The Vector and the Stationary Point

It was a mild summer day and I found myself outside walking in the woods with a friend. It happened this time that we came upon an old barn in a small clearing. We had walked these woods many times before and had never found this place. It had an eerie feeling. The barn was ancient and was built on a small embankment. It had strange architecture and it was overgrown along its sides and the roof was covered with moss. We briefly debated as to whether or not we should enter and eventually decided that we should at least try to peer inside. There was only one small side door that wasn't blocked by overgrowth and it was the only place that we could enter. We walked down what appeared to be a well worn path to the entry point. As we grew closer to the barn, a strange wind got stronger and stronger and shook the tall weeds back and forth. The sound of the birds, which hadn't been very remarkable at all, became frenzied and were distressing.

As soon as my fingers touched the latch and turned it to its opened position, everything went completely silent. The violent wind ceased, the call of the birds stopped. I withdrew my hand from the door and turned back to look at my friend for confirmation of what had just happened. There he stood, not one or two paces behind me, frozen fast in his tracks. His eyes were open and fixed on the door with a mixed expression of horror and expectation. I tried to shake him but he was like stone; I called out with my voice but nothing came out. I didn't even feel the vibration in my throat. I looked back and the door and it slowly opened under its own weight.

In life, I can say that I have never been overtly seduced, but in this dream, I was compelled to go into this dark building because, for some reason or another, when that door opened, I knew exactly what was waiting inside. It was no surprise to me that within a few steps I found a small, green trowel, laying on the dirt floor.

I knew this thing and it was precious to me. I was elated, then at once perplexed as to how it got there. It was an item that I had misplaced in real life when I was a young boy at the shore. I turned my gaze upward and found that I was standing at the entrance to another room within the building. It was filled with toys. They were all covered with a silt-like dust and I knew them all. Then, breaking the absolute silence, I heard whispering noises that came from the corners of the room in voices that I knew but hadn't heard in a long time. It slowly became clear to me that this room contained everything and everyone that I had ever lost.

When I began to understand what this place was, I felt horribly lonely and immediately felt like I shouldn't linger there. I had to keep moving. I turned back to leave the place altogether, when I realized that I wasn't physically able to progress backwards through the room. Whenever I tried to move in that direction, I froze, and would only be free if I tried to back-up further deeper into the barn. Moreover, the outside door had closed and it had become dark in the room and very difficult to see.

I eventually gave up trying to get back to where I came from and I made my way to the end of the room where there were two flights of steps. One went down and one went up. As I gazed upwards, I saw the door at the top of the stairs had a light behind it. It was a bright, bluish-white light. There was a great wind behind the door and it sounded like rain was falling. The wind carried these little drops through the slats in the door and they blew down the stairs and hit my face. I winced and brought up my sleeve to wipe them away, only to find that these drops were blood. I then heard the sound of a screaming animal and the sound of feet moving upstairs. The wind picked up and the door flew open and I saw a man facing away from me. He working away at a butcher's table. He wasn't wearing an apron and was drenched head to toe in blood. There was a cart to his left with dead piglets in it. He picked one up and flopped it on his bench. The poor creature had knives and cleavers stuck into it and was essentially dismembered. The man began to pull out the knives and with each one he removed, the pig became more and more alive. It began to scream as it became aware of the knives that were still in it, until the last was removed. It shook itself off and jumped down off the table and walked out of view.

I tried to walk upstairs to see what was happening more closely, but I again couldn't move forward; when I tried, the man at the top spun around surprised. I could not see his face because of the light. The door at the top of the stairs slammed shut and the light went out. I turned back and looked at the room and I felt an increasing anxiety about being trapped there. In fact, I couldn't bear it. The thought of living with these things that I had lost in this decrepit place made me realize how unimportant they were. I turned and rushed down the other flight of stairs. It was the only direction I could move in. When I reached the bottom, I immediately realized my mistake.

In the middle of this dark room was a deep pool and crouched next to it was a person in black with long hair, passing a baseball sized rock back and forth between her hands. I never saw this person's face, but I instantly perceived that I was in danger. My impression is that it was a woman, not a man. I felt a paralyzing recognition of the place, realizing that it was where I would die, and in that instant, the woman sprung into action. It was if she was waiting for my realization to occur. She jumped up and, lurching towards me, she grabbed me by the hand and flung me around like a schoolyard bully would. I spun around and around and fell over my own legs onto the dirt floor. Without any words and without any reason, she stooped over me and struck my face again and again with the rock in her other hand, knocking out my teeth. She dragged me over to the edge of the pool and held me under. As I was drowning and trying to pull my head above the surface, I heard my friend's voice calling for me, but I could not call back for him to come save me. I had known that this would happen. I drowned.

I began having this dream when I was 16 or 17 years old. Each time I had an impression of what was going to happen, but I was powerless to change it and each time I felt the horror anew. I only shared it with one person (my friend who was in the dream) at the time and it upset me greatly to even talk about it with him. It has come to my mind more recently because, with a lapse of almost 8 years, I found myself in that place again, though very briefly, and it flooded my brain with all the troublesome aspects of the dream.

I don't always know what one is supposed to make of a dream. I'm skeptical of their predictive powers, but I am fairly certain that they can be demonstrative.I have rarely (if ever) felt meaning upon waking; the meaning has always come some time after that. If you asked me what I thought this dream meant when I was younger and having it regularly, I would have pointed to the three levels of the barn, voicelessness, and loss.

In my most recent visit, everything changed. This time I didn't actually go inside. I was taken to that place and I immediately balked at the idea of going in there. I knew it was a lost cause because I had no chance of progression. As soon as that door opened I would be compelled to go after what I had lost only to be disappointed, I would not be able to get to the one place that I wanted to go from there, then I would go down into the darkness and be killed. I thought that it would be better to be frozen outside then to try to move around willfully in that place.

Some doors should remain closed.

Queue

"You know, we usually stock turtlenecks. Sorry though." Guess I'll stick with the pants. Checkout.

I saw the midnight shift change, which takes a quarter hour. Money trays going out and being counted. Long lines building up. The welfare folks were at the front, cashing out their checks within the first hour of the day that it was allowed. Some of them were old, and that made me happy. Most were able-bodied Hispanic kids my age, talking in english on phones that cost more than mine. One of them had his eyebrows waxed. $512.36.

Another hispanic man, maybe forty years old, is next to me in line. He's wearing a security guard outfit. He's quiet and woebegone looking. He has an American flag embroidered on his sleeve. Maybe he was going home or maybe he just got up.

I saw a tired dad with disinfectant wipes and diapers standing midway down the line looking worn out. There was a man who had oily mechanic hands with a pack of Marlboros in his breast pocket. He had a tube of red and gold wrapping paper. The black girl in front of me had on green, wool peacoat on. Her friends called her and she hopped to the next line, sensing the wait would be long in ours. She set her tabloid magazine on the coke-product display fridge and a meandered over to the next lane, head extended up high in a graceful sort of way. She bought lip-balm.

Next lane over I saw a middle aged EMT. He was talking about his job at an uncomfortable volume with his co-worker, a younger woman. He would click his radio on and let the static ring. He must be important. The couple in front of them were being playfully affectionate and at times, handsy and borderline indecent. Checkout lines do that to you.

On the way out, I saw a young white boy sizing me up like he was tough. He was maybe fourteen. Nobody is tough when they're fourteen. The man at the exit had no teeth. He waved me on as I pulled out my receipt. I didn't look the part. Obviously only buying pants.

Outside the door there was a short skirt with heroin legs, finishing a cigarette in the cold.

Conception

This is how I became:
I was formed in love, like most,
when one and two makes one makes three.
The seed and ground makes little tree.

Loneliness

Recently I've been considering what it means to be lonely. I listened to a good sermon a few years ago by Tim Keller talking about it in the context of marriage. He sees it as the root of why two people get married, citing God's dissatisfaction with Adam's lack of a partner. Heading down a dangerous road, one might even say creation itself is partly a solution for a lonely God.

Now, that seems to punch holes in God's completeness and that's a little bit sketchy. I realize that. Its anthropomorphic, but God is heavy on the metaphors. Time and time again He recommends that we attempt to understand him within our own context. To a certain extent, there is no other way for me to understand it then to try to understand my own feelings of loneliness. On the other hand, there a times when you just need to concede the point that what you want to understand is beyond you. You can hit the cognitive brick wall.

Alternatively, our solution to loneliness is God. Its a symmetry in creation. In theory, its easily understood and accepted by everyone who believes. In practice, the struggle to deal with it can be painful.

Loneliness falls into my "pure motive" category. Meaning that, in and of itself, its not sinful. It's an emotional response to a lack of connection, a lack of communication. What you do with those emotions might become sinful, certainly, but isn't that the same with anger? Consider Jesus fashioning the whip. In the end, no matter how you deal with it (sinful or not), I'm starting to feel like I can empathize with it.

In my psychiatry class, we've been talking about what it means to work with the mind. Its a hard thing to grasp. Sure, we try to break it down into pieces so we can address what can be fixed. We might talk about anxieties, personalities, and moods. We know that, when taken in sum, these make up the majority our inner landscape. There is something holy about the mind too. It is a foregone conclusion that everyone's experience in life is more than the stimulation of neural pathways. Its special. No one is practically solipsistic about it. Science hasn't yet taken us to that place.

My professor said something this past week that really stuck with me. She offhandedly remarked that there are two things that we'll see commonly with deeply disturbed psychiatric patients. This would include something like schizophrenia and multiple personality disorders. First, there is often an accompanying inflexible belief in God. If the belief isn't there, there's a debilitating stress over its lack. Secondly, the predominant behaviors are oriented almost exclusively towards coping with felt loneliness(real or imaginary). Bearing in mind that a lot of these problems are imbalances of neurotransmitters, its important to realize that they still legitimately feel lonely. This is cause for sympathy. Its heartbreaking.

Moving more superficially into personality disorders, we again see that most of these stem from loneliness or emotional trauma. These are more learned behaviors, but they're learned at a tender, formative stage in life. They're still very hard to overcome, but we see loneliness creep in here even better. Neglected children develop schizotypal personalities. They literally create people in their own minds and attach meaning and personalities to inanimate objects. A lot of times these cases present like underlying chemical imbalances, but they are actually learned coping mechanisms. They have a solution to these feelings, but from the outside, those who don't suffer think that they're illegitimate.

I remember working in the ER one night and I had to take blood from a patient who was a "Jesus-babbler." His default state was talking to Jesus in his voice, then responding as Jesus to his own statement. It was disturbing to me. I felt like this grizzly man was John the Baptist in the flesh.

The general consensus that you'll find about this information goes something like this: "See? Religion does a real head job on you." It's a fair complaint I guess, even if its made irrelevant by the majority of the world who believe in God and aren't disturbed. Rest assured that the non-believer copes, he just does it in the secrets of his heart or in the darkness.

The claim of "completeness without God, thank-you-very-much" is a tragic vanity; an inability to admit the lack. They may certainly feel that way, but its said on the sunny day. You've asked them the question at the wrong time in their lives. Hope in anything other than God is transient. Once the losing starts, there is disintegration, sometimes a psychotic break even. As for those that already struggle with this, I've wondered if these really hurt people haven't seen the world and it broke them. I've wondered if their insanity is actually appropriate.

In James, we read that the measure of your own faith before God depends on how you feel about the plight of the emotionally helpless. God's heart breaks for those who have lost their natural companions, those who have lost their comfort: the widow who loses her husband and the orphan who loses parents. That's my consolation.

Medicine

"Wait, wait, wait...okay...yeah...wait what am I listening to?"

So this morning I got to slap some goo on a patient so that I could look at her thyroid. I held the probe for about 4 seconds, enough to see the well circumscribed nodule on the left wing, just next to the isthmus. I can't lie. It was pretty fascinating to look at.

It was, however, interesting at someone's expense. Shortly thereafter, the tech held the same probe in place to guide the endocrinologist's biopsy. He took a honker of a needle and repeatedly lanced the poor lady's gland about a million times, sucking out the bloody pulp left behind. The tissue was hardly recognizable. In stunned horror I watched as he came maybe a millimeter from the carotid artery in the neck. That's the artery that shoots like ten feet in the air in your standard horror movies. It's actually not the "jugular" like most people say. That's a vein and it's more likely to ooze blood than to shoot it. This is not to say it doesn't ooze a lot.

Medicine is pretty cool, even if my toes are just five weeks wet.

There are things of which I may not speak.

I have been trying to write this post for nearly 3 months now. Its been difficult.

There are times of alignment in my life. Everything seems to merge into a singular thought or message that is appropriate in my particular season, however long each one may persist. If I was more vigilant concerning my journal, I imagine this phenomenon would be easily identified. It would likely be the best way to divide my life into its important chapters. Sadly, I am not constant in writing these things down and I've probably been hurting myself in doing so. I wish my younger self had believed how essential good record-keeping is to self-discovery.

Sometimes I feel more "present-John" than I would like. I begin to feel like I'm just motor-coordination. Like I had one too many drinks. Like my interactions are reflexes, lacking emotional dynamics, concern, and heart. There is no past or future, just the present behavior to go about or conversation to have. People don't really care for this kind of person, I don't think. I'm sure that I don't. It feels like a very deep sort of dishonesty, like I'm a drifter inside my own life that I can't rely on to be constant.

Its at these times that I feel a profound disconnect from each chapter in my life. My fearful childhood that transformed into thinly veiled insecurity is discrete from all that has happened since. My high school years of loneliness and inability to communicate, marked with distinct and still painful failures seem totally different from my college years of social integration and exploration. My simultaneously occurring romance with my then future wife feels separate from that. My marriage feels separate from my dating years. I do not feel continuous.

If I were to overlay my status with God on top of this, I would be hard-pressed to say there was a correlation. I've been closer and farther away in both joy and suffering. Never approaching abject disbelief, and having been alternately on a moment-to-moment level, I don't know what to make of it. Right now I'm neither.

I've had, for as long as I can remember, the notion that when I die, God's going to disrobe me. Everyone, actually. The moment of judgment need be embarrassing if its going to be fair. I know, at least superficially, about the dark areas of my soul (though its an ongoing, painful process of coming to terms, isn't it?). I can claim them, say that I desired them as they were in the moments of my weakness, numerous as they have been and as they yet are.

When you feel this disconnect that I'm trying very hard to describe, self-definition becomes difficult. Who am I really? Am I judged for the current head on my shoulders or the one that was? What about when I was a lonely 15 year old? What about when I was a headstrong 19 year old? I wouldn't know how to judge myself. I'm not saying that God isn't able to merely because I can't. It's more like I'm scared that I won't understand whatever conclusion he comes to, be it boundlessly merciful or purely just. Maybe my eyes will be opened for the first time just then. I don't know, but I desperately want to understand.

I'm not trying to explain an anger over my judgment, whichever way it falls. I think of it of a lack of emotion, not a presence. I'm fearing senselessness. I'm fearing it in my death, but more urgently, I'm fearing it in my own life. This isn't a balance of the measures of pain or joy that I experience, both of which are no stranger to any of us.

I remember when I was 14 or 15 I was frustrated with my family's dog. I don't remember the particulars about what she did, but I was upset. I punished her by putting her in her cage for a time. I was so incensed that I came back and to my shame, I struck her across the side of her head in my anger. Recalling it now, she might as well have been human by her reaction to my pathetic behavior. She looked startled and disbelieving.

I'm not attempting to make my behavior's like God's. I don't think there was anything remotely righteous going on there. I can empathize with her emotion and I know what it feels like to wonder what's going on. I don't know if its sin to ask that. I don't know if its sin to not be able to feel and to understand the course of your life, to be out of touch. There are times when I feel horribly kicked around and, without anger,I am a stalemate as to what I emotion I should have, or even worse (and more often), I fly wildly between guilt and anger, only to average out or settle into numbness and acceptance.

I've been told the theological explanations as to why I might feel this way. Its not satisfying. I get the idea of sin and its direct consequence as well as indirect consequence from another person's sin. I get it and I'm okay with it. I'm not pursuing empathy really, because I don't believe that I'm special in this instance, like I'm the only one who ever felt this way. I've never wanted someone to cry for me. Its just that sort thing one has to look at, that's all. This isn't everything to me and I'm not taking it out of the larger context of my life. Its just a small, uncomfortable, nothing.

The Persistence of Memory

"Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it."
-Michel de Montaigne


The other day I was going on about something with a classmate of mine as we were walking to class and during our conversation I had a very vivid recollection of a moment from my childhood. Some people might call it a "suppressed" memory, though that has sort of a negative edge. The point is, it was a memory of no practical consequence.

To satisfy the curious, I'll describe it. I was probably about 6 years old at the time. It was late afternoon and I was alone in my bedroom that I shared with my brother Daniel. The windows of that room faced west so the whole scene was bathed in orange light as the sun went down. My brother had a "high" bunk-bed. Instead of their being another bed underneath it, there was a a big cubbyhole. This was the "Holy of Holies." In this sanctum was a white faux crackle-finished treasure chest containing a large assortment of toys. On this particular afternoon, I was kneeling next to it and pulling out different things to play with. We had this one object (I can't really call it a toy) which was sort of like a yellowed, Tupperware-like, fishbowl. I used to put Micro-Machines in it. Well, on this occasion, I was... compelled... to stick my face into the bowl to smell it. Like most things children play with, it smelled like vomit.

This semester I'm taking a course in neuroscience and while I'm oftentimes overwhelmed by all of the other particulars of the course, I'm also continually impressed with how the brain works. On top of that, I have these horribly affirming moments almost every class when I see how I can align my new found understanding of physiology to help me understand myself. Yes, that sounds corny to me too, but bear with me.

Scientists know where memories are stored in the brain. They know that when you create a memory there is a chemical change that goes on and that (in super-baby terms) a little bridge is made between two areas of your brain. This bridge lasts a while, but not permanently. This is just a short-term memory. In time, the river washes it out. In order to make it long term, you have to "reiterate." You must revisit your memory to make it permanent. You need to build more bridges to it.

I've been thinking about how I reiterate experiences in my own life and how I make things more or less permanent in my memory. Remembering my first kiss is easy. I have revisited that moment because it was good and thinking about it now makes me happy. But I also have so many memories that I've permanently affixed in my mind out of a sense of unrest. This can be guilt for something that I've done to hurt someone or agitation over residual anger from when I was hurt.

The moment you do something, your memory and the memories of those involved are the only real witness to it. I know we think of time as being past, present, and future, but it seems to me that the present comes and goes so fast that it hardly exists. We expand what we mean by "present" to encompass an increment of time, say an hour or a day, but really I think its helpful to realize that you are actively moving away from what you consider to be "present" and memory is what remains.

If you draw the conclusion, like I have, that selfhood is attached directly to memory, you can see how dealing with memories is so important. If you don't address the pain from a recollection, you continue to revisit it and the memory becomes more permanent, attaching to your sense of self. As for me, when I know that I've done all that I can, the reiteration stops. Somehow forgiveness and being vocal represent a break in the cycle.

Good memories are easily remembered and help in the bad times, but I'm not sure that they can get you through. Trying to "average out" my sadness or painful memories by relying on what has been good just doesn't do it for me. You've got to go to the pain, and learn how to take it for what it is and deal with it. This explains the delusions of avoidance and denial. They are effective in the short term, but ultimately end up being a distraction from the goal. To me, relying on happiness isn't really a cure. I have to go to the cause and settle it and that allows me to be at peace.

What I mean to say is this: remembrance has a lot to do with happiness. Keeping your memories clear and learning how to manage how you revisit your thoughts so as to keep everything constructive is hard. Lately, this is seeming evermore important to me.

Against the rancid-fishbowl memories of my childhood, I have no defense. I think I'll just have to live with those.