Lost For Now

Yesterday morning, around 4:45, I changed forever. Any perspective I thought I had on everything I thought I knew flew out my bedroom window. Without warning, without a plan to cope, I was thrust headlong into a place that I had only thought about before, only, barely, considered visiting.

But yesterday morning, I was forced there, locked in with no way out. And I was scared.My urgent desire to escape only secured my position in this fear. Less than 24 hours later, I am lost. Completely lost without the slightest idea of how to proceed. I was finishing up Antwone Fisher. The happy ending was nearing: he faced his abusive foster mother and his pedophile babysitter at the same time; after poring over phone books with his girlfriend, he found his dead father's family. This reunion resulted in another, serendipitous one: that with his mother. He left his girlfriend at his aunt's (his father's sister) house when he found out they knew where his mother was. Escorted by another new family member, he had a little conversation with her. Or, rather, he talked.

Upon returning to his aunt's, he was met by a slew of family, near and distant in relation, with open arms and smiling faces. They welcomed him into their fold. The camera, as Antwone, moved through the crowd of beaming black faces to the other side of the room where someone was standing in front of closed double doors. As if their opening would reveal the secret to a long lost civilization, the room grew quiet in anticipation of his reaction to what they were concealing.

The doors opened slowly and seated quietly in the room around a dining-room table symbolically full of a variety of home-cooked food was the royalty of the Elkins family, the elder stateswomen and statesmen.

I dropped my head. I couldn't deal with the way I all of a sudden started feeling. He found his history. I felt -- really felt -- for the first time that I don't have, will never have, one half of mine. Oh they ask what I am. And I tell them I don't know.

Getting to that point was difficult in some ways, but it always remained for me an exercise in analysis. I deconstructed race as much as I could, as long as it interested me, until I was able to relinquish any ownership of a racial explanation I thought I needed. I simply won't identify, I finally told myself one day. And it's worked. It will continue to work. But this is not my point. It had nothing to do with my fear. My fear wasn't about racial abstractions or theoretical insights into why I think the way I think, or even why I'm not accepted racially. My fear was about me. My real lack of knowledge about my origin. I couldn't stop crying; I couldn't erase the isolation I felt, one that I have never felt before in my life. It wouldn't stop. It doesn't stop at my felonius coneption. It doesn't stop at my being mixed. That's something in itself. I grew up with the light parent, not the dark one. Not the criminal. And what was the criminal, anyway? Where'd he come from?

Hyperventilating through the rush of the feelings that were emerging, I kept returning to the scene in the film. Is this what people have been trying to get me to do? To feel, rather than just relate a story. The fact of my life. I called people, despite the early hour. I stumbled through tearful voicemail messages. I tried to write.

Maybe this is the emotion I hear I lack in my writing. Maybe if I write now it will come through. But how am I supposed to do that? How can I weave this emotion thing into my writing? I just the other day began an outline of my "book," something that I was satisfied with and something that I actually got excited about. But now? What am I supposed to do with all of this? I tried. I could barely start.

I felt I had nowhere to start from. All of a sudden, using my time in New York as an anchor seemed all wrong. Is this what feeling is like? I used to be able to discuss with a stone face the beginnings of my existence. I used to be able to just talk, as if I'm recalling a story I read in the newspaper the other day, about any social effects my existence might have on me. I truly believed there were no effects. Just simple facts of life. But that hasn't been the case since early yesterday morning. And it was still there when I woke up, as I tried to talk on the phone and could barely eek out an explanation. This is now in me. It's incorporated itself into my thoughts, and I believe that my perspective is forever changed. It's as if others don't matter -- those with whom I insist on fighting day in and day out in my head. I've got bigger issues than their objection to me. I just don't know what to do about it yet. I am still scared.

That damn movie. I can't write anymore about this now, because I don't know anything else. I have no idea of how to proceed. No theory exists for me to rely on. For perhaps the first time in my life, I don't want theory. And maybe even I don't want to understand. I imagine I'll think about this often. I thought about it all day as I was walking up in my old school hood.

My eyes welled up with tears, which made me realize that this might just be too big for me right now. In my attempt to avoid thinking about this, trying to understand it, I went to a cafe and bought some fruit and water (seriously) and went back to the comforts of Henry Miller. And he didn't let me down (this will be lengthy):

'I feel in myself a lift so luminous,' says Louis Lambert, 'that I might enlighten a world, and yet I am shut up in a sort of mineral.' This statement, which Balzac voices through his double, expresses perfectly the secret anguish of which I was then a victim. At one and the same time I was leading two thoroughly divergent lives. One could be described as 'the merry whirl,' the other as the contemplative life. In the role of active being everybody took me for what I was, or what I appeared to be; in the other role no one recognized me, least of all myself. No matter with what celerity and confusion events succeeded one another, there were always intervals, self-created, in which through contemplation I lost myself. It needed only a few moments, seemingly, of shutting out the world for me to be restored. But it required much longer stretches -- of being alone with myself -- to write. As I have frequently pointed out, the business of writing never ceased. But from this interior process to the process of translation is always, and was then very definitely, a big step. There is an ordinary kind of forgetting and a special kind; the latter is due, more than likely, to the vice of living in two worlds at once. One of the consequences of this tendency is that you live everything out innumerable times. Worse, whatever you succeed in transmitting to paper seems but an infinitesimal fraction of what you've already written in your head. That delicious experience with which everyone is familiar, and which occurs with haunting impressiveness in dreams -- I mean of falling into a familiar groove: meeting the same person over and over, going down the same street, confronting the identically same situation -- this experience often happens to me in waking moments. How often I rack my brains to think where it was I made use of a certain character! Frantically I wonder if 'it' occurred in some manuscript thoughtlessly destroyed. And then, when I've forgotten all about 'it,' suddenly it dawns on me that 'it' is one of the perpetual themes which I carry about inside me, which I am writing in the air, which I have written hundreds of times already, but never set down on paper. I make note to write it out at the first opportunity, so as to be done with it, so as to bury it once and for all. I make the note -- and I forget it with alacrity...It's as though there were two melodies goin on simultaneously: one for private exploitation and the other for the public ear. The whole struggle is to squeeze into that public record some tiny essence of the perpetural inner melody. "It was this inner turmoil which my friends detected in my comportment. And it was the lack of it, in my writings, which they deplored. I almost felt sorry for them. But there was a streak in me, a perverse one, which prevented me from giving the essential self. This 'perversity' always voiced itself thus: 'Reveal your true self and they will mutilate you.' 'They' meant not my friends alone but the whole world. "Once in a great while I came across a being whom I felt I could give myself to completely. Alas, these beings existed only in books, They were worse than dead to me -- they had never existed except in imagination. Ah, what dialogues I conducted with kindred, ghostly spirits! Soul-searching colloquies, of which not a line has ever been recorded.... "After such indescribably tumultuous communions I often sat down to the machine thinking that the moment had at last arrived. 'Now I can say it!' I would tell myself. And I would sit there, mute, motionless, drifting with the stellar flux. I might sit that way for hours, completely rapt, completely oblivious to everythign about me. And then, startled out of the trance by some unexpected sound or intrusion, I would wake with a start, look at the blank paper, and slowly, painfully tap out a sentence, or perhaps only a phrase. Whereupon I would sit and stare at these words as if they had been written by some unknown hand." -- from chapter four of Plexus, Henry Miller

I could actually only manage the first part. It was too much. I had to close the book. I want to relay. But I have no sense. Perhaps I'll try to write now. Go back maybe to New York as anchor. Or not. Or just try to write the pages upon pages I've already composed in my head. I'm not sure I can transmit them to "paper," though. That fear.