Never Walked In High Heels

For most of the past two months, I’ve been on a Facebook strike. Such abstinence seems to be unthinkable for someone of my generation. Facebook has been a part of my life since 2004 and a great way to keep up with friends since moving across the pond. Recently however, with my life taking some very odd turns and many of my friend’s choosing to go a more traditional route in their own lives, I needed a break. At my age, the holidays mean an onslaught of baby pictures and engagement announcements which, somehow, Facebook can manage to bundle together in some sort of conspiracy that can bombard you with the idea that everyone else in the world is young, beautiful, fertile, and knitting baby blankets.

During this time of self inflicted celibacy two events occurred. First, Facebook decided to turn itself into some sort of historical time capsule and second, a friend who had just announced that she was having twins, miscarried.

I think all of us in life hate to think that nothing, even the most natural and yet miraculous milestones we can have, is ever guaranteed. If the ring is on our finger or the pregnancy test shows a red plus sign, we have made a contract with fate. We are going to have reason to celebrate, we can shout it to the world in our Facebook statuses, and the happy event will happen. Guaranteed.

And on the one hand, why not? We should celebrate at full steam our times of joy. But many are finding out, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that the hope for our lives we place in the future, sometimes doesn’t come. One week after my friend announced to the world her amazing news, hew new world was crushed. Despite our open book policy, it seems not a whole lot of miscarriages are announced on Facebook.

What will happen when we are able to look back at lives of the new people we meet and see that, well, there seems to be a kid missing from current family photos, or she used to wear a diamond ring and now she doesn’t? If its impossible to avoid pain and disappointment in our lives, do we really want our new acquaintances finding out about these events by our status updates and wall posts followed by years of silence?

Facebook, I believe, presents a unique problem in that it’s main population it that of young adults. Ours is a generation which has, seemingly, always been protected and was able to hold off being an adult just a little bit longer thanks to grad schools and the misleading belief thing things always improve over time. My friends are just entering a point where they are discovering loss and heartache. For many of them they do not know how to be cautiously optimistic.

Perhaps, by seeing disappointments of years past we make ourselves more vulnerable to prying eyes. Or maybe we are simply made aware of our vulnerabilities which are already there. We all have pain from our pasts we would like to forget, and pain coming at us which we could never imagine. Perhaps a tool such as Facebook allows us to share in our joys. But the question is: Do any of us have the strength which can only come from vulnerability in sharing each other’s sorrow?

At first our friendship was easy. A favor for him here, something for me there. It was a relationship which hardly seemed tit for tat, as the jokes seemed to cover any form of transaction we pursued. It was the perfect no-pressure friendship, which lasted for several years, seeing each other week in and week out, without any source of conflict. Until The Storms came. Now The Storms themselves were not my fault, nebulous as they may seem. In fact, The Storms had no direct impact whatsoever on the friendship itself. But The Storms directly affected me, and my own reactions rocked the friendship. I became exceedingly difficult to love and, in my mind at least, my friend became incredibly irritating.
Here we sat at a crossroads. Either choose to forgive the other of their own special form of obnoxious behavior, or go our separate ways. Here was where our friendship began in earnest.
I have often heard that love is a choice. Through hot summer weddings and cold church services told me over and over again that love is an action, not a feeling or chemistry. You choose to love somebody. I heard it so many times growing up that it managed to loose all meaning for me. It wasn’t until recently, when I saw two people wittingly choose not to love each other that I realized that it the end, love comes down to something as mundane as choices.
The difference between friends and family is that, like it or not, you are stuck with the people in your family. You can’t leave them. Travel across oceans and foreign lands but somehow, but annoyingly, DNA and blood type always manages to hunt you down. In reality, friends are people you can walk away from. They aren’t going to hunt you down and ask for a kidney at two AM on a Tuesday morning.
The more you love a friend however, the more of a conscience decision you have to make not to walk away when things become difficult and The Storms hit. Friends are family you choose not to walk away from.
In recent weeks I’ve been tempted to walk out on several friends. As we get older the friends of the past have lives which are becoming less and less like mine. Or mine is becoming less and less like theirs. Often these differences become catalysts for conflict, sometimes flat out pain. So for the first time this holiday season I found myself making a choice, and knowingly deciding to love my friends even in the moments when I felt like picking them up and hurling them across the room.
As for me friend who is willing to stay with me during the storms, despite my erratic behavior and the unfavourable conditions, he stays. And I stay. Both of us know that we have chosen to create a relationship based on choice, not on what we feel in that moment. And that choice gives each of us the freedom not to worry about our passing feelings during The Storms.

Last week I decided to go to the Evensong service at St. Paul’s Cathedral. I walked up to the only accessible entrance of the famed cathedral to find it locked. Black iron gates clapped shut for security reasons, no guard posted at the door to assist, no number to call and receive an explanation, no alternate means of getting inside what is commonly referred to as ‘God’s House.’ I use a wheelchair and because of my disability, I was locked out of a church.

Upon later enquiry, a member of church staff stated that due to the Occupy London protests, the accessible door was locked every evening.

I tried all weekend to do the mental gymnastics needed for this reasoning to make any sort of sense. I’ve failed. If Occupy London intended to storm the church, they could do so just as easily at the front door as at the side. The Church of England has enough money and power to make someone available to open a gate if such extreme precautions are ever taken. But more importantly, a church should never take an action which comes out of fear and ends in exclusivity. Such behavior reminds me of Christ to tipping over the tables in the temple.

Visibly upset, I then went through the Occupy London camp, hoping that those who wish to help the ninety nine percent would be willing to enter the church which was acting as their host and inform a member of staff of my situation. I was met instead with glares and open mouths.

What does it mean if we live in a world where a church locks a physically vulnerable population outside at night and the very people our media hails as humanitarians refuse to help a person in front of them? If each have the genuine desire to give help to those who are forgotten and walked on by the wealth of this world, then does this not include the disabled? A quick look at any of the United Nations statistics of disability reminds us that this population is far from being the blessed one percent. The disabled are an example of the people the church is commanded to keep it’s doors open to. There is no other universally human condition than that of disability. Both the church and the radical activists are failing to help these people.

The church must wake up to the fact that it cannot lock its doors and then claim to be a force of good in the world. Likewise those such as the Occupy London camp have no right to feel that they are indeed changing the world when they refuse to help a person in need in front of them. Both are self righteous. Both are exclusive, elitist, and even arrogant. Neither are pointing towards progress.

What I encountered while attempting to go to Evensong is actually a perfect example of the state of this broken society. The church has locked their doors and made themselves inaccessible to all sorts of people for centuries, and young radicals have no desire to be reminded that someday their bodies will also fail them. The rights we fight for and the inaccessible hearts we fortify now are the exact challenges we will inherit when we can no longer stand. Whether it be from age, illness, or political muffling we are all headed towards a time of frightening vulnerability where a simple locked door can have massive implications.

In my opinion the term ‘conservative Christian’ is little but an oxymoron. This statement might come as a surprise to most of my readers as, this is a new thought in my own head and one which I’ve never attempted to express on paper. So bear with me.
I have, or so I thought until very recently, been raised in a so called conservative Christian home. This is how my parents would identify themselves to pollsters who would call during the dinner hour. This is how our church labeled itself during election season. I spent hours listening to talk radio rather than music. Our best friends were church folks. We where wary of anything too worldly, anything without clear boundaries and rules, anything where there might be a grey area.
And yet, the man who would end up being the closest thing I had to a godfather was gay. My parents and I wrestled enormously with the notion that someone’s actions meant they were toxic to be around. A careless attitude to the poor never sat easily with me. And, perhaps most unsettling of all, while we all talked about values and the importance of a stable home, I could see the cracks in the facade of my own family as well as everyone else’s.
Recently and seemingly without warning, I’ve been rejumbled with some people who wish to identify themselves as that odd little alliterate group on Washington’s right. It has admittedly stirred up some very aggressive and visceral reactions from me. As one of my best friend’s put it yesterday, “any part of your life would be enough to send most of the Christians we know screaming to their nearest bible study.” Fortunately for me, she is a Christian who always tethers my faith when everything else seems to be whirling about in madness.
This isn’t an essay about politics. As you know, I decided to wash my hands of the stuff over two years ago and focus, rather, on what was directly in front of me. Let us rather discuss labels, and how a certain label creates a massive contradiction in terms. Kierkegaard once wrote “once you label me, you negate me.” In much the same way, if we stupidly label ourselves, as a sort of short hand to form clans and enemies, we run the remarkable risk of negating ourselves.
Say what you like about how we manage to screw up the beautiful ideal that Christ laid out for us, it is all, distressingly, very true. The one element which I wish people could see when they look at Christianity is grace. The idea that we are loved and treasured not because we’ve earned such approval, but because someone decided to give it to us anyway, is what makes Christianity different from all other faiths. This notion is scandalous in a world which teaches that good things are to be earned, that we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and become self made men, that religion is something one does.
Grace, the foundation of the Christian faith, is never conservative. Real grace, not appeasement or the avoidance of conflict, is costly to the one who grants it shocking to the one who receives it undeservedly. Their is no political party who takes this practice as a platform. Indeed, a proposal of operating by grace is a horrible way to run a campaign. But all of us, regardless of who we are or what we believe, are to be fully formed and loving human beings first, long before we should be identifying with any sort of squabbling sub group. To associate any of this with the ‘conservative’ or traditional way things are is absurd. Grace is unnatural for any human being because in this economy of our self centered minds, grace never adds up.
Ultimately any sort of affiliation which can be summed up in a single word is nothing but shorthand. The most mainstream conservative will be found to be radically liberal on at least one issue and the most liberal will find something that he is conservative about. So too are religious labels. Such terms are almost both intellectual and social laziness. We hope we can know the person and their beliefs by hearing a few key terms. After that, we think we have him all figured out.
But as in logic, a thing that contradicts itself cannot exist. And while ALL humans magnificently display self contradictions, when an entire group chooses to found their basis on an openly contradictory term such as ‘conservative Christians’ I can’t help but wonder, is it that these people do not practice conservatism, or is it that they don’t practice grace? The two cannot co-exist.

It was the sort of day where spring had established itself. The winter bite was out of the Manchester air and you knew warmer weather was here to stay for a while. For my birthday some friends  had taken me out of my beloved London to see a play by Miller and have a much needed change of scenery. To take advantage of the latter, I had gotten up early that Saturday and taken a walk outside the city. Or at least I was going to walk as far as my very limited sense of direction would allow me.

After taking some back roads and dodging others, I came across a small canal which twisted under a bridge and through a lock before connecting itself to a larger body of water. On either side, there was a narrow footpath which had grown moldy and slick from years of dampness and warmth. The sound of water rushing was alluring and, although every bone in my  body told me to do otherwise, I made my way down to the narrow walkway to be closer to the water.

I know this is a stupid thing to do but I’m a good driver. I’ll just go to the waters edge and sit. Actually, that pathway is a little wider than I thought. I wonder if it’s wide enough for me to get onto… Look at that, it sure is. Way to go Manchester Council for being accessible. I wonder how far I can make it down this path before I can’ t fit. I’ll stop when I have to. Obviously. 

And so the monologue in my head went, justifying the very stupid thing I was attempting to do. With about three inches of clearance between myself and the water I kept moving. It wasn’t until I was under the bridge that I realized I couldn’t turn around even if I had wanted to. The best I could do would be blindly back my three hundred kilo wheelchair up blindly, the exact way I came in and hope I could align everything perfectly. And still I kept going forward,  past the “danger of death” signs and the place where the pavement became an even tighter fit. The spring wind had grown quiet and there was a dark stillness in the air despite the sunshine.

It has often been noted that in an airplane crash an average on nine separate issues are ignored which should have been addressed in order to avoid disaster. Rarely is it one fatal action which forces tragedy. There are many red flags which appear to ask us to rethink our decision.  This is the way tragedies such as Apollo 1 occur. Ignoring the concerns are how mountain climbers get stranded and ships go down. I knew all of this, and choose to continue to go down this path.

It’d be pointless to turn back now. I’m close to the end of the tunnel and it’s a shorter distance to go forward than back. Besides, everything always seems much easier on the return trip than getting there. 

At one point under the bridge I passed two fishermen who were trying to adjust the position of their boat. They looked up from their work, surprised to see such an adventurer. One of them opened his mouth to speak to me and then, after a moment, closed it again to refocus on his work.

The sunshine at the end of the tunnel hit my face with a blinding violence. At the end I was met by a pavement large enough for me to turn around on, and a staircase as the only means of egress. I would have to turn around and slowly make my way out the with the exact same trepidation as when I came in. So that exactly is what I did.

By the time I got out from under the bridge a second time I was feeling much more confident. The sun had softened and I was headed home, still steering my way confidently forward. I looked down  at my wheels and saw a baby pidgin barely making its way in front of me, his feathers from softening in that young, rough, fledging sort of way. After a second of me chasing him, having no where else to go, too fast and too soon he leapt into the canal.

His reaction was one that neither of us expected.

The water scared him. His wings, flapping like mad, startled the adult birds across the water so that they took off in a self protective panic. His own wings were yet untested, he had no idea how to make use of what the small bird was naturally born for. Feathers becoming saturated, he fought harder  against the inevitable sinking, failing, flailing, moving consistently further away from me. There wasn’t a stick or any net I could reach him with. I couldn’t save him if I wanted to.

I couldn’t watch. I kept going down the path.

A few moments later the friend  I was walking with caught back up to me and said “He’s gone.” I didn’t need to ask her to clarify.

When I got  off the narrow pavement I passed the “beware of death” sign again. I knew that danger was there, I just always assumed it would be me putting myself at risk, not anyone else.

The voices in our heads, the quiet ones, the ones which are the easiest to ignore,  these are often the voices we are supposed to pay attention to. We expect catastrophe to come when we ignore the loud voices and flashing red lights. Arrogance too often comes when we assume we simply know just a little bit more than common sense rather than trying to shake the foundations of the earth.

“Does the part where they sing still move you every time, Dad? Even at your age?” We were in my flat, each sprawled out on one of my couches, watching Casablanca for the fourth time that day. My father was fiddling with his camera, trying to figure out something about the exposure. He had been taking a Hollywood photography class that autumn and as a result had to watch all sorts of old black and whites.

“Yes,” he said, his answer brief and definitive as if he didn’t even think about it. “You know they say when this bit was filmed, there wasn’t a dry eye on set. Most of the actors were European refugees.”

The first time my father sat me down to watch Casablanca I was six. The only thing I remember about it are the animated maps at the beginning, and the airplane flying, which, to my eyes even back then, looked like a plastic toy. But it was my father’s favorite movie and every few months we would sit down to watch it.  I knew it was a good movie. But in those early years of my life I couldn’t understand why.

In art, the pieces which force us to sick with them are considered to be the classics. They force us to grow into an understanding of them and their time, rather than being tailor  made to be a piece which fits our own surface skimming view of the world. We keep coming back to films such as Casablanca or books such as Moby Dick, because despite all our growth and advancement both in civilization and on the individual  level, classic pieces keep asking us the same questions which seem to have no finite answers. What is a hero? What is a man? What is right?

My father chose to expose his six year old to such questions in the form of old movies and thick books, the King James Bible and existential poetry, not in the hope that I would be able to answer such questions correctly. He knew that the mind of a child, while curious, is not actually wiser than anyone else’s mind. Rather my father wished me to be unafraid of asking such questions, referring to the same sources over and over, and realizing that finding an answer is about as difficult as nailing jello to a wall.

It wasn’t until I went away to college twelve years after seeing Casablanca for the first time, that the film finally started to click into place. It took another three years for me to actually like it. There are some parts such as the singing of the national anthem which always spoke to me, even when I was very much unaware of what the film was about. But there are new details which I notice as small bursts of realization with every new viewing. He has his hands on the papers now and doesn’t even know it… Oh that’s what why he’s wearing a fez… This whole thing is just an extended metaphor about neutrality in a war. 

Now that I’m a working artist myself, I look at piece which are worth revisiting with a new set of eyes.  To be able to have the audience return again and  again, each time getting something new out of the work is an ambition I seek to accomplish whenever I sit down with a new piece. A philosopher friend once told me that the same person can never read the same book twice, meaning that art changes you so that the person who opens the book is never the same man who closes it. I have learned however, that even the most well established writers and artist cannot knowingly create a piece in which layers are able  to be explored endlessly. The artistic muse is not a short order cook or city planner. The best blueprint any of us can follow, either while sitting with  pen and paper or in a Twentieth Century Fox studio is the truth. The world as we each see it, with all its questions and requests for humility, is still the most interesting subject requiring all of us to even begin to make it functional. An artist can require little else from his audience.

Casablanca hasn’t changed at all over the years. But I have. Unlike a play, the performance and cadence of the story doesn’t alter even if I sit down to watch it night after night. But the piece changes me, making it impossible not to get goose bumps at parts which I know are coming and can recite word for word. These are the actions and lines that have touched me before and, knowing the new lessons my  brian jumps at the opportunities to build on them again. These are the parts that inspire me, even while lying on the couch during a Sunday off.

Because, in the end, what Laszlo says about the fictitious reports of his death is the greatest complement an artist can receive…  “it was true every single time.”

…and the Rhythm is Easy…

Athena is taking a much deserved holiday for the month of August. She’ll be back on August 15. Happy Summer!