Epiphanies in Isolation

Today I got some of what should have been the best news of my short life. I have been accepted to be a member of a wonderful medical school's class for next fall. When I saw the email however I didn't feel anyone of the things I thought I would. Absent were elation, relief, and pride instead I found myself feeling wholly unmoved. My first reaction was to blame it on the rather uninspiring email that it came in. No school seal or congratulatory special fonts. Just a normal email saying that I had to pay some money to keep my seat. But it quickly became obvious that my stoicism was sourced from something much deeper within me.

My first instinct was to celebrate and share the news with all my friends. Immediately following that instinct came the blunt realization that I had by and large burned all the bridges with anyone with whom I might be able to share this. In the process of arriving at my goal I had lost ties to most of the people whom could have shared in my happiness. I wouldn't get a high five from a best friend. There would be no congratulatory bar rush. No kiss on the cheek and sparkle in the eye of a loved one. There was just me and this banal email. All of a sudden I felt the full distance of the social environment I had created. 

The next problem arose from the reaction of acquaintances and really how I had come to frame the situation myself. "Of course you got in" was a popular phrase. I know this is meant as a compliment but it undermines all my hard work that has gotten me to this point. In some ways this is a bastardization of the fundamental attribution error. People seeing in me some kind of inherent genius or ability that has predestined my success. While flattering it not only diminishes the weight of my efforts but also places unduly high expectations on everything I do. "Of course you got in" echoes in my ears as "when are you going to do something really great?" The more things that become expected of me, the less things I can do to prove myself and less fulfilling everything I do becomes. This problem is more alarming because it is reflected in how I have grown to see things myself.

I know this sounds extremely whinny so let me take a moment to thank and acknowledge the loving support I have received. I got a card and some chocolate from two angels which meant more to me than they could ever know. Despite everything I've down to isolate myself from everyone there are still lose people that dare to reach beyond my walls.

This epiphany has left me with a lot of unanswered questions about my future. I absolutely still want to be a doctor. I want it more than ever. The question now is how I'm going to frame it within all the more important and larger questions that have come to interrupt my singular focus of becoming a doctor. There will no joy in being the world's greatest doctor if I go home to an empty house and am constantly devaluing my own accomplishments because of unreasonably high expectations.

The Recitation

Where do you find angels now-a-days? I know friends and family that have been looking for them for ages and never found them. This weekend however I meet two. God knows I wasn't looking for them.

The first was on Teaneck Road by a closed dairy queen at about 12:45 am. It was raining so hard and I had been walking alone for so long that neither my clothes nor my glasses were serving their purpose. I was drenched and not quite blind. I was also dreadfully cold. The divine meeting happened quickly and without any procession. I saw the angel sitting about the peak of the dairy queen roof. He/she greeted me with a wave and leaped, his/her great wings slowing his/her decent, to the dead leaf strewn side walk in front of me. A tentacle of light emerged from the angel's navel and enraptured my head. I struggled desperately but as soon as I began struggling I realized I was no longer in Teaneck. Well that is not quite true. More correctly to say I was no longer only in Teaneck. I was in three places at once. I was in Teaneck but also in a great desert and a quite isolated Caribbean beach. The bright scorching of the day melted into the raining misery of Teaneck and the tranquil star lite night of the beach. Like three oil painting whose canvases turned to water and began to flow and mingle with one another without losing any distinction, I was seeing all and each. In the desert I saw great migrations of people with their whole lives on their backs pressing west buffeted by sun and sand. In the beach I saw a single woman bathing in the star light. The waves rolling over carelessly, unappreciative of the beauty they held. It lasted perhaps a second, likely less. Then it was over. All that remained was the dairy queen and the dirty wet sidewalk. I was exhausted. I fell over and vomited. With 40 mins of walking behind me alone in the dark and rain and another 40 mins ahead of me I concurred with my body that it was time for a break.

I might the second angel while listening to Dvorak in a middle school concert hall. With two free tickets to the Bergen County Philharmonic and with no one to go with me I sat quietly suspended between a state of complacency and melancholy as they orchestra rounded out the fourth movement of Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony. The tarantella rhythms carrying all the weight of their poisonous origins. Then a girl took the stage. Younger than I and still engaged in her education at Julliard she seated herself and her cello at center stage with a gaze of otherworldly focus. It was time for Dvorak's concerto and she was to be the soloist. The first stroke of her bow was deep and resounded in my chest awakening the depths of my soul, unbinding the chains that I'd so meticulously placed. Elation and freedom followed the vibrations of her strings and the caresses of her hands on the cello's neck. Her music was like calligraphy written in the air painting the auditorium with chords of intent and grace. I had no hallucinations or visions or what have you but I was equally as transported as I was the night before. Carried on waves of music to wonders that lasted only moments at a time. The music of the spheres was opening around us.

It was a good weekend for Angels, but I do enjoy the company of some much more than others.

Some more (hopefully not awful) poetry

Suits

Mine;
Ruffled about my elbows,
Still creased to previous owner’s shoulders,
Mother-tailored, thread not quite matching,
Loose in the waist, old belt over draw
Ballooning out the legs.
Only $50 dollars at the thrift store.

Across the cold and dark table,
Theirs;
Slim, fitting, immaculate.
Made in Italy, Genoa, France, Singapore,
Anywhere but here.
Pressed and Dry-Cleaned.
They begin:
“So what are your qualifications?”

AJM

Some (hopefully not awful) Poetry

The World’s Great Scab

Cutting itself deep
world’s blood drawn
land blackened, hard
Never healing

Moans, grunting
flakes tear at one another
Wails, shrieking pink flesh
bared raw

Congealing bleeding hardening bleeding again
tirelessly, the great scab claws at its self
starving, depleting the world
Never healing

Blessings gifts, regretted
Stars’ tears boil
on backs of the scab
it roams spreads virulent

Billion legged, toothed, fisted beast
self mutilating, plaguing all the earth
Were that God never spoke its name,
Adam.

Karaoke Night

Ice cubes dance in brown and clear liquors
Beneath faces shadowed by overdrawn collars.
Deafening off key lyrics reflecting
shimmering like broken glass,
Fist clenched she bellows a eulogy
To the may haves and never were.
Wrung out melodies unmasked by the dim lighting.
Wraiths, shadows of memory, dance on the walls
Jubilations reserved exclusively for these
Beings of the past,
Mocking the living statues cemented to the bar
A final wail beneath the decrescendo
The music dies.
The absence of applause.


A moment of silence for the departed.

Seven Deadly Sins? Nay, Shakespeare Needs Only One: Jealousy, Iago’s Poison and its Abstract Implications

The immense and hadean world of literary villains is rife with irresistible personalities full of complexities and unanswered questions; however, there is no villain that has so captured the imagination of the world as Iago. Iago shows himself to be a heavily nuanced Machiavellian protégée whose schemes so are encompassing that even the audience falls victim to his wit and guile and whose motivations are so cast in shadow so as to only further damn his nature. However, possibly the most compelling aspect of this luridly deceitful man is just how he causes all that he does, how he causes the death of four people, the wounding of three others, the complete destruction of a man’s soul, and his own descent into madness. One might think that to engineer such a disturbing and varied set of results there would need to be a multidimensional and equally varied scheme; however this is not the case. Iago masterfully engages a single human emotion to bring about all of his ends, but he is only able to do so because of the raging agony of which that same emotion has caused within himself. Like drawing water from a poisoned well, Iago’s uses his own caustic jealousy to envenom nearly every character in the play; consequently, “Othello” and Iago specifically is an exploration of the corrosive nature of jealousy at the self, interpersonal, and communal levels which reveal Iago to not only symbolize jealousy but rather to embody it, prompting implications for an abstractive reading of the play. In order to properly engage these arenas, it is best to begin with the outmost and move towards the personal in much the same way one might trace the epidemiology of a disease.

The first analysis of jealousy working through and in Iago on the communal level comes in his exchange with Barbantio. At first glance this interaction may not seem to be any different than any of Iago’s exchanges, but when analyzed carefully it becomes obvious that Iago’s ploys go beyond that of a single person against another person but rather of a community against an individual. In act I, scene I, lines 108 – 110 Iago says “you’ll have your nephews neigh to you; you’ll have coursers for cousins and jennets for germans” taking the insinuation to a level beyond the immediate family and into a larger perspectives. Again then in the same scene only a few lines down in line 115 in response to being called a villain Iago throws Barbantio’s attention back to his place in society saying “You are a senator.” In each of these cases Iago is crafting Barbantio’s fury not in relation to the moor’s association to his daughter but in the context of a community in which he will be seen in a relation to a moor and the jealousy that is engaged by Iago in Barbantio of Othello’s having robbed him of his rightful place in society, a place that his peers will occupy without his company.  This theme is further carried through in act I, scene III, where it is settled in front of gubernatorial body, a prefecture of community. Iago is most silent during this scene, which if one accepts him to be a symbol of jealous is a demonstration of the omnipresent but hidden jealous present within society and communities. In the next arena of jealous, it is obvious to see Iago playing a more active role.

The most familiar theater of jealousy is interpersonally. This is also the most evident throughout the play, being most obvious and fully developed in Iago’s interaction with Othello, but also taking place with Iago’s interactions with Cassio, Rodrigo, and Emilia. Prime examples of Iago functioning as the interpersonal symbol and agent of jealous occur in act III, scene III, lines 93 when Iago prompts “Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, know of your love?”, again in line 208 of the same scene recalling Desdemona’s initial deceit of her father, and in such prevalence throughout nearly every seen that it would be tiresome to note them all, rather it is better to note the conditions of each. In every instance of these interpersonal encounters with Iago, he always is pitting the gains or supposed gains of one against the reciprocal loss of another. In the case of Othello it becomes less about the loss of Desdemona as it does about her being taken by another man, the same is true for Iago, even Emilia is jealous of losing Iago’s attention and it being displaced elsewhere despite her knowing where or why. In this way Iago embodies jealous as a sort of universal scale to which all the characters are bound and by which the weigh their own value. This leads inevitably to a question of how could the same emotion, jealousy, function entirely within one’s self where there is no counter weight to judge by. For the answer again one returns to Iago.

When taken in isolation Iago is at the very least a mysterious if not entirely obfuscated figure. The plays offers flimsy and conflicting motives for Iago’s jealousy, both of which are only presented by Iago himself and neither of which would elicit the degree of malice that he unleashes in a rationale human. Iago jeopardizes his career, life, and reputation in order to achieve his revenge. Even in this extreme and maniacal internal strife Iago fulfills his symbolism and embodiment of jealousy. Jealousy, when taken in isolation, is not rationale, it is extreme, and its origins are often unclear and contradictory. Jealousy takes no account of anything except its satisfaction. In all these ways Iago mirrors jealousy exactly. This close relation and near perfect embodiment of jealous at every metaphysical level leads to abstract conclusions that begin with asking the question, could the play progress as it did without Iago.

If one considers, given the near perfect embodiment of jealousy that Iago has generated, that Iago does not embody jealousy, but rather in fact is jealousy, the abstract implications begin to unfold and the evidence for such begins to become clear. If Iago were not a physical character in the play but rather the abstraction of jealousy present in the community, interpersonal relationships, and selves of all the other characters in the play and they all were to fall victim to their own jealous inclinations, just as they do to Iago’s lures, then the play could progress as it does without fail. For isn’t it true that the desperate conclusions to which all the characters attend are drawn to by themselves and their own mental steering or in Iago’s own words in act II scene III, “and what’s he then that says I play the villain, When this advice is free I give and honest, probal to thinking.” Another avenue of evidence for this abstraction of Iago is his long addresses to the audience, which implies his ability to function both within the play and outside its boundaries, something no other character can do.

A critical review of “Othello” allows for the discernment of the depth of interconnectivity between Iago and jealousy. It becomes clear that Iago is a character composed of, driven by, representing, embodying, and possibly even abstractly existing as jealousy in the communal, interpersonal, and personal levels as a hidden omnipresent force, universal scale of worth, and mysterious incorrigible innate emotion. It is a testament to the ability of Shakespeare to so masterfully compose a character that absolutely embodies a single emotion without explicitly stating it and confining it entirely within the human experience.

My Struggle with Personal Statements

The personal statement is one of the strangest writing assignments that can be thrust upon someone. With almost no direction you are asked, in a 1000 words or less, to tell your story. This is ludacris. It is founded on several outlandish assumptions.

First the idea that I have idea what my story is or that it has any degree of a reasonable progression or plot that I can easily understand is wishful thinking at the best. My "story" is a series of impulsive decisions made moment by moment by former versions of myself that are as unrecognizable to me now as a stranger form halfway across the world. To hold me not only responsible to these former version of my self but to expect me to be able to justify them and assemble them in some compact linear form is simply asking the impossible. 

Secondly to expect me to be able to convey my entire essence of being in a form of prose limited to 1000 words is like asking Da Vinci to invent a helicopter with only lead as a base material. Prose is fine for stories, narrative, and essay but what in God's name makes you think that my heart and soul is most readily conveyed in any of those forms? And on top of that you impose a word limit! Oh tyranny! What if Dickens was limited to only 1000 words in writing David Cooperfield? Imagine the beauty of growth, the ebbies of conflict, the shades of morality that would have been forsaken for no other purpose than convenience! If you wish for convenience then please do not be so brazen as to ask me to lay bear my soul! 

Finally, and probably most idiotically, is the assumption that you or anyone is capable of assessing this rendition of my being. That you can somehow judge the quality of how someone chooses to present their "story". Were I too send you a black and white picture of Nietzsche or a Walt Whitman poem who are you to say that this some how lessens my potential contribution to the world? These things may hold unknowable value for which you could not possibly begin to understand and I certainly couldn't describe in prose in 1000 words. Ah but for convenience, for convenience and clarity it is that we must apply these assumptions and constraints. I only warn that these constraints for convenience will not end with application and paper processes that these constraints become a state of thinking and soon, if something is not convenient it is simply not worth doing.

The State in Which I Live

You may remember that I have taken up residence in a small home in the town of Teaneck. It is next to a middle school and a turtle conservatory of which I have grown overly found. The town is peaceful and the nights are quiet. This subdued atmosphere however does not carry into the home in which I am resident.

I now like with three other people. Without exception they are all mad. Let us begin with the most humorous of the trio.

“They call me ‘The Rat’” were his first words to me. The fat, heavily bearded, sharp toothed, Saudi Arabian man that was sitting in my living room thought not to give me his name or extend his hand in greeting; rather he offered a decidedly unflattering nickname and an unbalanced smile while he continued to scratch his balls. This could have been our only interaction I would have known enough about the man. My expression of surprise must not have been well hid for he went on to explain the origin of this title. “You see, in college, in the dorm, I would become very hungry, and at night I would awaken and scrounge about for food, collecting in my bed and eating for sometime before falling back asleep…like a rat!” The Rat looked at me expectantly, perhaps waiting for a laugh, I let my cocked eyebrows relax and said “So it is, it’s nice to meet The Rat” and turned upstairs to lock up all my food.

The first few nights living with the rat were unremarkable but then the nightly grumblings began. I would just finishing my reading and having had a long day of work and class was half between dreams and wakefulness when I would hear a long sigh erupt from The Rat’s room, or hole as he might have called it. There would follow a period of between 40 and 50 minutes of his stomping around, moving boxes and furniture, with a desperation that was reminiscent of a beast in its final moments. The door you fling open and The Rat would go vaulting down the steps, the sighing becoming more of moan. The lights crept in under my door and the shadows of his movements danced on my walls. I heard the refrigerator door thrown open and its contents assaulted. This would go one for a period of minutes and then quietly all the passion gone The Rat would stumble back up the stair and into his room. When the dawn came the only evidence of the raid that had occurred were a misplaced bag of cheetos forgotten on the stairs.

The resident in absencia is apparently named Brian. Although only having meet him twice in the 6 months we have both been living there I really have no proof of that. Brian lives in the basement and apparently designs suitcases. One might consider Brian to be in these matters a relatively normal renter; however, Brian is also subject to some rather strange circumstance. To start, Brian is married. He has a wife and she lives just down the street. She lives alone in a big house. Why does Brian not live with his wife? No one knows. Brian also takes phone calls in the middle of the night beneath my window in which he discusses rather interesting things; the “moving” of things, the “purity”, and the “price” of these things without ever naming the things. Brian also never comes upstairs or is in the kitchen despite not having any access to a fridge or a stove in his basement. In fact Brian is never anywhere but under my window smoking a “cigarette” or in the basement. In fact The Rat has never even seen Brian. It is very possible Brian may not even be real.

Finally we arrive at the master of this house, Olga. One day upon returning home from week I realized that my room was absolutely frigid. I saw that the heat was turned off. I assumed I must have mistakenly left it off and fixed it and went on with my day. This would have been unremarkable except this happened everyday for the next week. Now, some nights I come home pretty late because of my class schedule and it is difficult to sleep in a glorified ice box so I thought I must get to the bottom of this. The next day that I left I placed a small rubber ball just behind my closed door so that if it were to be opened it would be struck and sent to the other side of the room. Sure enough upon returning home I saw the ball underneath my desk nowhere near where I had left it and the heat turned all the way off. It was clear from this that Olga (The Rat had not moved in yet and Brian leaves and arrives earlier and later than I do) was sneaking into my room every day after I had left and was turning off my heat. This is in and of itself is not a terrible thing. It is an invasion of my privacy and it is rather annoying but Olga was also charging me $50 extra dollars for heat during the winter. Heat that I was never getting to enjoy! What a scam she was running! Ah but I out smarted her. For the Rat’s room was still vacant. So every day before I left I would go across the hall and turn the heat all the way up and leave both doors wide open. Thereby I would suck all the out of the Rat’s future room and find myself nice a cozy despite the treachery of Olga. 

A place only we know

I've come to realize that some of the most enthralling parts of being in a relationship, involved with, or whatever you want to call it, with another person go well beyond the physical realm. Don't get me wrong. I love sex. I happen to like women and spending a lazy afternoon undressing a captivating feminine being is a great use of time. That however is only a single dimension of the relationship and also a subject for another time. Tonight I want to talk about the psychic place that is developed when two minds become intimate, the metaphysical state of reality that only you know through and with each other.

Becoming intimate with a person fundamentally alters your understanding of reality. The center of your university moves ever so slightly away from your own being towards another. Your perceptions are forced to accommodate the perceptions of another. The intersection of these realities becomes the defining space of your relationship. It is a way of viewing the world that you couldn't have discovered except through one another. The particularly difficult part is that from your respective poles in this shared space you cannot see the view shared by your partner. So while the space is shared you cannot know what it appears like to your lover. The crags and crevasses of your shared physic landscape that may be so endearing to you can be scars on the land to them.

This landscape is as scared as it is fragile. A misspoken word or forgotten date can send the whole scene into a torrent of uncertainty and desecration. A dangerous place it is to exist no doubt. But for its fragility and risk it is all the more beautiful.

Impermanence

The impermanence of everything has been coming through pretty clearly lately. The summation of all your efforts can vanish in the blink an eye. Does that devalue what you had done? Not if you have grown through doing those things. The impact the experience has had on you cannot be taken away.

My car was totaled last week. Some maniac was driving so fast on my street (which is basically an alley that has a school crossing zone on it) that he hit my car and pushed it through a snow bank and into a tree completely crippling the frame. Consequently I have started using the bus.

Now I love watching people, so the bus has provided a perfect venue for some good ole observing. The other day I accidentally sat directly across from a homeless man that was very angrily mumbling to himself, had an incredibly swollen prostate, was wearing unidentifiable stained clothes, and smelled to high heaven. I was presented with a choice I could move but there was no way that it could be seen for any reason than avoiding him or I could run the gambit of staying there under his watch. Partly cause I didn't give a fuck and partly cause I was so tired I chose to stay.

For the next 20 mins he stared at me and mumbled threatening things. I figured that if he made a move for me I could drop him with my metal water bottle, which when full is pretty substantial. Everyone else on the bus was staring at me. I could feel their eyes urging me to relocate.

At one point another woman got on the bus and sat down next to me, thinking I offered a zone of safety. She quickly reconsidered a moved to the back.

The bus reached my stop and I got up and left. The homeless guy never moved an inch, he just keep staring at the spot I had occupied, still mumbling. I guess I just made up my mind that being attacked by a crazy homeless guy didn't really bother me. This is as much a part of life as a nice meal or a massage. Once you've stopped caring so much about your own safety you find that the world is a much safer place.

I am alone in a patronage. I am not a pastor. There are 2 cats here that are destroying everything but I find it futile to try and clean up after them. The cats live with me and share my company. There is a gigantic french window to which there are no blinds or shades and is impossible to cover. This window looks directly out on the church. All day long I see the practitioners filling in and out of the church. They all peer at me through the window, while I am eating my breakfast, reading my books, and even as I prepare to sleep.

This window to the church quite concerns me. It is as if God him/herself were watching me through it in some kind of demented aquarium exhibit.

There is a street lamp that torments me. It sits just off to the right off the church in full view of the window. It never turns off. It shins directly onto the pillow of my bed. I sometimes think of destroying the light, but I don't think that god would allow for that.

Then there is the tree. There is a Christmas tree here that has been the target of several cat assaults and is now very deformed in appearance. The tree regularly releases spores at purposefully random intervals to cause my airways to contract and to make me cease breathing. The tree has attempted to accomplish my end several times by doing this while I am asleep.

I would take the tree down and throw it outside but the a Christmas tree is a very personal thing so I am fearful of moving it. Moving someone's Christmas tree is like wearing their clothes or taking a bath in their bath. Bathing you see is entirely different than showering. There is an intimacy in both the tree and the bath.