“Looking for Bobby,” or Losing & Finding Ourselves

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"Looking for Bobby", Deborah J. Brasket, fiction, identity, literary fiction, short fiction, short stories, Short Story Month

May is short story month, and in celebration I’m posting a short story I wrote years ago and published in an online journal, Bareback Lit. Unfortunately, the story can no longer be read on that site.

It’s a strange little story that plays with how we identify ourselves and each other, and how we lose and find ourselves in those identities. It’s not a story to “enjoy,” but I hope you find it interesting.

LOOKING FOR BOBBY

By Deborah J. Brasket

Bobby is bad. Just turned seventeen, he’s big and mean with hands the size of basketballs. Not that he plays basketball. He likes the clean, straight edge of a razor or knife better.

Bobby is loose. His long sharp bones seem to hang in his tight skin; and when he walks, he dances.

Now he runs. Behind him the drugstore, the cop, growing smaller and smaller. And the sun, the morning sun, soft on his back. Before him races his long, clean shadow, his sharp legs slicing through the sidewalk like knives through butter. He smiles at the image, then turns, darts down an alley. With a quick glance behind him, he spreads long, powerful hands on the top of a wall and scrambles over. Dropping lightly, he pauses, crouched and coiled. His small dark eyes sweep up and swallow the neat back yard, the little house before him. The screen door gapes open like a black hole and he springs for it, entering. He jerks the door close behind him.

“Out boys! I told you kids to stay outside for awhile!”

The house is dark and steeped with strange, myster­ious odors. Bobby hesitates, his breath big as watermelons and hard to swallow. A taste like blood. Soon his hard, dark pupils grow soft and fat with the darkness absorbed. All around him rush shapes, objects, unfamiliar. Bobby jumps.

“Greg! You hear me? I mean it now. Just git on outside!”

Slowly, stealthily, Bobby approaches the open doorway and the voice behind it. He places his hand on his hip pocket, feels the hard shaft within, and then swings forward to fill the doorway.

The room is draped against the light. Only the glow of the TV and the woman’s pale skin can be seen. She sits curled in the corner of the couch, plumped up like a big pillow, one bare leg tucked childishly beneath her. Bobby grins.

The woman glances up, annoyed. Her round eyes grow rounder as she takes him in. “Where’s Greg?”

“I dunno no Greg. You just sit quiet little mama and you won’t get hurt.”

“Me sit quiet? That’s a laugh! You’re the one making all the noise!” Her plump legs unfold and she pads toward the TV, turns the volume up. “Sorry, but I’ve been waiting all morning to watch this. Go ahead and sit down though. It won’t be long.” She smiles, curls up into a ball again on the couch.

Bobby flicks a wet tongue over his lips. Smart ass, he thinks. He strolls over to the TV and yanks the plug from its socket. Now there’s no light but hers.

“Well, that’s a fine howdy-do! Guess I do watch too much TV, though. That’s what my husband says anyway. Thinks I spend all day parked in front of the tube. As if I had the time! But those soaps. You watch them once and you’re hooked. All those lives running out every which way. And you got to ask yourself–how will it all end? You never can tell which way a life will turn, can you?”

She sits now on the edge of the couch, elbows on knees, her wide pale face caught between the palms of her hands like a moon among clouds, watching him as he stands there with the plug in his hand.

“It’s all right now. You can sit down. I won’t bite or anything.” She winks. “I can see you need to rest a spell. How ‘bout a Coke?”

Bobby flings the cord away and springs to a crouch, whipping his knife out in an instant where it lays now in his hand like a living thing.

“Who you think you talkin’ to, woman?” he says, eyes narrowed to slits. “You see this here?” He turns the blade so that it catches a stray beam of light, making it dance in his hand. “This here’s my own special baby. My very fine and lovin’ lady. She do anything for me. She like nothing better than to decorate little ladies like yourself. So you sit there real quiet-like and don’t get her riled none, hear?” Bobby’s feet move, restless, beneath him. The knife feels like a fish, cold and slippery, in his hand. And this woman like a deep, round pool.

The woman gives a startled little laugh. “My! You’re quick-like, aren’t you! You remind me of my brother. He was wild like that and all. Always springing out at a body! And look what’s come of him!”

Bobby snorts. “Lady, I may be a number of things, but I promise you this, I ain’t nowhere near like your brother!”

“Why sure you are! Look at you. You have his mouth—— corners all droopy, like his smile fell down, I use to tell him. He never did like to hear me say that. No sense of humor. You don’t want to turn out like him, though.”

“That a fact?” Bobby says. “So? Just what happened to this all-bad bro’ of yours?” he demands, curious.

“0-h-h-h, you wouldn’t want to know,” she assures him, shaking her head slowly, her round eyes grip­ping his and never leaving his face.

Bobby’s knife slips from the light as he feels the room moving back and forth beneath him. He gives his head a shake as if to free it. With an effort he lifts his knife.

“You one crazy woman, you know that? Why don’t you shut that fat face awhile. In a little bit, I’m gone, and you ain’t never gonna know I was here at all. See?”

“Oh no you don’t!” she says firmly, rising. “You can’t stay here one minute more with that knife in your hand. Heaven’s! You’re not that much like my brother! The mouth maybe, and the funny way with your feet like you’re going to fall flat on your face, and your eyes. . . maybe. But no,” she adds decisively and strides past him toward the front door. “This won’t do at all. I have two little boys to think about. Why, if they should come home now and see you here like this . . . why, I don’t know what they’d think! It’s bad enough on TV. But in their own home?”

She opens the door, holding it for him. The light on the lawn is dazzling, rising in waves of green. The sidewalk lays across it like a white-hot poker.

“Go on, now. Go home where you belong. Take a nice long nap. You’ll feel lots better.” Bobby steps out into the light and shakes himself free from the cloying darkness.

“Git, now!” she shoos him away with the back of her hand. “And for heaven’s sake, put that knife away! Remember what I told you about my brother!”

Bobby shoots away from her touch like a bullet.

The noon sun is hot and intense upon Bobby’s head as he slows to a walk. He studies his shadow laying in a fat, round puddle at his feet, fishes it for lost images of himself. That crazy broad! He tries to laugh but can’t quite manage yet, can’t quite figure out how she failed to know him. But he ima­gines how he’ll hoot when he tells the others. Tells them how this crazy fat lady mistook him for her brother, tried to sit him down and feed him hot chicken soup and cookies for lunch. They’ll get a kick out of that one! For they know him well. Even the young ones know all about ol’ Bobby and his dancing, blinking blade!

He feels better now and begins to run, his knife reaching out before him. He feels his blood pumping through his veins, pumping so fine and fast it would like to cut loose without him.

He’s almost to the corner when he hears a sound behind him.

“Freeze! Hold it right there!”

Bobby grins. At least the Man knows him. He stops and turns. The sun dancing on his knife blade seems to leap from his hand like a fish.

Slowly Bobby slips into the pool lying like a shadow at his feet. The splash is the sound of gun fire. Cool, cloy­ing arms reach up to grab him, pull him under. He breaks loose, struggling for the surface, for the light, for some forgotten image.

Lying in his own dark puddle, Bobby looks up to see the fat sun wink. And close its eye on him forever.

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This Mud-Luscious World of Woe and Bliss

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identity, life, personal, Philosophy

Lately I’ve had a hard time getting a grip on myself. I seem to be sliding in so many directions. The better parts of me, the parts I enjoy, are becoming lost or shunted aside. While the wilder, unreasonable, agitated parts are trying to take over.

Sometimes I feel I exist in multiple layers with different parts of myself coming to the surface at different times. Some are easy and comfortable, the ones I’ve spent a good deal of time articulating on these blog pages: poet-writer,  spiritual seeker, nature lover, art enthusiast, literary critic, philosopher. The one who seeks to understand what this mud-luscious world of woe and bliss is all about. These are the layers I love to dwell in. They play well together. I can move seamlessly from one to the other without difficulty.

But there are other layers of myself that are torn to pieces and hard to make sense of. Parts that fume and rage and groan and don’t know how to let go or wake up or walk in a straight line. A part of me that seeks to control what’s uncontrollable, change what’s unchangeable, even if that means banging its head against a very hard and bloody wall.

A lot of that is mixed up with what I’ve experienced trying to help a son afflicted with addition. But part of it goes way back. It comes from all the years spent down in the trenches, fighting for worker rights and social justice and protecting the environment. Trying to right the wrongs of the world. Beating my head constantly against a wall of greed and exploitation, intolerance and hypocrisy, that would not budge! Doing it for so long and so hard, I had to walk away. I had to.

I feel like I’m getting sucked back into that fight mode again, and all I want to do is fly away. But I can’t leave my son behind.

That old head-banger is resurfacing and I don’t much enjoy her anymore. I understand her. I know where she’s coming from. But I don’t see a happy outcome for all her troubles. She can’t help herself. She’s an optimist, a passionate reformer. Perhaps all optimists, all social reformers, are born head-bangers, trying to break down insurmountable walls. We truly believe we can effect change for the good. We can make a difference in the world. In small but important ways we can help move the direction of society toward the greater good, toward health and peace and prosperity for all. And we do, we do, inch by inch we move that needle, but at great cost.

It’s more than that though. More than social change that many of us are after. We want to break through to new states of thinking and doing and being. To experience more peace and joy and power in our own lives. To experience heaven on earth right here, right now. Maybe that’s what happens to all the head-bangers of the world. When those outer walls don’t come tumbling down we turn inward, toward the walls within our own consciousness and try to break through.

“Be the change you want to see in the world.” Maybe that’s the most and the best we can do. Maybe it’s enough.

I’m still trying to get a grip on all this. To reconcile all the different parts of me, the world of woe with the world of bliss, both inside and out. The two are inter-twined. I can tease them apart at times, but they get all rolled up together again. There must be a way to walk in this world of woe while still experiencing that state of bliss. Some of our spiritual teacher/reformers have walked that path: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela.

I’m trying to figure out how to let go and hang on at the same time. How to let go of banging my head against an intractable wall, while not giving up on my son. How to accept this world of woe and bliss, inside and out, all rolled up together, in all its mud-lusciousness. Bear with me.

“You are the Eternal Universe” – Alan Watts

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Alan Watts, Carl Sagan, Cosmos, identity, mysticism, Philosophy, Science, spirituality, the universe

I found this amazing video “You are the Eternal Universe” on the Dionysian GENERATOR blog, where Cody describes it as “a beautiful kind of moving, throbbing zazen.”  I could not agree more.

I’ve long been a fan of Alan Watts’ writings on Zen and Tao and Christian mysticism. I’ve also been a huge fan of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” book and series when it came out so long ago, and I’m now watching the new Cosmos series narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson.  This video brings the two together in a beautiful and inspiring way.

If you like this and want to hear more, the video below contains a playlist of Watts–his best hits, so to speak.  As Cody said, “Enjoy.”

 

Our Quest for Wholeness – Part II of “Some Tragic Falling Off”

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identity, Jacques Lacan, Philosophy, Psychology, Wholeness, writing, writing process

“Duality, difference, and desire presuppose “some tragic falling off” from an original (mythical or otherwise) world of undivided wholeness.”

So I wrote in my last post. Here I explore that further, looking at how narrative fiction mirrors the psychic quest for wholeness, for becoming fully human.

Writers of fiction know that to create a compelling story that keeps readers turning pages we must:

1. Create a protagonist with an overarching need or desire (derived from some sense of loss, of being wounded, or incomplete)
2. beset by constant conflict that intensifies and delays achievement of that desire (to gain what was lost, find healing or wholeness)
3. until that need or desire is eventually realized (or not), but either way,
4. leaving the protagonist in a better place (happier, wiser, more whole) than where she had been before the story began, having learned something important or significant about herself, the world she lives in, or what it means to be human.

What drives the story and develops the character is a quest to return to wholeness, to regain what was lost. But what is regained is never simply what was lost, but “something more.” Some new realization– wisdom chiseled from the hard knocks and setbacks of a difficult journey, insights into human nature that will light her path moving forward.

Perhaps we find these stories so compelling because they parallel our own psychic development from the womb to maturity and beyond.

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan describes the earliest part of this development as the Mirror Stage. This is where an infant first becomes aware of itself as a self, and where the division between I and Other, subject and object, consciousness and the unconscious takes place.

Lacan explains how an infant cannot differentiate itself from the world around it. Lying on a blanket beneath the trees, it waves its hands and sees no difference between its waving hands and the trees blowing in the wind and its mother’s face as she bends over the child and takes it into her arms. The infant is one with its world, which it experiences as undivided bliss and wholeness.

But this cannot last. As the child grows it becomes more and more aware of difference. It has control over some parts of itself (its hands and feet) while it has limited control over its mother and none whatsoever over the trees. Eventually, the child comes to identify itself with its body and to distinguish itself from other parts of its world, and the individual is born.

Lacan sees this development as a succession of splits or gaps, a sense of separation between I and Other, the knower and what is known. The child experiences this growing awareness and individuation, however, as a sense of anxiety–of separation and loss–and desire, to reclaim what was lost.

This is what the Robert Hass referred to in his poem as “some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light.” But out of that differentiation between I from Other, painful as it may be, comes a growing awareness of the Other, experienced in all its exquisite particularity.

Out of that “world of undivided light” appears “the clown-faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk.” Without difference, the split between I and Other, the infinite variety and particular beauties that we now experience with such pleasure would be unknown.

Here’s what’s interesting though: We cannot “know” something without first acknowledging its difference from the knower. Yet, paradoxically, to “know” something, to become aware of its difference, is to “take it in” and make it one’s own–a part of one’s experience or store of knowledge, for instance.

Having suffered the painful split of separation from a world of undivided wholeness, we are now filled with a desire to reunite with what was lost, and the only way we can do this is by “taking in the whole world”—by naming it and knowing it through language, by exploring the world around us, and the world of ideas, and by seeking ever new experiences, insights, and knowledge.

For Lacan, this turning back toward “reunion” is ever present and woven into the fabric of the psychic existence. The gap between I and Other, subject and object, the conscious and unconscious creates, of its own necessity, out of its own “vacuum,” the desire to close the gap.

While this effort to reunite with what was originally lost appears futile in and of itself, it does create some interesting correlations. For “I” defines itself not in itself but through its relationship with Others and the desire to satisfy Others’ desires. There is a kind of overlapping or embrication of identities, which constitutes an intersubjectivity. A sense of “doubleness,” if you will–standing always within ourselves and outside ourselves at the same time.

This sense of “doubleness” can be seen when we examine our consciousness in relation to the unconscious. What exists prior to individuality or consciousness is the unconscious. The entrance of the subject into a conscious state immediately renders it double. The unconscious both surrounds and grounds the conscious self, but never comes fully within the locus of being—that is, being fully identified.

The content of the unconscious remains, perhaps, a kind of “becoming,” Lacan writes, in that it can potentially become, but once solidified consciously into an identity, ceases to be what it was: unconscious.

Lacan tells us that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Like language, its function is “not to inform but to evoke responses in the other,” in consciousness. It does this through language, but always inadequately, for language can never fully represent unconscious desire. Always it says both less than what it wants to say and more than what we can understand.

How well this parallels the human dilemma: We are at almost every point less than what we want to be and more than what we can understand. Hence our desire for, our striving toward, that “something more” which we do not fully understand, and cannot articulate.  It is something we first glimpsed in our distant past which is no more, and which we seek in a future which has yet to be.  We ourselves stand in that gap of now, which is itself a kind of becoming.

Lacan explains the difficulty of our dilemma this way:

“I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.”

This “process of becoming” is the turf of poets as well as psychoanalysts. And no poet writes more upon this subject or with such longing, perhaps, than William Wordsworth, who wrote in “Tintern Abby”:

Our destiny, our nature, and our home
Is with infinitude, and only there:
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

More from the poets on this topic in my next post.

You can read Part I of this series here:

“Some Tragic Falling Off” Into Difference and Desire

“Taste and see – I am spare”

Tags

art, entelechy, human consciousness, identity, Philosophy, poetry, Sohan Qadri, spirituality, writing

That age-old question “who am I?” haunts us from birth. We sense we are more than what we seem to be, more than the sum of our parts, more than this thread of life that spans so short a distance.

Sometimes a felt-sense of that “something more” emerges in consciousness with a ring of clarity–then fades just as quickly. Sometimes if we are quick or lucky or persistent, we capture what we sensed in a word or image, a poem or song.

What we capture is always an echo of what we’re trying to get at, a finger pointing to the moon, not the thing itself.

The following poem is trying to capture that “something more.” I titled it “entelechy” which is a philosophical term that denotes both the perfect essence of an object or person, and that which propels it toward self-fulfillment. This is the closest I could come in finding a word to capture what I was after.

Entelechy

I am spare

I am clean uncluttered space

I am a fine line curving inward and out

I am a high sweet note wrung from the still air

I am a cup of cool water drawn from the clear stream

I am bone bleached and bare, tossed upon a windswept shore

Taste and see

I am spare

In some ways, this poem is like a prayer. When I am confused, or out of sorts, or besides myself, I turn to it to remind me of that something more or something deeper that I am at heart. Meditating upon these images brings me home to myself.

I am not sure if the poem will mean anything to anyone but me, but I wanted to share it here.

The artwork by Sohan Qadri that precedes these words captures for me, so beautifully, that same essence. I wrote another post about his artwork and what it means to me here.

The Art of Sohan Qadri