Perspective Please

Father Johnson

David Johnson, the retiring Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts, shot himself on January 15th, 1985. The Boston papers were full of reflective eulogies and psychological explanations. Theologians and Philosophers squirmed to find an answer, juggling existential hyperbole with earnest bewilderment as if to convince themselves of their innocence in the matter. After all, if he was privy to the same information they were and chose death over a life much like their own, what did that mean? Did this in some way threaten their integrity as intellectual and spiritual guides — the men who knew all the questions if not the answers?
How could someone explain, in less than three paragraphs, why any man, let alone a bishop who had attained the NEW American Dream, would shoot himself in the head? It didn’t make sense.
David Johnson was not merely successful. He was successful in the way that Madison Avenue has recently hyped as chic. He had managed to attain status on both a professional and spiritual level. True to Hollywood standards, he also possessed a tragic hero’s’ “fatal flaw”, which, in his case, manifested itself as an irrepressible passion in a matter pertaining to the flesh. I say “passion” because it is only passion, not merely lust which would back David Johnson into a corner with a bullet.
. In our culture, passion unbridled is now more of a sin than it was 200 years ago. It contains elements of the spiritual and implies a defiance of the Good-Old-American-Boy network which fears the aesthetic, therefore dangerous, notion that a sum can be greater than its parts – a man can be swept away by something greater than himself. John Wayne wouldn’t have let it happen and if he did, it certainly wouldn’t have happened in Boston.
Lust, on the other hand, has become an acceptable, if not imperative, cultural measure of masculine competence. Based solely on physical reactions triggered haphazardly by a thought, an idea, a sensory cue, lust, at first glance, gives off a macho—glow, but is instead spineless, emotional and blood red, like a raw steak. It is considered an appropriate vehicle for free-floating aggression, a made-for-TV-movie version of the apocalyptic terrorizing, ecstatic free-fall I imagine David Johnson experienced. Of course, I am only imagining, for I haven’t seen David Johnson in over ten years and we exchanged less than one hundred words back then. But I’ve found that words, like emotions, can exist without value. They must be shaped into significance with attention paid to the awkward pauses between the words and the mystery behind the emotions. It was David Johnson whose awkward pauses and mysterious nature helped me through a particularly painful part of my life.
I was a young wife and mother in Sarasota, Florida. My days consisted of suntan lotion, picnics, sand castles and iced tea. At night, after the baby fell asleep at my breast, my husband helped me wash the dinner dishes. But it was silent in the kitchen except for the singing locusts and crickets and it was silent in our bedroom. I supposed that was to be expected with money problems and such. I considered myself indulgent with self-pity based on unrealistic expectations.
I was confused as to why a conventional but supportive lifestyle left me wanting, but I took great joy in mothering, singing in Cabaret clubs, and cleaning the house. Trouble was, my head pulsed with a dull consistent ache and seemed stuffed with a thick blue fog. This fog partially lifted at times, just enough for me to peer through it, and recognize its return.
It was through this fog that I first heard David Johnson pausing between religious references in his sermons at St. Steven’s Episcopal Church on beautiful Siesta Key Island. My husband and his family, on and off members of the islands’ Episcopal congregation, decided to dress up and start going back to church when David Johnson came to town. We all heard that there was a very handsome, distinguished man of letters behind the pulpit who knew how to please a crowd. I was introduced to he benefits of an intelligent theologian and the primal fulfillment of religious ritual that my Unitarian past lacked. For the first time in my life I sought and found spiritual solace in a “house of worship”.
No one was more surprised than I was at my regular church attendance. Even on good beach days, I sat in a back pew, watched and sometimes listened to Father Johnson. There was apprehension in his delivery and manner that seemed to torment him. He would pause mysteriously in the midst of a sentence as though he yearned to expand on it. He would then stare out at the congregation, studying a few unsuspecting blue-haired matrons with intensity and puzzlement as though looking for a clue. Sensing futility, he would reluctantly return to the sermon-as-written. I sensed he felt he was failing us in some way. He knew that words were not the vehicles we needed to soothe our wounded psyches and that neither prayer, song, or communion could begin to absolve us of our one apparent sin: existence.
I didn’t listen much anyway, or sing or pray. I just sat motionless, half asleep, my head heavy in the thick blue fog. I tried to figure out why David Johnson had chosen the priesthood. I didn’t sense that he used his robe and collar costume as protective armor but rather survival gear that might allow him access to otherwise dangerously invisible theoretical and emotional territories. Was he a true believer? If so, in what, exactly? What was he struggling to withhold during the awkward pauses in his otherwise flawless sermons?
I knew from reading Rilke and first-hand experience with authority figures that there were no answers, only more questions, but I made an appointment for counseling, driven by the blue fog which, after a few weeks with a bible, I interpreted as a spiritually significant sign from God. A sign that only David Johnson could interpret.
On an unaccustomedly damp and overcast afternoon, I walked into the newly refurbished adobe-styled rectory. It smelled like good leather and money. I felt hopeful. A sunburned church lady, in a starchy dress the color of the inside of my head, quickly adjusted her pinched face, made irritable with unrewarded martyrdom. She smiled whitely.

He looked up at me over his bifocals for a moment and started to say something. In his accustomed manner, he paused and studied my face. He shrugged his shoulders and leaned back in his chair. He finally said, “Well…” He paused. I jumped in and finished his sentence. “I guess maybe I should just sing and see what happens.” A pause, then, “you love to sing which may mean….” The pause. He wanted to continue. I felt he wanted to, truly but he didn’t. Why not? I looked at his face. Yes, he did want to continue but — didn’t feel it was his place to do so.

So that was it. The pauses on the pulpit were moments when he concluded that it was not in his place, or anyone’s place, to insinuate that they had an answer. Answers, even attempts at answers, especially those veiled with sobrieties intentions, were oversimplifications and therefore violations of a seeker’s dignity.

He shook the snow paperweight, harder this time. The snow swirled around the caroling child again. We stared at the paperweight together until the snow settled. It took about five minutes. A stream of blazing tropical light flashed across the desk as the sun came out. The dust in the air was spinning like the snow. It seemed like we were inside a larger paperweight. He pulled a book from his shelf and began reading passages that meant nothing and weren’t meant to; just a string of words, soothing, colorful, but empty, like the sound of his voice. They wrapped around me like ribbons but then became thread-like. Threads of pain. I began to understand why I felt a sense of connection to this man who appeared so aloof and introspective. Somehow, in his own strange way, he was validating my pain instead of trying to alleviate it.

I felt his pain, but he did not suggest it. I was spared an indulgence of empathy; a mental state easily manufactured which temporarily satisfies our hunger for emotional connection. But empathy is of-the-moment, short-lived, because it is by nature, a thought based emotion. It is safe. It is passionless. What I felt that afternoon in Reverend Johnson’s office was his capacity for passion, which, in our circumstance, availed
Itself as com-passion. I had somehow entered the paradoxical closet he suffered in. On one hand, a withholding – allowing me to reach towards the pauses made awkward by their naked availability, on the other hand, an offering, a surrendering, for in allowing me, or anyone else to reach towards, he could be touched. And passion is ignited not when we touch, but only when we allow ourselves to be touched by others.

I shook David Johnsons hand good-bye a decade ago and never saw him again. When I heard about his new position as Bishop of Massachusetts, I had a hard time picturing him in a passionless Puritan environment. But I wished him well and thought about him whenever I choose passion over emotion, or silence over distraction, because, ever since that Florida afternoon in the adobe rectory I stopped formatting my foggy blue brain for conventional purposes unrelated to a passion, whether it be singing, mud-wrestling or other admittedly peculiar pursuits. I let loose of the reins. Often, I forget about consequences. Sometimes they have been severe, but the blue fog in my head has faded into yellow gold, the color of my daughter’s eyes and she, too, has benefited from my connection with David Johnson.

How do you thank a man for that kind of gift? Certainly not by challenging his final decision and labeling it a tragedy. And not by participating in a psychological autopsy as though filling out the blanks on an application form admitting him into heaven.

The true tragedians are the people who insist on settling their soft bottoms around other people’s souls until they hatch, explode, or suffocate. Their own grief acts as a sturdy vessel, which they feel allows them floatation rights across someone else’s birthright. These well-intentioned emotionally alert care-takers lead active lives, manipulating their pain in warped circus mirrors or reflecting it in quiet pools of meditation and retreat. Unlike David Johnson, they choose to live on and on and on. They’re very busy. They never let the snow settle.

Performer turns Painter and painter turns Writer to Performer

give give give

PRIVATE or SEMI PRIVATE PERFORMANCES ONLY – unless..

Unless you are a club owner who understands art and is willing and able to do whatever advertising and explanations needed to educate your guests. They are used to Kareoke and folk music or quiet jazz trios. This is theater in a club setting-

I like so much what I don’t like or want and want what I dont’ want

Florida, I have been drinking the best wine, eating the best food, soaking up the best sun, performing and offending the best people. I am five pounds heavier, with great new facial injections and bawbles and bangles, manicures and pedicures…the sand is white, the stars are bright, it’s the season. Oh, how beautifully some people live… rows of linens and silks and cashmeres in cave-like closets…. first, second, third wife… always someone on the arm, a solid foundation. Sculpted yards, art abundant, the casual beach bungaloo bongo drum invite, just a bar seat away. Smile. smile white with a professional bleach job. Hobble about in the highest heels. and heavy with the mascara. You, too, can be a star. the ageless Disney World…. the paved in gold road to oblivion. Maybe these people are on to something.

Smoke Gets In My Eyes

The cigarette smoke made its way across the living room and hallway. It somehow managed to float underneath my tightly shut bedroom door. It hit me like mustard gas. My sinus’s started to flow, my head ached, my face ached. Simply a bit of cigarette smoke? Do people still smoke? I went out to ask my friend what was going on. The health conscious pal was sitting at her desk, lit cigarette in an ashtray at her elbow. “Is that a cigarette?” I asked. “Well, yes, I don’t really smoke it, I just keep it here in the tray when I get anxious. I mean, I kind of smoke it but I don’t really inhale it.” Her room was a chemical fog. “Oh” I answered. “Well, I wonder if you could open a window.” “I would, but the windows were painted shut years ago, never been opened since, can’t be opened, no.” “Are you insane?” I asked, politely. “Are you fucking crazy?” I tried to be pleasant. It was her house. “I’ll stop.” she said. “I really can stop. I”m not addicted to the nicotine, just the habit of lighting the cigarette and putting it to my lips.” She sat behind the computer screen in the dark, her face pale as the smoke drifting around the room. This woman, so healthy and bubbly and active during the day, now sunk down low in a chair, in the dark, the glowing raw computer light throbbing across her white skin, the smoke wafting across the screen, like streaks of a gray crayon making twirlies up into her face..a saturation of fumes on furniture and curtains, her clothes, and my clothes, the dogs fur, the rugs, and in such a pretty room with such a pretty woman, dull air burning with benzene, acetone, and various other chemicals.

Trapped behind inoperable windows, I knew that I had suddenly become a zero tolerance cigarette Nazi, and I looked at this fine woman and saw a suicidal, stinking, poison belching addict. With her advancing age, medical propensities and family history she was a good candidate for premature corpse-dom. And then I watched myself take a Valium, pour a glass of wine, and pop an Ambien. It was late. I felt no sleep coming on… not even an open-eyed stare of worry about how I’d feel if she smoked at her desk every day, all day. The dirt dust smell was in my bed sheets and my clothes, my socks, the towels in the bathroom. I had been away from smoke for so long, enough people had quit that you hardly ran into that wall of stink anymore- even in parking lots… then, to suddenly get a full load of it coming through the walls, seeking me out, a dose at every turn…. a frenzy of sneezes…. the tender tingling nasal passages, a metallic nausea creeping up the throat.  Dull head, dull brain, burning eyes, from what… a little bit of second hand smoke??? A Virginia Slims Menthol Filter Extra Long?

Is there anything in my life so harmful and yet so addictive that I would willingly exude a continual, poisonous stink and then, when confronted, shrudge and make an excuse? There must be, I just can’t think of anything at the moment, except a fart because there is something about air. Booze doesn’t drift. Pills don’t float toward the ceiling or invade the body of a passer-by. The porous nature of the poison smoke, the dance of the smoke, the way it seems to know its way around, conscious, intelligent. Free to move about the cabin…invisible, smoke enters.

Bride in Black

It can happen, your dream come true. But something is missing. White. Sold out of white fabric at Fabric World. Can you go to the dark side of your dream? Can you face the reality of what you are really doing? Have you talked to a lawyer. Have you done the background check? Do you really think that taking walks along the beach and taking a cooking class together is really going to enhance your life? You are about to getting married. Do you have any idea what you’re getting into? Do you think that the marriage contract will in any way control your beloved? Of course you don’t have any expectations. You accept the love of your life for what they are, bad and good, black and white. And they love you. They really do. They are certain of it. And here is the gist of this comment: There is no black or white, only those Shades of Grey, which line the second hand bookshelves, row upon row, of soft porn, the same paperback porn that will creep into your marital bed after a few years, when you are so bored that you’ll try anything, and everything..once…and then it will all be better, and you will know that you’ve made the right choice, the right choice at the time, the only choice you could make with the information you had available, and you will forgive yourself and your beloved, and start a garden, keeping the sharp lawntools locked away tight.