I Have Lost an Idea

All last week I was plagued with a recurring nightmare.

The first evening of the nightmare, I had been listening to Joni Mitchell’s Blue album. I am quite fond of this album; my mother detests it as my penchant for eras I never experienced. As I listened, my ear caught a particular line.

When I think of your kisses, my mind see-saws.

That lyric rang out so clearly to my ears that evening in a way it had never done before. I think it was all the more particular to my mind because I had, up until that moment in the lounge, believed the line to be –

When I think of your kisses, my mind sees stars.

After hearing this line for the first time, for what it is, I also had the first occurrence of my nightmare.

I am unaccustomed to fitful sleep. I have always, as a rule, enjoyed the average eight hours of sleep each evening. I have, over the years, developed something of a bedtime ritual. I begin by taking a hot shower, making sure to both shampoo and condition my hair. I take extra care to lather my underarms as I am disgusted by my armpit's ability to accumulate deodorant clumps; these small white masses have a manner of metastasizing and becoming hopelessly bonded to my underarm hair. I typically pee in the shower as well; in truth, I feel as if I have skipped a step on those evenings when I do not need to. I also brush my teeth in the shower, but more for convenience than a sense of habit. Unlike with urinating, I would still feel a sense of completion if I were to brush my teeth out of sequence.

This ritual is important to me because I enjoy the feel of clean sheets as I fall asleep. The highlight of travel with my mother is hotel sheets. They are always pristine, crisp, and industrially clean. Taking a shower just before bed helps me to keep my sheets as fresh as possible.

The therapist my mother sends me to asked why I don't simply change my sheets daily. I told my therapist that I have been banned from approaching the laundry machine after an incident with a number of mother's table linens and gelatin. I told my therapist that I have also been banned from making undue work requests from our housemaid because, as mother describes her, she is an unfortunately constructed woman on the brink of the lower class. I told my therapist that, in light of my mother's edicts, I thought it wise to limit myself to changing my bed linens only once a week until such time as we have a more sightly housemaid.

In the meantime, I explained, I recognize my evening bathing ritual.

On the night of Blue anew, I was able to complete my bathing ritual, but was distracted by a lingering sense of shock.

The therapist my mother sends me to asked me what was so shocking about the shift from seeing stars to see-saws. I told him that it likely made quite a difference to an astronomer or a child.

Each night I would wake from my nightmare entirely dampened. I would refer to it as having a cold sweat except that there was nothing cold about it. I would wake each night in such a humid state that I would need to get out of bed and stand with my limbs akimbo and swinging to cool myself. My hair along the scalp would be wet, giving my hair an athlete's volume as he breaks a sweat. The back of my pajamas would feel thin as the fabric clung to my skin. Worst of all, there would be a damp imprint on my linens and pillow as if a great anthropomorphic sponge had been laid and pressed onto my bed.

The therapist my mother sends me to asked me to describe what happens in the nightmare. I told him that I wasn't upset about the nightmare. I was upset about the state of my bed after the nightmare. I asked him if he knew of any methods to make the effects of nightmares less destructive on one's laundry and linens; after all, I am uncertain of what brought on this recurrent nightmare, but I would like to be prepared if it is to recur again. He told me that it would be necessary to analyze the contents of the nightmare if I was ever to understand why it caused me such troubled sleep. To sleep, he said. To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye there's the rub.

I reminded my therapist that Hamlet was speaking of death, not nightmares. In any case, I failed to see how discussing the electrical impulses of my brain would prevent them from causing such violent sweating.

We spent the rest of the session identifying Rorschach blotches.

I have always loved Joni Mitchell's Blue. I have loved it from the first time I came across the record at a small flea market near a farmer's market where my mother was searching for a particular type of honey that is meant to bring renewed luster to the skin. But, more to the point, I have always understood what I meant in saying that I loved Joni Mitchell's Blue.

I have loved Joni Mitchell's Blue the same way I have loved funeral processions, loved the smell of tension in a room after the meeting of a deadline, loved Magritte's Empire of Light, loved cornbread. For each of these things, I have enjoyed their strengths and weaknesses, neither celebrating those things that made them superior nor castigating those things that made them inferior. What is the good of emphasizing that perfect way that cornbread absorbs butter, only to turn about and criticize the way it disintegrates at the slightest nudge? These are both characteristics of cornbread and, so, reasons to love cornbread.

I have always comfortably loved things because of their entirety. Perhaps this is why there are so few people whom I love, the proclivities of people being so less suited for balance. Their motives and abilities are so much more difficult to understand, to even ascertain.

But this shift from

When I think of your kisses, my mind sees stars

to

When I think of your kisses, my mind see-saws

changes everything about loving.

See-saws are unstable. It is their nature. If the mind see-saws, it becomes this teetering thing, capable of anything. Kisses may lead to laughter, to embitterment. It would all depend on the weight of the players on either end. And what of days when a player has had a large lunch?

The therapist my mother sends me to told me that my interest in this lyrical shift is merely a diversion. I asked him what he felt I was trying to divert attention from. My therapist told me that that was precisely the question he wanted me to answer.

I think the therapist my mother sends me to may be something of a lazy thinker.

In my nightmare, I have finally found my friend. We are on the dirt track of a dog racing course. My friend takes the place of the rabbit on a track at dog races, but I am cemented to the starting line. As my friend races away, I am forced to watch as he slowly grows smaller with distance. Then, when he is out of sight, I must wait for him to come up again behind me. I cannot seem to even turn my head to anticipate his approach. I am forced to stare straight ahead, as if awaiting the starter’s gun, and wait for my friend to pass through my field of vision again.

An Unreliable Narrator

While last week I lacked imagination, this week I possess it in abundance.

This, at least, is the position of the therapist my mother sends me to. The two of them held some sort of forum together, a parent-analyst conference. The topic of discussion: Harold’s Progress. Despite a number of protestations from my therapist, my mother assured him that her complaints regarding my progress would remain strictly beyond the confines of my therapeutic sessions; and, afterall, she was paying for these little chats.

According to my mother, my therapist feels that I am a liar and that my inability to tell him the details of my life accurately is the only blockage between my current state and psychological wellness.

According to my therapist, my mother is concerned with my interpretations of everyday events and that she would like our therapeutic sessions to focus on these issues for the next month or so.

I await the pending judgment as to whether or not my previous description of their meeting qualifies as a lie or as a misinterpretation.

In either case, the therapist my mother sends me to focused our entire session this afternoon on the nature of truthfulness. He explained to me that, in general, truthfulness is regarded as presenting an accurate representation of events or beliefs to another. He added that there are, of course, matters of perspective such as explaining one’s side in an argument. However, beyond these exceptions, truthful representations of events is generally an easily agreed upon matter. I asked how, then, truthfulness is to be determined in the case of arguments. The therapist my mother sends me to said that I shouldn't focus on these exceptional cases. But, I told him, disagreements are a fairly common exception.

I am fairly certain that the therapist my mother sends me to ended our exception with a request to continue this line of questioning with my mother; it was hard to be sure as he muttered to himself and made a note in my file.

Getting back to the point, my therapist began again, truthfulness is an easy state to achieve. As a simple demonstration, he asked me to describe his desk.

I have spent many hours examining the desk of the therapist my mother sends me to. There is no couch or comfortable armchair. There is a moderately uncomfortable mahogany colored chair for the patient that sits just out of arm's reach of the desk's edge. This distance has always made examining the details of smaller or obliquely-angled objects more difficult. I began my description.

The desk is sturdy and broad, made of a real, dark wood, I told him. All of its legs have been raised by several inches by lifts, giving the desk a more authoritative presence in the room. The high back, burgundy leather chair is also elevated to its maximum height, a fact that is evidenced by its slow but audible exhale when my therapist sits down. Together, the effect is to make my therapist seem more ominous and established presence at his desk than when meeting him standing up.

The therapist my mother sends me to interrupted me, instructing me to actually describe the desk. For instance, he suggested, what was on his desktop.

Beginning again, I described the landscape of the desk's surface. A computer monitor sat at a forty-five degree angle on the left corner of the surface. The screensaver was always running its photo slideshow whenever I had been in his office, but I had noticed that all of the images were of famous works of art. Also, I added, these images were all clearly labeled Christie's and, therefore, downloaded from the internet. At the opposite corner of the desk is my therapist's coffee mug. I have never seen him drink from it, but it is a fixture of the desk landscape. It is a glass mug with the emblem of the American Psychological Association etched into it.

The therapist my mother sends me to let his pen drop onto the desktop and began to rub his temples. Despite my best efforts to describe his desk, my therapist informed me that he has a simple mahogany desk set with a computer monitor, papers, and coffee sitting on it. I asked if it shouldn't be 'setting' on it, but he did not answer. He told me that my muddled description of his desk was untruthful because it was made up almost entirely on my own conjecture and contained very little fact.

I told him I think we have different understandings of what it means to be truthful. He asked if I thought it was possible to have different meanings of truthful. I told him I obviously did believe it was possible because I believe it is the case between us. The therapist my mother sends me to only sighed and motioned for me to continue.

I told him that I believe that truthfulness can be in seeing the meaning in things without regard for their labels. By way of example, I asked my therapist if he had ever read the poem Ballad of Orange and Grape by Muriel Rukeyser. He said he had not. This, I told him was likely the reason why we have different understandings of what it means to be truthful.

My therapist said that truthfulness is not decided by poetry, but by accuracy. My description of his desk was untruthful because it was laden with all of my interpretations and assumptions about him, giving an outside listener a wrong understanding of his desk. His own description, on the other hand, was accurate and factual, detailing the objects on and around his desk so that any man on the street might recognize this office from a photo array. His description was truthful because it was specific and unbiased; my description was untruthful because it was vague and subjective.

I mentioned that my description in no way implied some sort of conscious effort, that I was in no way suggesting that he had consciously tried to make his office communicate these sorts of messages. The therapist my mother sends me to told me that all this had been enough for the day and said he would see me next week.

I still do not understand what was wrong with my description. Why is it untruthful when the desk of a therapist, a healer, is designed to bolster only the man who sits behind it and not the one who sits before it? Why is it truthful to describe the objects in the office, which are not particularly dissimilar from any other office in the world, without giving notice to those aspects of the office which make them uniquely owned?

The therapist my mother sends me to has implied that there is something wrong with the way I see the world. This is precisely why my mother sent me to him in the first place. It would appear I've made little to no progress over these many months. At least my therapist already has a topic to discuss at the next progress meeting.

I still believe a friend would help, a friend who believes in the difference between orange and grape.

Ballad of Orange and Grape
Muriel Rukeyser
After you finish your work
after you do your day
after you've read your reading
after you've written your say -
you go down the street to the hot dog stand,
one block down and across the way.
On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth century.
Most of the windows are boarded up,
the rats run out of a sack -
sticking out of the crummy garage
one shiny long Cadillac;
at the glass door of the drug-addiction center,
a man who'd like to break your back.
But here's a brown woman with a little girl dressed in rose and pink, too.
Frankfurters frankfurters sizzle on the steel
where the hot-dog-man leans -
nothing else on the counter
but the usual two machines,
the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty,
I face him in between.
A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on walking.
I watch the man as he stands and pours
in the familiar shape
bright purple in the one marked ORANGE,
orange in the one marked GRAPE,
the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE
and orange drink in the GRAPE
Just the one word large and clear, unmistakable, on each machine.

I ask him: How can we go on reading
and make sense out of what we read? -
How can they write and believe what they're writing,
the young ones across the street,
while you go on pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE - ?
(How are we going to believe what we read and we write and we hear and we say and we do?)
He looks at the two machines and he smiles
and he shrugs and smiles and pours again.
It could be violence and nonviolence
it could be white and black women and men
it could be war and peace or any
binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend.
Yes and no, be and not-be, what we do and what we don't do.
On a corner in East Harlem
garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape,
forgetfulness, a hot street of murder,
misery, withered hope,
a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE,
pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.
(1973)

Some Experience Required

The therapist my mother sends me to recently returned from his annual family vacation. This year he, his wife of sixteen years, and their twelve-year-old son elected to take a ten day cruise to Mexico. Aboard the ship, my therapist informs me, all earthly pleasure are gratis. Buffets are available at all hours; movies are screened in a variety of locations; games and dancing are arranged in yet other locations; pools are available at all times, despite the fact that all passengers are, in fact, floating amidst giant open seas; and, for the single or those less scrupulous married types, buffets of the carnal sort are also plentiful and unending. The therapist my mother sends me to gave me a knowing eyebrow lift at this last point of description. Unsure of what I was also supposed to know in regards to cruise line carnal buffets, I asked my therapist if he was one of those unscrupulous married types. He snorted and assured me that he was not. But, he insisted, I can imagine what he meant.

I am afraid that the therapist my mother sends me to believes I have an active imagination.

This fear extends beyond simply imagining the forgone temptations of extramarital affairs. For as much time as I spend watching the interactions of people, I have never been able to imagine with any clarity what these people are like when not in my immediate sight. Today, I saw a magnificent old man standing outside of a gas station. He wore terribly worn leather shoes, ones whose color had faded in the creases atop his feet where his toes begin. He wore old slacks, ones that he clearly patched himself along the cuff because the patches were threadbare and of a mismatched hue. Despite being summer, the old man wore a comfortable looking blue cardigan sweater, one with a hole torn in the lower right side. This hole was undoubtedly caused by the small, jumping dog at his side. I know very little about dogs and even less about their breeds. However, if Snoopy were a real dog but only longer in the body, I think it would have been fairly close to this old man's dog, Doodle. In truth, the dog's name was Yankee Doodle Dandy, but I would only learn that later on.

I had stopped into the gas station for a cheap rotisserie hot dog because it had occurred to me that I had never had one. As I walked out of the gas station, the old man was allowing Doodle to leave a small deposit of turd on the small patch of grass near the air/water station. The man had his back to the dog, speaking to it without turning to look directly at the dog, cooing, "Go on now, Doodle. Make your poopie."

The dog was evidently oblivious to the man's encouragements, only walking in slow circles about the grass. I watched the exchange with some interest. For one thing, I have never had a pet. My mother would never allow any sort of animal in the house. I had asked her once for a cat.

"Harold, please. Cats have a way of getting into everything. It is bad enough I have you snooping about without actually acquiring another pair of eyes."

I had asked her once for a bird. Nothing as elaborate as a parrot or cockatoo, only a small canary or pair of love birds.

"Have you any idea that birds chirp, Harold? They are not the silent beasts of beauty as they appear in tapestries. Could you imagine how badly you would feel with your birds chirping while Mother had one of her headaches? Can you imagine, Harold?"

Unfortunately, I could not. As I've said, I have never had a talent for imagination.

In any case, my never having had a pet has always caused me to take great pause in watching others interact with animals in a meaningful way. Another thing that made the relationship between the old man and Doodle so interesting was that the basis of their relationship appeared to be something of a life. The old man believed that he needed to coax his dog into doing its biological functions, that the dog needed him in some sense beyond the basic necessities of life, as if the dog needed him emotionally, psychologically. And, in return, Doodle seemed to regard the old man as little more than a great moving bumper, a thing that would block oncoming feet from encroaching on its space.

As I watched the old man talk and Doodle circle, Doodle took note of me. More accurately, I believe that Doodle took note of the hot dog I was eating. I would have never believed that such a small dog could have leapt as far as Doodle did if I had not been its landing pad. I lay flat out on the sidewalk, with the dog happily eating on my chest. Nearby, I heard a group of teenagers laughing at the predicament. The old man made his way over in a manner that suggested his dog was prone to such leaps and they were nothing to be overly concerned with. I lay motionless, waiting for the dog to finish its meal. His small metal name tag was shaped like an American flag. The name, proudly printed along one of the flag's long stripes, read: YANKEE DOODLE DANDY.

The old man approached and called his dog. Doodle, finished with the hot dog, sprung off my torso and returned to his master. The old man nodded an apology and began to walk his dog home.

Beyond this incident, I cannot imagine what this man and his dog are like. The therapist my mother sends me to asked me if I was upset that the man had not given me a more formal apology or, at the very least, a verbal one. I told him that I had been more scared of the dog than I had been outraged; I saw no reason why someone should apologize for my feeling scared. My therapist told me that, had he been in my place, he would have felt outraged for being accosted by a stranger's dog and would have felt an apology was in order. He asked me if I imagined that the old man let his dog jump on strangers all the time. It was then that I admitted to my therapist that I could not imagine the man beyond the circumstances I had seen him in. My therapist felt that I was being uncooperative. He asked me to imagine what sort of behaviors might be tolerated at home if jumping on strangers was tolerated in public. I told him that I had no way of imagining what life might be like for the old man.

I can imagine a simple, small house; in truth, I only picture the home of my father's deceased aunt. I can imagine a dirty apartment; in truth, I only picture an apartment I saw in a television show once. I can imagine a house of some size and grandeur; in truth, I only picture our home or the homes of one of my mother's friends. But, no matter how much detail I can pictures these locations, they are only memories of places, and I cannot imagine the old man and his dog into these settings. It is a thought experiment that I fail at, over and over.

The therapist my mother sends me to asked me if I thought I had been encouraged not to use my imagination in my childhood. I told him I felt that I had never learned how to use my imagination as a child. This answer seemed to vex my therapist for a moment, and I could see that he was deliberating how to proceed. He told me that the imagination was not something that one needed to be taught how to use, that the imagination was simply a faculty of the mind, one of the most fundamental faculties of the mind. In fact, he continued, I probably imagined things all the time and failed to recognize it. Any time I have daydreamed, problem-solved, planned for the future, even fantasized about death, all of these were instances in which I was imagining. That I felt I could not imagine things on command was merely a lack of confidence and practice.

I have been thinking a great deal about what my therapist said to me about imagination. For all that he assured me that I have been using my imagination all along, I am fairly certain that I have not. I cannot recall ever daydreaming. If I were ever given to moments of thoughtful reverie, mother would likely never have sent me to the therapist in the first place. Also, I have virtually no problem-solving skills. I admit this with a modicum of shame, but the truth is that mother has always solved problems before they became problems. Once I arrived at my therapist's office for my regular appointment, but had missed the phone message at home that my therapist was ill and could not make my appointment. This might have been a problem; indeed, later that afternoon, mother assured me that it would have been an incredible problem of logistics and timing to get me home. However, mother had intercepted the phone message on my behalf and sent a taxi to collect me as soon as I arrived at the office.

I've heard a great deal of talk about My Future from mother, the therapist she sends me to, her friends, family. Yet, in all this talk, I have never actually pictured that future in my mind's eye. I can no more imagine myself ten years older than I can make myself ten years younger. I can in no way imagine myself in any sort of profession, only because I have never had any sort of job or responsibility to speak of to date. What would I do? When would I wake in the morning? What sort of clothes would I wear? Would I have to wear my hair with a part? And would there also be cologne?

Can I imagine these possibilities? No. I can picture people I've seen in professions, getting ready for jobs, applying deodorant. I remember being a child and watching my uncle get ready for work in the morning. As a child, my uncle seemed to be the most powerful man in the world. He began by putting on a pair of boxer shorts, followed by well-pressed suit pants, navy blue. He would then put on a white undershirt before selecting a dress shirt. Most of his dress shirts had vertical stripes, all barely visible. He would tuck in his shirts and then select a belt. He had a mirrored cabinet filled with hundreds of small bottles of cologne and aftershave. Though he wore a different one every day, he always reached immediately and without hesitation into the cabinet and retrieve a bottle, as if he had a schedule of his scents and was merely playing it out each morning. I can see every step in his morning ritual, but can in no way replace his body for my own, his face with mine.

Even my interest in death is, so far as I'm concerned, completely unaided by imagination. If I was able to imagine the many ways in which death can interrupt a life, I would not need to enact them. Again, I feel that if I were truly able to use my imagination regarding my interest in death, mother would have never sent me to the therapist. For instance, when I enacted my drowning, I simply could not imagine the feeling of losing consciousness due to the inability to breathe. I had, of course, held my breath until losing consciousness before and could remember the sensation. However, that is different from drowning. When willfully holding one's breath, it becomes necessary to battle the will to breathe, to create a mantra of determination to hold out until the point of unconsciousness. But, in the case of drowning, there is no choice, no mantra. If one falters and decides to breathe, the lungs are only greeted by fluid. I could not imagine what that would feel like, at that moment when you might choose to forego the experience and not being able to. And, not being able to imagine it, I enacted it.

I will have to ask the therapist my mother sends me to whether or not, sometimes, fundamental things must be learned.