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The Wound's Eye View

POSTED: Sat, Dec 15 2007 - 03:30 AM   |   Eric Roos

If you’re wondering why last week was so spooky I can totally clear things up. Of course you noticed it was the first time in more than two and a half years that I didn’t post anything to this blog but did you also know that key world leaders (Bush, Brown, Merkel, Herkel, Schmerkel) don’t make a move without consulting these pages for psychic direction? Without my guidance, chaos reigned. The logjam at the Bali climate talks and Fed rate cut market swoon are just two examples, not to [barely] mention the baseball steroids bombshell, so terribly shocking. Better not to go there anyway because whenever I think about baseball players (well, more their uniforms) I get sorta hot and itchy.

The thing is, when I sat down to write last week nothing came out. It was the strangest thing. So I did what I always do when that happens. The grocery shopping. Dusted and vacuumed. Scrubbed the sink and toilet, which usually does the trick because if I still can’t write after that, I am forced to perform the all-time odious chore of scouring the bathtub.

There’s really nothing worse. Ours is surrounded on three sides by walls of gleaming white tile that stand, I swear, 250 feet tall. I have tried many, many different types of “no scrub” cleansers on these walls but, and I should know better, having toiled for Clorox on these selfsame products, anyone who puts “no scrub” in the same sentence as “bathtub tile” should be given a used toothbrush, one cup of tepid water and a map the size of a barn door so they can polish every last inch of grout in the Pentagon.

But soldiering on hopefully with my latest hard surface spray, I pump until my trigger finger begins to twitch uncontrollably, sort of like in Up With People when my smiling muscles went into spasm. Just as I begin to lose consciousness from the toxic fumes, I remember to turn on the fan, crank the window and lie down on the bathmat, where I notice that either Jack or me has lost quite a lot of hair, unless we have a cat, in which case I’m experiencing the early onset of dementia.

The thing about these “no scrub” sprays is that you’re supposed to “just rinse with plenty of warm clear water!” Maybe I’m retarded but the only way I’ve figured out how to do that is to take the mop bucket, fill it from the bathtub faucet and sort of throw it at the vast tile expanses, thereby creating a fantastic whooooshing wall of water effect that does seem to provide the necessary rinse…of the entire bathroom. And me.

So I do it naked, except for the fetching yellow gloves I wear to guard against the toxic chemicals contained in the arsenal of cleaning products I use and own. Seriously, an entire hall closet bursts with every last product you’ve heard of or seen advertised on freakshow TV, the ones that promise space age laborsaving technology. I even bought all those “Now, With Teflon!” cleansers that promise to leave your toilet bowl free from “soils” longer because, ostensibly, they (the “soils”) simply slide off. I think “soils” is, in this case, a euphemism for dried-on poop and I would dearly love to have been in the ad copy meeting when that little gem was sold. I am here to say the Teflon promise is a steaming pile of crap, which would get dried on if you allowed it to sit for awhile.

But even after tackling the bathtub last week, I was unable to produce a word. I felt like a clock that stopped ticking or a toy with a broken wheel. I think I know what writer’s block is, at least my own brand of it, and this wasn’t it, felt much deeper. So I decided to ride it out (as if I had a choice) and hope for clarity.

It was kind of funny when it came, coinciding as it did with Hyundai’s new advertising campaign, “Duh.” In retrospect, “Duh” sums up my assessment of the situation, but don’t we often feel this way with the benefit of hindsight? Following this thought out the window, I wondered how it might be to live life in reverse: always knowing exactly what to do, never making a mistake, never learning. It would look like how George Bush acts, but the result would be Linus, not Pigpen.

Anyway, immediately prior to my “Duh” moment, my attention was drawn to what I’d written last, about reconciling with my parents, and everything pretty much fell into place. Even though I hadn’t the first clue at the beginning, this entire enterprise was concerned with healing a bunch of childhood crap, including my relationship with my mom and dad.

But I didn’t know that when I started, didn’t have the first clue. No, I thought I was indulging a romantic and long-held desire “to write.” And a part of me was. But I found out along the way that the act of writing—the craft of it—doesn’t interest me overmuch. I’m impatient, a little sloppy, mostly concerned with conveying my racing thoughts in as cogent a form as possible.

Looking back, I believe that what drove me is primal and unconscious, a force within that heals. Deep wounds require light and air lest they fester, so I cast my shadows on the public square. Through strange alchemy, the soft underbelly I exposed transmuted to sinew; nothing is left to fear when all has been revealed. I see now that my version of events is just that—my version. It’s the only one I have to tell, but I’ve lately heard others and grasp their truth.

I think I made my parents villains in the early parts of this blog. I don’t feel that way about them today, but that’s the thing about real time healing: it unfolds in, yup, real time. Blood and smelly pus make special appearances. (I’m talking about mine, not theirs.) I was, as my therapists are wont to say, “deep in my wound” when I first began writing here. It’s true, my childhood didn’t resemble one uninterrupted Sesame Street episode (whose did?) and I might have made different decisions were I in my parents’ shoes. But that is exactly where I was not. And it wasn’t possible to imagine walking in them while I was wallowing in my wound, for the simple reason you can’t have perspective (the key ingredient in compassion and forgiveness) when you’re lying in a ditch.

Speaking of wallowing in the wound, I do want to put in a hearty word for it. Too many of us avoid it, to our immense cost. We cannot advance singly or collectively if we do not address our wounds, and part of that process is a big fat messy wallow, like a prize sow in mud. Each of us has a defining wound, which we know is the case because we’ll do anything rather than sit alone in a quiet room and do absolutely nothing. (This widespread inability is just a symptom of our wounds: the minute we’re quiet and alone, the pain comes up, generally felt either as anxiety or depression.)

So it’d be swell if we could identify and work through whatever is capable of chasing us around like this and by jingo, there’s gonna be a nice long wallowing period, during which time we want to blame whoever we feel dished it out to us—in my case it was my parents (not very original), for other people it could be god or the drunk driver or school nurse or whoever we’ve decided is responsible for our misery. This is natural and normal. But other people, Americans especially for some reason, just hate wallowers and will first try to joke you out of it (“Hey, give us a smile!”) and then try to make you feel guilty (“Some people have real things to feel bad about.”) Ignore them.

Because what I’ve learned is this: the wound is a gift, generally hand-selected just for you. Doesn’t that sound pathetically Jack Handey? But what I mean is that working through the wound is the path towards wholeness and a reason to get up in the morning. If we were meant to have an easy life, there wouldn’t be adult acne or upgrading to Microsoft Vista or, most importantly, a wound’s-eye-view to the spiritual grandeur of the universe. Rather, we would live frictionless in a perfectly ordered bubble world like Mitt Romney.

If we avoid this work, what I call “running around our backhand,” then we might as well curl up and die. In our atomized, broken culture, many of us feel empty and alone and unfulfilled precisely because we aren’t engaged in the process of healing into a connection with something larger than ourselves. Consequently, we eat, drink, drug and shop to fill the void. It ain’t pretty and it ain’t living.

Of course it’s scary to stare into the monster’s maw. But the monster is an illusion, for jewels are strewn like weeds along the healing path. For me, just one process (writing this blog) yielded a true miracle, reconciliation with my parents. I did not expect to see them again in my lifetime. To find that I hold them in my heart is so unexpected and unlikely that I can attribute it only to grace— and answered prayers for determination to press on even in the face of my own terror.

A wise friend of mine once said that we must keep the wound raw in order to maintain our connection to the universe (or god or whatever you want to call it). I believe that, but obviously I wrestle with the dark aspects of my being every blessed day and am disheartened by how often they prevail, so I don’t have a choice—I’ll be working on myself until I keel over. I am done writing here, at least for now, having accomplished what it appears I unconsciously set out to do. (We’ll still post the monthly links.)

Thank you for bearing witness to this journey.