Once upon a time, I wanted to get my clinical license so I could be a shrink. Odd to think about now, but I was hell bent on it. I was working in a setting without the kind of supervision I needed, so I hired my own supervisor and stayed with her for two years. We’re friends now, which is a difference between supervision and therapy: you can be friends afterward. That said, in retrospect, she was basically my therapist.

One afternoon we were discussing a client who was trying to get disability* and about whose claim to same I was skeptical. Honesty about your own lousy motivations is important in clinical supervision as it is in therapy. I admitted that an ugly fantasy of mine sometimes is to use what I know about mental illness to get disability so I could drop out and never do anything again. Fantasies work how they work; I can easily see all the problems with this, but once in a while it gives me solace from that locked-in feeling life sometimes gives me.

My supervisor admitted her own version, which I think is sort of not mine to share here, though it was bizarre and compelling. Never one to quit while I’m ahead, I piled one more log on the bonfire of crazy and admitted my other escape fantasy: being the last person on earth. She looked genuinely puzzled and asked what the good part of being the last person on earth was, and I said (of course) that nobody could ever tell me what to do again.

David Markson may be largely to blame. He wrote a riveting or maybe stultifying experimental novel called Wittgenstein’s Mistress composed of fragmented observations made by a narrator you come to understand either is or believes herself to be the last person on earth. Here is a sentence chosen haphazardly to give you the flavor of her musings:

“Well, and I certainly would have found it agreeable to tell Ludwig Wittgenstein how fond I am of his sentence.”

It’s oddly matter-of-fact and occasionally funny but mostly it’s suffused with terrible loneliness…and she’s most likely just nuts, but meanwhile, she lives in the Louvre for a while, and in an abandoned house on the beach for a while, and so forth. She crosses the Bering Strait in a motor boat (the sick fantasy of any non-flyer.)

So, sometimes, as a DSM-worthy form of self-soothing, I do this, though really it just comes over me. I think about where I’d live if it were just a matter of breaking in, knowing there was no one left to stop me. Or I bring The World Without Us into the bibliography of my little nervous breakdown and try to remember how long it would be until I could drink from the Hudson. Or I think about the practicalities of keeping warm or fed. Or sometimes I just imagine the quiet, which is the very best part.

*either that or we weren’t and it came up completely some other way. Si non e vero, e ben trovato.

A loud buzz signals that the metallic hammering is about to begin, a technological blacksmith pounding my molecules against an electronic anvil. The noises vary in pitch and length, long patterns that hold for a while and then change, slamming against the giant red noise-canceling headphones that can’t keep out the aural onslaught. But the sounds make patterns, comforting in their regularity, engaging in their changes.

First, the intro to MIA’s “Paper Planes” seems to be playing, but the chord change never comes and I settle into its sameness for a while. Then I imagine the sounds to be a big long Philip Glass opus, like the score for Koyaanisqatsi; I imagine the landscapes and urban decay and people mobs of those images set to the clinks of the MRI machine. I think of Bang on a Can, Aphex Twin. I remember the movie Altered States.

I imagine that if an entirely spondaic line of poetry could exist, it would sound like this. The machine throbs. I think about those pod-bed “hotels” in Japanese airports. The pulse intensifies. I hear the poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” when she imagines the mourners tromping, “treading—treading–” across her soul with “boots of lead.” The tempo shifts. The pitch increases. I am in a private space and my mind is meandering first to concrete comparisons and favorite people, then just abstractions, flashes of color and feelings of sound.

The technician interrupts on the loudspeaker every few minutes to let me know when another round of noises will begin, and I find that when the noises stop, I start to wish he wouldn’t say anything. I am sure he does so because most people find it comforting to hear the human voice, but I like the buzzes and beeps and the total retreat.

In between rounds, the technician reels me up to the surface and I find I don’t really want to go. He makes fun of me for looking away when he hooks the IV into my arm, and I object to this because I am really not freaking out; it’s just that no one actually likes to watch that jab, right? Or looks forward to it? It makes me want to dive back inside to escape his jollity.

Instead, since it’s not up to me when I glide back in, I ask the technician what makes the noises, and he says the sound is there to move the microelectrons in my bloodstream, to upset them so they register an image. A few minutes later, face down in the tube, I feel the cold contrast dye seeping sluggishly into my vein and settle in for the next song. And I can feel the electromagnets pulling on the fluids in my body like a lunar banshee of a moon-tide. My ear piercing vibrates under the headphones as the force of science tugs at it. But the itch stops soon and all that’s left is the hail of pure powerful sound.

I emerge from the tube with deep red grooves on my cheeks from lying face down on the face cradle. I absently mention that the music was good and he says oh boy, I’m worried now, she’s hallucinating, so I stop talking about it. Groggy and quiet after my time in the tube, I want to keep my thoughts to myself. I duck my head as I walk through the loud waiting room in hopes that my hair will hide the marks on my face, into the different sounds of a different atmosphere. I sort of miss the music.

Around the middle of the semester, everyone is getting back grades for their first really major assignments, and no one’s particularly joyful about them. College is hard! And we should be challenging them to raise the stakes; that’s our job. I take that task seriously, in that I don’t think my job is to pat talented students on the head and tell the rest they’ll never make it. I want everyone to develop their writing and thinking.

The problem is that, when we develop our thinking, making really big strides in our ideas, our writing is now insufficient. High-school thinking is not particularly hard, so good students get by with essays easily composed around a thesis like “Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations is about a young man who develops socially, physically, and emotionally,” and then there is a paragraph about social development, one about physical development, and one about emotional development. I’d rather eat a dirty shoe than read it, but if everything is spelled correctly, it won’t get a terrible grade. In college, we’re asking disciplinary questions in English, like why do writers describe the things they choose to describe, and in what terms, and what are the stakes of making those decisions in the composition of prose narrative? What are the political or ethical stakes of these decisions, and how does the text, as a work of prose, function, if it does, and to what extent is it coherent or not, and, if not, why not? Once we’re thinking in these disciplinary ways, the thinking gets much harder, but it’s possible. The writing, on the other hand, is going to take more work.

Whenever we make huge leaps in thinking, our writing sucks. I tell my students about the five years I spent writing my dissertation, because I had to invent a way of writing that was a clear way to express the idea I had. I wrote a lot of crap before it got better. Or I give the example of major philosophers, who, after conceiving of world-changing ideas, produced first books that are practically unreadable—dense, vague, jargony, neologistic messes—before they found a way to write what they wanted to say in a way that can be read and understood by others.

I tell them this because I know that when their papers seem a little crazy (sentences trailing off into, literally, “blah blah blah,” or repetition in sentence after sentence of some insane generalization about what “we, as humans, throughout time” have felt), it’s usually because they’re trying to think about something new in a new way and their writing hasn’t caught up with their ideas. My students aren’t lazy or dumb. I honestly would not say that about any student I’ve ever had. They’re just wrestling with concepts they haven’t had sufficient time to think through, discuss, analyze, evaluate, and articulate. So they panic and their writing drifts into outer space.

Some of them know this, and they say so when they turn in their papers. “I know this really isn’t there yet, but I really want to make an argument for something that is a kind of new idea for me.” Great. Others hold the paper at arm’s length as they hand it in, never having so much as glanced at it after typing the words in it, hoping for a miraculous A. Either way, a revision is probably in the cards.

I don’t assign a ton of writing, in part because I want them to have the time and space to think through their arguments if they want to. I’m not going to force them to do great work, but I will reward it if they’re willing to do it. The problem is that revision means seeing their work again, when some of them didn’t want to look at it in the first place. When they look at their work, and read it, and ask themselves what the point they were trying to make was, they can’t even figure out what they meant by it in the first place.

Maybe it would be more kind to assign a paper a week, and give them better grades as the semester goes on and they learn how to do what they want to do. But all I’m asking is for them to read their own work if and only if they’re dissatisfied with the results, and to do something they can be proud of, that they’re willing to defend. And doing that makes them sad.

Oh, they’re so sad. They asked, before handing their papers in, “So you mean we can just revise our papers if we don’t like the grade?” Yes. “And we can get a few points for extra credit if we revise?” No, I regrade it, completely. “Wow, that’s awesome.” It’s hard for me to communicate how painful revision is.

Revision is brutal. I hate it. It’s humiliating, and not just because someone else has told you your work doesn’t make sense. It’s humiliating because you are forced to confront your own limitations, and see yourself as the world might see you. When you revise your work, you don’t get to give yourself a pass, or play the role of your own infinitely loving parents, or make excuses because you were really tired when you wrote it. You realize that you don’t sound as smart as you think you are. You realize that sometimes you don’t make sense.

I don’t want to cause sadness. Bad feelings are not something I enjoy creating in other people. I don’t even think they’re necessary for learning, and they aren’t if you know what you’re capable of and what your limitations are. But college is where you start figuring out what kind of a figure you really might cut in the world if you were turned loose right now. And I see their sadness and say, but I do think you’re special and smart and that you deserve happiness. I just want you to be able to show that to someone else.

It’s kind of awesome.  She has ways of dealing with life, the universe and everything.  It’s an ideology, but not one that freaks me out.  I’m madly averse to organized religion.  But this doesn’t scare me.

Thing I learned from Tara: make space for the anxiety and stress or whatever emotion you’re feeling.  And inquire.  Inquire where it’s from and what’s beneath it.  Give it the space it asks for.  And strangely and magically it breaks down.  It doesn’t disappear.  But it becomes a part of the jigsaw, not the whole puzzle.

And say yes to the emotional guests, good and bad.  Don’t deny them.  Learn from them.  It feels quite dramatic to stop castigating oneself for feeling negative and being open to feelings without prejudice.

I know!  It sounds like I joined a cult.  But it’s such a nice cult.

Please observe exhibit A, submitted to my community newsletter:

Please Be Mindful Of Your Aggressive Dog

It’s happened four times since my wife and I moved to Cal Heights in ’04, two of those times in the last four months.  We’ve been out for an evening stroll with our small dog, when a neighbor leaves his or her front door ajar, not realizing that their much larger and more aggressive dog is about to run out and try to attack.  Luckily (but unfortunately) I’ve become somewhat paranoid when walking through my own neighborhood, and have been super vigilant.  Each time, I’ve scooped my dog up to protect her before she’s become another dog’s chew toy, and every time but once, the other dog’s owner has run out and apologized profusely.

The apologies are fine; I appreciate it when someone acknowledges when they’ve made a mistake.  However, much better than any apology would be if my neighbors would please do their best to keep an eye on their dogs, and make sure that their children or guests haven’t left the door open behind them.

I understand that people get dogs for different reasons, and that some chose larger and more intimidating breeds as protection from perceived threats, but those of us who didn’t make that choice also deserve the peace of mind that we and our smaller dogs are safe in our own neighborhood.

…and exhibit B, addressed to the City of Long Beach:

Dear Sir or Madam,

Generally speaking, members of the public are not thrilled when we receive parking tickets.  Given this (sometimes fraught) relationship, it would seem that employees driving official Parking Enforcement vehicles would be extra careful to follow rules of the road.  Perhaps you’ve heard the saying: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

This is why I was surprised to see an employee of the City of Long Beach, Parking Enforcement detail (driving car# 10105) talking on a hand-held cell phone at approximately 11:30 while driving South on Orange Ave before the intersection of Wardlow.

I look forward to a response to my concerns.

…and exhibit C? Let’s just say, “There’s an app for that.”  Yes the perfect middle-aged conservation app: with the push of one virtual button, I can narc out my water-wasting neighbors for such infractions as excessive sprinkler overspray, hosing down a driveway, or watering a lawn at the wrong time of day (any time that isn’t between 8PM and 9AM). Oh, the joy this app brings me!

…and as if I needed an exhibit D, you should know that I’ve written these two letters and narced out a neighbor all within a 72-hour period.

See you at the early bird special!