Fragment #9
I have a confession: I don’t hate the fireworks. This past week (two, three), as pyrotechnics and just plain explosions lit up Chicago every night, I was unperturbed. Even as friends railed, and dogs quailed (sorry dogs), the apocalyptic cacophony felt … right. Even on the Fourth, as the stench of explosives wrapped my neighborhood in a toxic, humid embrace, I didn’t mind. It was ungoverned and unruly, gaudy and dangerous. It felt like liberation. Like the city raising itself to scream, with one voice, “Let’s start some SHIT!” A revolution, maybe.
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I went to a circus show last weekend—outside of the food pantry and I guess the grocery store, the first experience I’ve shared with more than a few others in a physical space since March. Jean and Raquel organized it, outside, in the courtyard of La Casita de Don Pedro on Division Street, which was inaugurated in 1997 by Lolita Lebron, who fired a pistol inside the Capitol. “No mask, no pass” read the sign, and admission was strictly capped at 40, each audience member assigned a six-foot, numbered spot in the narrow yard. I was supposed to go with a friend but she had abruptly left town, so I went alone and to be honest I was feeling pretty melancholy, but the cabaret—a showcase for performers of color—was one of the most quietly joyful hours I’ve had in weeks. “You’re gonna see your friend and want to hug them!” said Jean, the emcee, laying out the rules of engagement for the show. “But you can’t! You have to do the air hug”—and here he demonstrated, clown-style, with extravagant exaggeration, as Raquel ran around him in an anxious clown frenzy, spritzing hand sanitizer into the air.
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Nance told me last year about a walk a friend had organized, a collective walk across a swath of Chicago, a group of women walking together, the destination the place where the organizer had, some time in the past, decided not to end her life by suicide. I’m sure I’m remembering the details wrong, and I can’t remember the name of Nance’s friend otherwise I would honor her genius here, but my memory tells me that on this walk the walkers carried noisemakers and every time one of them had a self-destructive thought their instructions were to blow a kazoo, a raspberry, make a fart sound. I think about this a lot lately, this clear structure for making ridiculous noise together in the face of despair.
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Dolly Parton sings: “Rivers run backwards, valleys are high. Mountains are level, and truth is a lie. I’m perfectly fine, and I don’t miss you. And the sky is green, and the grass is blue.” Dolly allegedly wrote this song, the title track of her 1999 album The Grass Is Blue, in half an hour, on a lunch break from filming Blue Valley Songbird. She says the song—a perfect ode to the cool torture of heartbreak—came to her direct from God. “I was so tired,” she said in an interview. “I just wanted it to be so good, and he just pretty much wrote this one on his own.” I once sent a copy of The Grass Is Blue to someone I was in love with, but he did not acknowledge the gift until I asked about it. I think I embarrassed him with my desire.
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For six months this year, from January through June, I participated in a course of dialectical behavior therapy, popularly known as DBT. DBT is a form of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy that aims to help practitioners better regulate their emotions and manage mood disorders, and to disrupt patterns of self-destructive thought and behavior. It’s not for everyone, or so I’ve heard—some people find it too formulaic, too externalized toward behavior modification rather than inward-looking, at root causes—but it worked for me, perhaps because I’ve had all the standard-issue talk therapy I need for a lifetime.
DBT is all about teaching skills for coping with stressful or distressing events, whether external (conflict management) or internal (obsessive rumination), and one of the skills in its ample quiver is the skill of “acting opposite.” In “acting opposite,” per DBT logic, you pivot your behavior 180 degrees from what your shitty self-sabotaging mind is telling you. If you are scared of spiders, pick up the spider; if someone angers you, turn toward them with love. Don’t want to get out of bed? Get out of fucking bed.
Obviously this is contingent on circumstance. If it’s a black widow maybe don’t pick it up. If someone is menacing you, try to get away. But in general I’ve found it a useful strategy in all sorts of unexpected circumstances, and possibly now more than ever. (Imagine if all the anti-maskers suddenly recognized the self-destructive nature of their antipathy and chose to turn towards masks with love and acceptance rather than punching the greeter at the Wal-Mart.)
Acting opposite, like much of DBT, has its tendrils in mindfulness practice. Because, according to Lao Tzu (or Heraclitus, or Kant, or the Frankfurt School or … pick your philosopher) the dialectic is the point. Acting opposite encourages a synthesis of opposites, to train yourself to challenge an entrenched belief or emotional response by actively practicing its opposite. Stasis, opposites in perfect balance, may not be attainable or desirable, but build connective tissue between light and dark, up and down, love and hate, fact and fiction and though the dominant undesirable thought may well endure you’ve given it a sturdy travelling companion to keep it in check.
Sometimes, it’s unclear which is the true thought; which is desirable and which is not. I mean, as Dolly says later on in the song, “It’s hot in the Arctic, and crying is fun.” And, guess what it *is* hot in the Arctic and, in truth, crying can be fun, but then is laughing pain? Practice both, in equal parts, and follow the absurd road that unspools; enlightenment can be found in a raspberry.
This is the most fragmentary of fragments and in writing it I am myself “acting opposite” because I have not wanted to write or say much of anything in a while, my own complicated notions about speaking up and staying silent in full summer bloom. Honestly, I find invisibility a useful and healing thing from time to time. But while it’s easy to sink into blessed silence, it’s often harder to crawl back out. By the time it’s time the lead weights of patriarchy, ageism, self-doubt, and the godforsaken marketplace of ideas have once again latched around my ankles, reminding me I am lesser, denying the truth of my experience, the capacity of my desire, the pointlessness of effort if I’m not selling something another deems worth buying.
The pandemic isn’t helping any of this, obviously. Four months in I fear that we are all in danger of becoming invisible to each other, as we disappear into the silos of individual experience: parents and non-; single and coupled; employed and un-; ill and well; all staring at each other mute across a chasm of incomprehension. So I am writing this bottle rocket of a note, this love letter in anger, as a banana peel under the heel of despair, an air hug from a clown. Let’s not forget how to make joyful, ridiculous, inappropriate, obnoxious noise together. Acting opposite is to embrace our totality so as to envision radical futures, committing to a belief in a better you and a better us. Bring a kazoo, let’s start something new.
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This week marks the end of one of the most difficult and yet also unexpectedly transformative years of my life. Thanks for being here for it.