The world's gone crazy

"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." -- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

The best, most purely joyful moment of the last week was on Friday night, sitting along the wall of a little basement gym at a local community center. I held Isaac on my lap and we watched Suzannah run, tumble, and jump, giggling as her gymnastics coach chased her through the obstacle course. Matt made it to the last fifteen minutes of class, and we sat there together grinning like fools -- one would think we were watching our daughter in the Olympics. But these are the deep joys of parenting: watching our little girl strike out on her own as she learns how to do forward rolls and masters the balance beam, listening to her purely delighted giggles as she runs, bear crawls, crab walks. And could I ever have anticipated the huge swell of pride in my heart to watch her land on her feet and throw her arms in the air -- her triumphant big finish?

I remember a year ago, when we signed her up for a Saturday morning art class -- something just for her after Isaac was born. And while she enjoyed it, she still really needed to be close to us, as in at the table with her. And now, to watch her dive in and play, comfortable with me on the sidelines -- it is a wonderful thing. She is shy, in those first moments, about letting her joy show too much; she actually tries to stop herself from grinning. But there is a moment, a surrender, when she lets herself go completely into swinging from the bar or doing one of the activities in the obstacle course; she's not trying to hold back, she's not looking at me to see me looking at her, and she is just so beautifully herself.

And it is moments like these that give me a window, an escape from the deep funk in which I have been stuck in the last couple of weeks. I thought I'd get back to my blog after I managed to shake it off and write with clearer vision about something everyone would find agreeable, but I couldn't even manage to write about my daughter's gymnastics class without feeling this underlying heaviness, because there's just so much that I'm not writing.

I have a particular sounding board where I work, someone who listens when I occasionally launch into one of my THE WORLD IS A SCARY HORRIBLE PLACE rants. The gist the other day when I burst through his door was this: I am just so sad right now. My life is so good, but the world has gone so crazy. We treat people horribly. We don't actually give a shit about anything as long as we have our video games and our fancy goddamned televisions and stuff. We've been talking about marginalization in my junior English class this week -- who has the power? And who are the people who don't have a voice? -- and it's just. not. enough. It's not enough, and I feel CRAZY.

He frowned and asked if I've been writing. Not really, I said. He told me I need to be, and also, that I need to read some more Conroy.

(Sometimes I really do believe in the power of language to save us somehow. I think of all the writers who have become my life rafts, and the ways in which they remind me of the immense capacity of words to heal.)

(They heal or they hurt. They are never neutral.)

I didn't read Conroy, though. I came home and read the news, and Facebook. I think my friends who gave up Facebook for Lent had the right idea. Or my friend who deleted her account entirely, for the same reason I ceased all participation in a few online message boards I used to enjoy: it is astonishing what people will say to one another when they're not saying these things to a face, and it is astonishing what people will say about one another when they don't have to put a face on the people about whom they are speaking.

I don't know, it was a combination of things --

Being completely disheartened by what's been happening in Wisconsin and hearing so many hateful things said about my profession and the people who function as my lights in the darkness.

Any other number of political horrors that are happening right now.

Waking up to devastation on the other side of the world and feeling -- I don't even know. Powerless? Heartbroken? One of my students is an exchange student from Japan; she wasn't in school on Friday and I thought about her all day.

And then reading an attack on "stupid liberals" in my own Facebook friends feed. (Public Service Announcement: I do not require -- and have never required -- my friends to agree with me on everything, especially when it comes to politics. But if you are going to participate in vitriolic public discussions about how liberals "make you sick" and are "Un-American," then take me off your friends page. Right now. I mean it. Put my face on your generalizations and your unproductive, hateful ranting, pat yourself on the back for being right or whatever, and let's just be done.)

-- that led to my sudden fit of exhausted, angry weeping in the kitchen. I didn't even know how to explain it in that moment. What am I upset about? This dirty, gut-wrenchingly awful week in politics? The devastation in Japan? These bullshit Facebook groups devoted solely to denouncing immigrants and people on welfare? The fact that I'm just worn out?

I keep thinking of a scene from Mermaids, one of my all-time favorite movies. Winona Ryder's character, Charlotte, is walking through the grounds of a convent near her home immediately following the assassination of JFK. She hears the bells in the tower ringing, so she climbs up there, knowing she'll find Joe, her love interest and grounds caretaker. He's ringing the bells and weeping. "The world's gone crazy," he says. All the desperation and confusion of that scene (ignoring the fact that I'm not a sixteen-year-old girl who worries that she'll go to hell for kissing a man) is sort of what I'm feeling right now. I know that Charlotte doesn't have a whole lot of perspective in that movie, and right now I own that I may not, either. The world has never had any shortage of craziness, but this particular week of crazy has gone straight to my heart and my head and it's really kind of a mess in here.

It seems kind of trite, then, to say that I find hope in Pat Conroy and John Steinbeck, or in a moment of pure joy in a Friday night gymnastics class. But that's where I'm at, I guess, and maybe that has to be enough to keep me breathing.