[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
I stopped believing in you. I want to tell you this, sometimes. Write you a letter. Let you know that you’re not pulling one over on me. This need to always be one step ahead. This need to see everything before it comes. This need to classify and simplify and evade what you have coming.
What do you have coming, for me?
I saw a bald eagle in a tree, two days ago. Close to its nest which is huge and I stare up at almost every evening. There were people gathered under the branch it was perched on, which is why I ever noticed it in the first place. People staring up at it doing nothing on a branch. Looking this way and then, thirty seconds later, looking that way.
All of the space inside of thirty seconds.
All of these people staring up at an eagle and I joined them, sure. Hoping it would open its wings. Hoping it would fly. Hoping it would swoop down to scoop up some small furry thing that never saw it coming.
There are birds all over the place. They are outside my window every morning. Looking this way and, thirty seconds later, looking that way.
The importance we attach. The wonder we create. The lessons I never learn.
These are the things I always want to tell you.
I have been having nightmares. You are in them and you are in them and you are in them too. I blame myself, for these things. I blame myself, always. I am pointing fingers. My guts twist up.
I cry out for you, in the night. Without words but with sounds that wake people up to say, “What’s wrong.” So that I have to say, “Nothing.”
I write you letters. I write you letters to say, “I miss you.” I write you letters to say, “I love you.” I stop writing letters, when you ask me to. I write you again in a year, to let you know that I haven’t forgotten.
The prayers I give to leaves I rip off trees. To water that stays still and has fish in it. To clouds that cover everything like the apocalypse is coming. To books with yellow pages. To the little holes that form in my clothes. “Come back.”
You. There are five of you. I count you, when I am walking alone. I find you, in the places I can. I sing songs to you, until I am out of breath.
I do. I do. I swear, I do.
Siken says, “Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again.”
Change, change, change.
[Vaillant’s] central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble. His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of “adaptations,” or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father’s work, adaptations (also called “defense mechanisms”) are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality.
Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. Vaillant’s taxonomy ranks defenses from worst to best, in four categories.
At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or “psychotic,” adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the “immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.” The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).
In contrast to Anna Freud, who located the origins of defenses in the sexual conflicts of a child, Vaillant sees adaptations as arising organically from the pain of experience and playing out through the whole lifespan. Take his comparison of two Grant Study men, whom he named “David Goodhart” and “Carlton Tarrytown” in his first book on the study, Adaptation to Life, published in 1977. Both men grew up fearful and lonely. Goodhart was raised in a blue-collar family, had a bigoted, alcoholic father, and a mother he described as “very nervous, irritable, anxious, and a worrier.” Tarrytown was richer, and was raised in a wealthy suburb, but he also had an alcoholic father, and his mother was so depressed that he feared she would commit suicide. Goodhart went on to become a national leader on civil-rights issues—a master, Vaillant argued, of the “mature” defenses of sublimation and altruism. By his late 40s, staff researchers using independent ratings put Goodhart in the top fifth of the Grant Study in psychological adjustment. Tarrytown, meanwhile, was in the bottom fifth. A doctor who left a regular practice to work for the state, a three-time divorcé who anesthetized his pain with alcohol and sedatives, Tarrytown was, Vaillant said, a user of dissociation and projection—“neurotic” and “immature” defenses, respectively. After a relapse into drug abuse, Tarrytown killed himself at 53. Goodhart lived to 70. Though Vaillant says that the “dashing major” of midlife became a stolid and portly brigadier general, Goodhart’s obituaries still celebrated a hero of civil rights.
Most psychology preoccupies itself with mapping the heavens of health in sharp contrast to the underworld of illness. “Social anxiety disorder” is distinguished from shyness. Depression is defined as errors in cognition. Vaillant’s work, in contrast, creates a refreshing conversation about health and illness as weather patterns in a common space. “Much of what is labeled mental illness,” Vaillant writes, “simply reflects our ‘unwise’ deployment of defense mechanisms. If we use defenses well, we are deemed mentally healthy, conscientious, funny, creative, and altruistic. If we use them badly, the psychiatrist diagnoses us ill, our neighbors label us unpleasant, and society brands us immoral.”
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
my mother says that rain is angels
who are crying up in heaven
and I believe that, cause when sad things happen
it starts raining, it’s been raining
it’s been raining for a while now
it’s been raining at least forty days
and I’ve been crying since the first time
someone I loved passed away
I’ll build an ark inside my body
in a bottle and disappear
cause my soul is drowning, missing people
that i wish could still be here
but it won’t stop raining
and I can’t stop crying
my friends keep dying
it’s been raining for a while now
it’s been raining at least forty days
and I’ve been crying since the first time
someone I loved passed away
The nearly-severely depressed bird has many interests. She enjoys making smoothies; drawing different foods she has eaten; packaging things to send to other birds; stealing from corporations; supporting independent, organic vegan restaurants and grocery stores; and adhering to an organic vegan diet low in non-fruit carbohydrates, high in nuts and seeds and raw produce, and free of sugar and other refined foods. Each night the nearly-severely depressed bird stands in her nest for two hours thinking of things she can do the next day, neatly writing each activity in a 3 ½” by 5” ruled Moleskine journal she stole from Barnes and Noble by putting five of them on her head and flying away calmly.
The nearly-severely depressed bird reads for about one hour each night before sleep. She reads mostly graphic novels, books on veganism and ethics, fiction by writers who write from an existential point of view without being dramatic about it, and non-fiction books about birds that have been marginalized in society at least twice—once by the mainstream and at least once by a subculture. Tonight the bird who is nearly but not at all severely depressed reads from a book called The Mole Birds about birds who can’t afford to pay for a nest and also (for a variety of reasons including shame; a lack of sense of belonging; and being constantly raped, beaten, or harassed) have been alienated from the aboveground nestless bird population, and now live underground.
“Carlos and Frank met in an apricot tree, where Frank, a large eighteen-year-old from New Jersey, was hustling,” reads the bird in a quiet monotone inside her head. “Frank lost more money than he had, and Carlos helped him escape, by creating an apricot obfuscation. Since Frank had no place to sleep, Carlos took him to the hole. Frank has lived there three weeks, and each day says that he does not intend to ‘live in this dirty shit-hole for another day.’ Carlos has lived with nine other birds in the hole for over fourteen months. ‘I’m afraid of being lonely,’ Carlos says, ‘scared to find no one there. I know I’m living down there partly because I’m afraid of going to a nest and being by myself.’” The bird puts the book down and goes to sleep.
The next night the bird who is almost always very close, she feels, to experiencing severe depression and crippling loneliness opens her Moleskine notebook. She picks up a red pen she stole from Harvard’s bookstore and writes, “Clean nest ten minutes.” She stares at her Moleskine journal for thirty minutes and then writes, “Find ferret and pet it with my wing.” Five minutes later she writes, “Drink orange smoothie.” She stares at the Moleskine. Forty minutes later she writes, “Mail five sticks to five birds.” The bird sits. She looks at her pile of books. She picks a graphic novel called “Bighead” by Jeffrey Brown. She reads and sometimes grins at the drawings, and the dialogue, but also feels very nervous and like she might cry because though she currently does not feel bad she is very aware of the possibility of feeling very bad. It is a feeling like she is metaphysically “surrounded by endless shit.”
The shit isn’t touching her but it is near her, in a precarious way, like she is standing on a small raft floating on liquid shit inside a room whose walls and ceiling are made of shit. It is very difficult to balance on the raft to prevent it from becoming slanted. But the raft almost never becomes slanted and when it does become slanted the bird always recovers. The bird has never fallen into the endless shit, because though it is very difficult and requires a lot of energy and focus to balance on the raft the bird does it existentially, meaning it is a kind of work, the bird feels, that is done at once automatically, deliberately, carefully, without fail, without reprieve, and without choice.
Name: Eva
Origin: Hebrew
Meaning(s): Life. Living one. Giver of life.
The girl’s name Eva \e-va\, also used as boy’s name Eva, is pronounced EE-vah. It is of Hebrew origin, derived from the Hebrew chava (life), which is from hayya (alive, animal). Latinate form of Eve. Also an Anglicisation of the Gaelic name Aoife (beauty).
Save for land in Antarctica, the terrestrial earth is entirely owned: Considered property, it has no rights of its own. For centuries humans have capitalized on this point of view, using and abusing nature—that is, natural resources—as they’ve seen fit.
This proprietary outlook might soon be displaced, and not a day too soon, given its complicity in our present environmental quagmire. In September 2008, the citizens of Ecuador approved the world’s first constitution to extend inalienable rights to nature. In the South American country, “Nature, or Pachamama … [now] has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Smog - Running the Loping
It’s summer now and it’s hot
And the sweat pours out
And the air is the same as my body
And I breathe my body inside out
With sunlight around my skin turns brown
And you wouldn’t know me from your pa
Or Adam or Allah
But I haven’t changed
No, I haven’t changed
