a bonobo humanity?

A phrase in a novel – falling in love is like being haunted. It brings to mind youthful feelings, traces of which are occasionally felt in – late maturity? 

It may not have been love, I was ever skeptical, but in youth you might encounter someone, without ever really meeting her, a friend of a friend of a friend, you see her, and then not,  and you’re not thinking of her, you don’t think, and then, unexpectedly, she’s there, in a room you’ve entered, a room full of people, and your skin goes electric, so palpable you feel other people must notice, you want to escape the embarrassment. 

Of course, of course, you have been haunted. Wonder and hope haunts. You need something, but how awful to impose that on others, especially on her. And so you’re caught in an orbit, a satellite, it feels fatal to get too close, or to drift away, into empty hopelessness. Can you simply remain like this? Is it bearable? Is it bearable not to? 

Haunting, haunted. You imagine speaking but dare not. You imagine trying to speak but the words refuse to become sound. You imagine a disdainful look that you’ve never seen on her face. You wonder at all the barriers you insist on creating. You count all your failures. You detect a pattern that you feel is slowly reducing you to… what? Nothing substantial. A thing so insubstantial that nobody, let alone her, will even feel any need to avoid. How could such intensity produce such nullity?

——————–

Hell is other people? Heaven too? Thoughts are encased in bone and flesh. We think others are a mystery, as if we understand our own hopes and fears and anger and anguish. We think, why did we think that? Idle, hurtful thoughts, impossible to trace. Or we don’t want to get lost in that maze. 

We’re drawn to what hurts us, for example, where there is pain there is life. But what is the equation? What are the respective quantities? Should we experiment with experience or stay safe or find a balance but what balance? To each her own? 

Screens are safe, mostly safe, their unexpectedness rarely pains, threatens, upends our lives, which is why they never provide us with enough. Spontaneous interaction is the essential that we often strive to avoid. Why do I say we? Can I even speak for myself honestly? 

Love is a terribly abused, essential word. It makes for us a pain which threatens our lives while we wonder about its reality. To not believe in it is killing, to believe too much kills with hope. But what matter, we must die. 

Old people on the streets sit on mats. I mostly look at the women. She sat on a dusty blanket with a bowl, a big Buddha staring through the passing crowd. A small dog skipped by on a lead, my dog, pulling toward her, and her face lit like a lamp, warming and shaming me, indelibly. 

Growing old, things still happen. Hope springs familiar, but so different, but not so different. No movement to action, or little, mostly just thought, internal, invisible to all but the self. When action occurs, however slight, it shocks and shames and excites, too much. No more, no return. But then…

I stand at the whiteboard waiting for my students to drift in. I wear a fixed, almost grim smile. A thin, wiry Arabic student enters and sidles between desks. His near-shaved head makes me think of skinheads of long ago. A contrast. He looks at me and stops, smiles.’Handsome’, he says. I smile back, thin. My skin prickles. 

I walk streets and stop at bars, or not. I pass a pub, familiar, near my home. Near the door I stop to let others pass, leaving. A tall, scowling man, who seems surrounded by acolytes, is saying ‘he sits there every night, with his one bacardi, clogging up the place’. I feel a surge of violence, burning. I blink and blink. Moments or hours afterwards I wonder at myself. Is this a male thing? 

I indulge myself with memories. As a child, but not so young, I sat beside a girl in class. I noticed with pride that I was the only boy who did so. I wanted to be unnoticeably exceptional. That year, the only year, we had inkwells and pens with nibs. It was hard for me, my left hand, my writing hand, trailed behind the nib and smudged the page. The girl, whose name I remember, looked at my work and smiled, a sad beautiful smile. And then, but perhaps not then, perhaps a day later, or a week, she rose, in the silent class, and approached the teacher’s desk, and I knew why, and the teacher, a young woman with huge intimidating spectacles and without a smile, came to me in all this silence and told me that I could write with a pencil from now on. And when she was gone, I looked at the girl, my friend, but she would not look at me. 

And memories bring more memories, as if on a string lit by the first. She came in late, and held a handkerchief balled in her hand. Her face was wet and discoloured, pink, almost purple, a number of subtle shades, and she was trembling. Everything disappeared around this sight. 

There is only one more memory, it was so long long ago. We were walking home together, like friends, chatting, and I was carrying her books. Yes, truly, I was carrying her books. I think I had come to realise that she was beautiful. And she told me, with a touch of sadness, the very slightest touch, that she and her family were moving to Melbourne soon. 

______________________________________________________

Familiar silence encloses me, though the inner noise baffles and bores. Impotence is tedious, yet it grows and grows. Or perhaps it was always this way, memories are so unreliable. How we love to manipulate, while never quite believing in its effects. And hate to be manipulated, yet always somehow hoping.

References

Han Kang, Greek Lessons, 2011