most weekdays, but that is simply how I get places; I like to move just fine, but I want the motions to get something done. I do not want to think about my form. Are there not enough labors to be undertaken in this world?, I sniff. Must we work so hard at useless things? (After which I generally turn back to reading the internet for another hour or two.)

It is a little bit more than my laziness speaking when I get nervous about these gyms and classes and machines and the people in them. One hears of the sense of accomplishment to be obtained from working out, and it is probably no more useless than most ways one could spend an hour's time. But nothing has really been pushed forward in the world, unless you are training for combat, perhaps, or to perform a demanding dance. That we spend hours running in place is too blockheadedly obvious a metaphor even to complete.

Heather brought home this Jillian Michaels DVD, is how I started my regimen of physical fitness; it was lying there, and I'd been sitting around working from home all day. So I began. "You want those abs!" Jillian Michaels says by way of encouragement as she gestures to her fellow demonstrators of fitness, and suddenly the video is some kind of QVC program, the viewer window-shopping for body parts which she will, hopefully, soon be able to afford. (Jillian has two fellow demonstrators, one supposedly more and one less advanced along the path of fitness, though the less-fit model's only visible difference is that she is five or six inches shorter than the other. And that does make her more relatable. Possibly she also cannot reach the top shelf of her kitchen cabinets.)

Shopping is a feeling, though this version is about as interesting to me as coupon-clipping. I can sprint, and, on the other hand, I can endure. Long bike rides, hikes up mountains, walks across town. These seem to be the natural rhythms of human movement. Something is darting past quickly and must be seized, or else it is staying put somewhere far away, and it will take a while to reach. The stuff in the middle is too vague to bother with; there are complicated calculations of pacing, budgeting. I am not so interested in becoming "shredded," as Jillian horrifyingly puts it. (She really isn't awful, and doesn't talk that much, but naturally my radar's tuned to certain wavelengths.) It'd be easier if I would simply agree that our goal is for me to lose twenty pounds in thirty days. But this is an instance in which you realize that you are dependent on certain figures who have extremely little in common with you, almost by definition of their profession: the dentist, the hairstylist, the banker. The woman on the workout DVD, who bosses me around while remaining cheerfully immune to my scoffing at her music choices.

It would be good to be stronger. And it is good to step out of my habit of only ever doing things I'm already pretty sure I'll be okay at, to be physically humbled in a different fashion than tripping on the sidewalk or dropping a glass. Because I started on a whim, I may have a chance of sticking with this thing—or at least get as far as I did a couple of weeks ago with National Novel Writing Month, which I also began impulsively, pounding out 26,000 words or so before losing hope of meeting the deadline. Which feels not so bad. It was good, then, to slip into a space mostly soundproofed against the hemming and hawing of the internal editor (though what lets me hope I'll finish the project is the anticipated pleasure of going back and fixing, improving). Its hesitant voice is also difficult to hear over Jillian's smooth encouragements, the bastardized synthetic '80s jazz that's never acknowledged by the women onscreen, the thump of jumping jacks. The unfamiliar-sounding bursts of breath that are emerging, somehow, from your lungs. They are forcing their way out on the wrong beat, Jillian keeps telling you, but eventually you may begin to bring them under your control. 

Some Words on Failure

Right now I am reading Judith Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure, after a long wait for it from the library. It is an okay read; I am skimming more than I should. I think this is a case where the underlying idea seems so inevitable that, once it has finally been expressed, the expression itself can come off as rather dull, almost trivial. (It may also be that Halberstam's writing moves with not much more grace than most academic prose, piquant subject matter aside.) But then I check this reaction a little, remembering that I am probably more disposed toward failure than most people, more likely to find it natural and self-evidently important.

By which I don't mean that it's more likely to be my destiny (though, sure, that too). But the art and the stories and the modes of life that keep my interest tend to come with some negativity built in. The records that buoyed me through the gray late winter were the Mountain Goats' Tallahassee and of Montreal's Paralytic Stalks, two narratives of flamboyant despair that anthemically proclaim "I hope you die, I hope we both die" and "I made the one I love start crying tonight / And it felt good." The kind of music I put on and thoughtlessly hum along to until whoever else is with me suddenly tunes in and stops and stares with concern. Until this point it has seemed that I am, if not nice, at least well-behaved and appropriately invested in maintaining a positive attitude. Now something has been called into question. 

I tend to forget that my particular brand of deep-seated skepticism is not necessarily the human condition. This startles me again and again. During college, noticing the mellowing of my personality and convictions, I began to assume that I would be pretty well aligned with the mainstream once I graduated from my mountain cloister and rejoined it. This assumption thudded to the beer-slicked sidewalk the first time I walked down Clark Street on the night of a Cubs game, having just arrived in Chicago. Taken a few at a time, they would have been a perfectly digestible part of the greater world I expected was somewhere outside my door, but the sheer numbers of these blonde and ball-capped persons having the time of their lives in a noisy hell forced me to revisit my status as the alienated weirdo I had always been.  

In the business of being an alienated weirdo, I have often come up against lives that are more strongly guided by the capitalistic imperative of growth and progress (if only implicitly; one senses that their owners half-observe its quiet motions as they do the streetlights turning on every evening, only ever registering that something must have happened). Reactions to these collisions have ranged from incomprehension to offense. There have been, of course, the teachers aggravated by the fact that the specter of bad grades could not convince me, young Bartleby, to do an assignment I found fundamentally flawed. The people, often for some reason in the self-evidently virtuous field of medicine, who are frankly annoyed by the apparent uselessness of my pursuits, which in addition to not making much money do not even seem fun.

Or there are the genially mystified ones like my father, upon whom, after a dozen conversations on the matter, I have still not been able to impress that my band is not nor is especially intended to be a moneymaking concern. Along the same lines, although I enjoy and am doing well at my current job, you couldn't especially count me among the ranks of those who "care about their careers." I live with an economic level of comfort that is probably par for the course of my age and level of education, but it still continually astonishes me. When someone asks whether I'm worried about losing my job I say no not because I don't believe it can't happen, but because there's some small muscle within me whose only purpose is to stay ready for resuming life as a waitress or temp and calculating the price of every bean-soup dinner.

I'm not entirely sure how I got this way. For a while as a kid it seemed I was supposed to be the successful one. There is this relevant thought, from an excellent essay by Alexandra Kimball: "Poverty doesn’t allow you to develop a linear career trajectory or a coherent professional identity, because when cash is hard to come by, you do whatever job will bring you more of it." Being an artsy kid in an economically unstable family, I got the worst of both worlds: none of the drive toward professional identity, and also none of the drive toward money. 

My mom has also located the focus of her life outside of her low-paying, dead-end job. I think she spins that as a sort of living-in-the-moment thing these days, and means it. But behind the spunky middle-aged optimism is the history of a woman who was first-chair violinist in her high school orchestra, who dreamed of being a veterinarian but had to leave college in her first semester due to depression and lack of money, who grew up with a mother who—as I learned only in the last five years, and second-hand—apparently thinks so little of women's capabilities that she believes they should not hold political office. (My grandmother, whom I love as much as I do anyone, surely soaked up this belief along with an upbringing's worth of other messages telling her that she was dumb and fat and unattractive and duty-bound to meet the whims of men; I can forgive her this, while also recognizing the subtle toxicity it must have introduced into her family.)

So there has been all that, and then also an early religious infatuation that presented being a nun or monk as an ideal way to live—another form of opting out of the drive to succeed. My brand of Christianity was never the delayed-gratification school of stockpiling one's treasure in heaven. There is a line in Simone Weil that I cannot now find, about gladly running to sit in the pit of hell for a thousand years if God ordered her to do so. I was no longer religious by the time I read that, but I immediately understood. Spiritual "success," if the term is meaningful, can surely not be so neatly allegorical; if this world truly does not matter, it cannot just be an off-brand version of the one to come. 

Philosophy and its extensions into anarchism probably took care of the rest by the time I was a teenager. Looking down into the roots of things is itself discouraged by the requirement to keep climbing and acquiring; it is so much time lost, and will not change anything except yourself once you come out the end of it. I always bristled when anyone characterized punk rock or anarchism as nihilistic — I aligned myself with these movements not because I hated the world as a whole, but because I dearly loved it and wanted to create structures that would let me spend more time there, appreciating things, rather than racing ahead somewhere profitable. (It is, of course, the voice of capitalism that insists that anarchism is nihilism, seeing no other alternative to itself but death.) Having examined the matter, I have determined that I am not here to make money or have babies to carry on the family name (or, probably, to carry out grand political projects either, as I eventually realized).

Not going in for an afterlife, I also know I have only a little time here or anywhere else. Weirdly, this results in laziness as much as it does activity. The inefficient machine of my creativity runs on vast quantities of indolence; I have just now been spurred toward the keyboard after several straight hours of reading while lying sprawled across the loveseat. I fail constantly at small talk and social life and family obligations, and happily, this leaves more time to lie around and read, walk around and look at things. There is, of course, one sense in which my ambition is foolishly, desperately huge, its goal to add beauty and resonance to the world through art. The thought of this success hangs always suspended before me, cushioned and protected by the pockets of failure I have positioned all around.

More on creativity and mental illness: Parallel Motions

"The reason creativity and craziness go together is that if you're just plain crazy without being able to sing or dance or write good poems, no one is going to want to have babies with you." - (the admirably and authoritatively sane) Mark Vonnegut

Now that I've climbed up on this horse, why not ride a little farther, since I haven't yet talked myself out of this as a potentially fruitful area of inquiry? After having talked about the ways in which mental illness interferes with creative efforts, and made clear that I don't support the classic romantic connection between madness and creativity, I want to draw out some of the other, more tentative and fragile connections I find there. 

For as long as anyone can remember, I was a pretty weird but also smart- and creative-seeming kid, and this might have mitigated some of the surprise when it turned out I was also crazy. My mother began saying things like, "I guess that's the thing, when you're really creative . . . ," as if my illness were only further proof of my exceptionality. I squirmed under this proud pity, but when I was being lax with myself I could let it seem like a slightly less dark corner of that darkness.

Though all this was, of course, a major burden on my family, it might have also been something of a relief. Until 7th grade I'd been a star student, but once I got to middle school a combination of rebellious awakening (what, precisely, was the point of all this bureaucratic ritual around me?) and incipient depression sunk my grades to the point that I was at risk of being kicked out of my competitive-admission magnet school. (I am incredulous at and a little proud of my 12-year-old self to recall that during a parent-teacher conference it was revealed that I'd submitted zero of the five geography assignments given so far that quarter; the teacher, who seemed to hate me for other reasons than my lack of initiative, was later fired under circumstances surrounding his penchant for the blonder and bubblier of my cohort.) Mental illness might have provided something of an explanation, an excuse for the past few years of decline -- and a promise that, if treated, I'd return to my unproblematically exceptional previous performance.

It was probably a few years before I had enough distance to consider at length what my family was going through at this time. Lately I've wondered about another possible factor in their conceptualization of my illness. I have a girlfriend now, which my family did not know was within the realm of possibility for me until a couple of years ago. They've welcomed her with an effusiveness that suggests a little more may be at work than delight in Heather's highly family-pleasing character. The other week on the phone with my grandmother, after some polite chat about what Heather was up to, she broke out with: "I'm just so glad you're happy now."

Now? Now that I had come out and into my true self, I suppose she meant. I had never actually framed the matter as a "coming out," never indicated that this had been a matter of much inner struggle for me (it was and wasn't, but not due to any kind of self-repression). But this is one of the narratives at work around us, and it might well present itself as a comforting explanation for why one's granddaughter was so miserable for all those years.

Sadly for narrative convenience, my mental illness surely did not stem from my being creative or being queer (though the latter factor might well have added to the general feeling of pressure under which my first break occurred). But it has informed my art, not so much as cause or content but as process. The two things can move in similar ways.

Metaphor is itself a kind of paranoia; poetry, like psychosis, depends on seeing things as they are not. A piece of praise that sticks with me is a comment that I seemed to "see more than anyone else." (The capacity for paying attention makes up about 90% of my talent in any area, I suppose; it's not much, but it can do a little more than one might think.) In a paranoid state the mind runs its fingers more and more rapidly along threads of connection between all things (perhaps half-realizing that it is weaving these very threads with the other hand, and perhaps not at all), enwrapping the world in an ever wider and more elaborate net. Similarly, when things are going well as I write or compose in my head or plot out an essay it is among life's highest pleasures to feel the successive sparks of connection between ideas; I feel maximally powerful drawing so many things within my grasp, alive with the sense that I am doing the thing that I was designed to do – as a cheetah must feel when it runs, a hawk as it enters its swift controlled fall toward its prey.

Accordingly, the first stages of agitation can feel almost virtuous themselves in their similarity to this blessedly productive state. The hyperawareness of anxiety sometimes brings along a sense that the world is burgeoning with barely-contained meaning, and every so often it does produce some useful flash: an apt image, a slightly bitter bit of aphorism. Usually, however, this branching of thought turns in on itself before reaching the desired destination. Consciousness begins instead devouring data on the body and its accelerating heart rate, the twitch developing in one eyelid, the nausea puddling in the gut, and the fraught border where the self meets a judgmental world. Past this point, the best that can be hoped for is to eventually collapse into an exhausted calm; the promised breakthrough is lost for good.

Depression does something else, which it can do in tandem with these other forces or alone. It saps the will to such an extent that it can, in some middle state between normalcy and incapacitation, actually provide a sense of focus on those few things that seem marginally non-useless. When things are going easily in a superficial way, the sense of urgency needed to undertake creative projects fades. If one is happy cooking delicious meals, watching movies, having drinks with friends, why not bask in complacency for a while? In a steady mood I can go days or weeks without the question of what I am here to do posing more than a minor itch at the back of my skull.

In a depressed state, however, art becomes one of the few things of worth in the world and one of the only ladders up toward the light. When making art is a way to feel better (and not because it helps "work through" my feelings, but rather because it dissolves the self and feelings in its own process), one is compelled more strongly toward it.

If my work ethic were stronger to begin with, these prompts of illness would lose their authority, I think. As it is, I try to wring what I can from them without losing sight of the inevitable point where they stop being of assistance, without forgetting that they are not the only spurs that can induce me to work seriously, but only the most painful. Which is not the same thing at all, as it turns out.