Picking greebles[1] off the bible belt

I am a halfling
In this world and out
My dimensions are returned
On their axis and roundabout.
I walk over the lines
Into both spheres and back
Through the mists, I am watching
Seeking the whole I lack.
Never to give in to fullness
As half is all I own,
I sit forever on the gated wall
As ivy along its damp, gray stone.
The night holds me to its sign
And I belong to the sun;
When stars meet with the morning
My life is finished and begun.
All things at their borders
Speak to and about me and mine,
Voice of sword, edge of sea,
Sky's true ending in me combine.

-Elna Misegades

The beginning is instrumental and each note on the sax brings a quarter of the screen to life. The man from the screenshot mutters around his yard. He lights up a cigarette as more notes wipe away each frame. Close up: first of smoke sighing out of his lips, moving up to his eyes as they sweep across the yard. Ben sings \Bought and old tux coat at the vintage store\ only accompanied by a slow, tapping, beat poetry-esque rhythm. Another four panels appear with the man pacing and pausing, while a girl in a red sweater passes through a few panes. \Had a few holes in it from the man before\\You wore a champagne dress\ Close up #2 on the girl’s brown eyes as she watches him. \Bought it at Target ‘cause it cost less\ Four panels again but this time the man’s hands are moving too. He flings them out, they flip around and come curling back in, dancing and gesturing overhead. As the horns swell, the man wings his arms around in one frame \Rented an old house with spiral stairs\, in another he tucks them in and spins. I sit up a little straighter. \Watched you walk down them with flowers in your hair\

The next frame is unified: he pirouettes; I get it. His movements aren’t elegant, still he’s dancing. He spins himself around again then stops to think and exhale. There are four frames again, but they’re unified too. He spins across all four at once. Like looking through a compound eye the images are tiny and separate but the effect is magnified. \Four months ago I didn’t know your name\ He pirouettes again, better this time, like the idea of the movement he wants has clarified. The next are also smoother \But I guess even as strangers we rattled the cage\ as he moves from one half of the screen to the girl sitting in the other frame. He takes her hand and pulls, throwing her across panels. The music crescendos, cuts off, and the screen goes black.

 Horns come back in, lower and more resonant. The mood has changed. \There’s a few folks whisper’n\ As the four panels fill in the scene is more intimate. The man’s lying in the grass as the girl walks up. The next panel she’s already standing over him, fingers outstretched and he follows them up, attached to them at the chin by invisible threads. In a third he’s on his feet, pressed up against her. \Billboards say what they won’t\ One by one the panels are replaced by the first, broken up through compound eyes again. He arcs off the ground to her fingertips. \We didn’t ask your permission\ Close up #3, aimed right underneath his chin, captures her smile as she’s in his arms. Without touching, the man’s hands brush across her face and around her head. I’m not even really sitting anymore because I can see it, like a pass out to a receiver in the open, I know what’s coming. \And I—I won’t wear your bible belt\ I’m standing on my bed silently cheering, cause the receiver is down the field outdistancing everyone. As the song ends I sit again. Was I actually cheering?

First I should stop you before your mind wanders any further. No, they did not strip or do anything else (I don’t traditionally cheer for that kind of thing nor would it have been noteworthy to have found it). They were still dancing, in a way, though their movements had lost any refinement that the man had worked up to. Instead they just pressed themselves together and like two misshapen gears they tried to turn. The result was clunky. It put elbows into armpits and noses into ears. None of it was particularly attractive (I can’t imagine that nuzzling someone’s shoulder blades would ever be considered attractive), but it was such a modern motion[2], so real, that aesthetics didn’t matter.

I imagine that some of you are still confused, mostly because rereading what I have so far, I’m confused too. The big question still looms unanswered. Why the hell was I “cheering?” Sure what I saw was powerful as art and dance can go and it was bare bones reality kind of art which I don’t see often in dance because it’s (in my opinion) always too structured, too lofty, to mimic what the world is really like. Still though, you don’t give a standing ovation before the dance is over, you can’t abandon good manners like that. Art isn’t supposed to encourage that kind of behavior either. It’s supposed to evoke a contemplative rapture (yes, even the splattered paint on canvas, since you can only imagine the artist’s emotions when you see it). It’s like I’ve broken some unspoken rule, “Thou shalt not act like a heathen when observing a refined expression of thought and emotion!” So what broke down in my head? Something had to make this more than just art to get me to my feet. What was it?

The best explanation I can offer is that I had been acting weird all day. And in retrospect jumping up on the bed seems like just an afterthought compared to my prior weirdness, which started earlier that morning after my first class let out. The first weird bit is that I was in class on time (as a rule for morning classes, I’m always late). My timeliness was only by the virtue that I hadn’t slept the whole night before, so I wasn’t crawling back in bed after my alarm was disabled, leaving me no reason to be late. But the all-nighter had left me in a terrible state for learning and leaving class I was grateful that walking is almost an automatic process. I let myself drift along with the current of students that were headed in the general direction of my next class. As I walked I drifted under a patch of pine trees with some low hanging branches and suddenly I woke up. A low hanging branch had passed right over my head and it was close. With its approach came a wave of claustrophobia along with a mental exclamation “Jesus! Where the hell did that come from?” I’ve passed under that same branch a half dozen times since then and it really isn’t that close to my head, but in the moment it seemed ready to swipe at it. The tree passed, however the claustrophobia didn’t because it wasn’t just the tree branch that was close. There were a lot of people pressed right up against me too.

They jostled and swayed momentarily coming within millimeters of me. Some people were hoofing it as well and as they passed they’d brush even closer, some even skimming my elbows and my bag. No one seemed to notice or care how close they came. Even the people who actually bumped me would only regard it for a second. Moments before I probably wouldn’t have cared either, but now that I could literally feel the distance between my edges and everyone else around, it was amazing that my presence could faze them so little. Despite being crammed together on the sidewalk everyone around seemed to have found their own imaginary space, in which they had a vast-private-island’s worth of space and solitude. I could almost feel those too, an immense distance, filling the inches between us.

Finally I began to relax as the traffic thinned out (I was headed off campus now, having missed the turn for class long ago), though I could still see and feel the spaces around me. I started to test the spaces of the people next to me, gradually creeping up, and walking inches behind their shoulders. Not even staring at the side of their head could break through the space that they had made for themselves.

I floated away from campus and away from people, leaving me a little time to wonder before I got home, why people were so attached to their space. It couldn’t just be that they were zoning out or just need their own space. I was being downright creepy and there’s no way they could ignore that for such a simple desire. There had to be something deeper.

And then suddenly I hit on it, maybe they weren’t ignoring me just because they want to. Maybe it’s because they feel like they have to.

Having a possible explanation in my hand I suddenly felt very isolated. If people’s oblivion to my presence is in fact not due to anything I have done or due to any interest they have in keeping to themselves, will they ever notice me? Even if they take interest in me, they’ll still have to juggle opposing urges. Though I doubt that the conflict is enough to drive someone mad, it must be more than enough to generate some anxiety. Enough for them to want to stop thinking about having any interest at all.

As if nothing else would do to prove my point more, I crossed Main St. in a gap between cars. At the same time a girl started to cross in the opposite direction. Her eyes met mine and held. Before I had the chance to observe, to see if she could bear the anxiety better than I expected, perhaps prove my thesis just a little wrong, my eyes whipped away, my back straightened, and I tried not to sweat. [3]

Shortly after I’m slumped in bed investigating Ben Sollee, still brooding, still trying to find a logical way around my thesis. With this context fueling my thoughts, I click on the link to Bible Belt, the tile only showing a man smoking, staring at his yard.

                Still how… how does this connect? What’s there to see in five seconds, that can relate to the small mountain of observations and hypotheses that I’ve given you? Awkward nuzzling between two people who are in love doesn’t seem like it has a thing to do with how you act with people on the street. Their intimacy seems like the exact opposite of anonymous oblivion.

But that’s why it filled in the blank, it’s the opposite. An opposite behavior that is both the cause of the behavior I’ve observed and also what I had really been looking to see. A simultaneous explanation[4] and redemption. [5]

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[1] Imitation is the most sincere form of gratitude I can muster.

Greebles (as defined by Sally Wallace) are little pills of lint, especially those which feet bring into bed. 

[2] The Attractive Force

When I say modern, I’m not trying to suggest that this is just something that was taboo in years past (though it most certainly was and, as the song suggests, still is in a large portion of the country). Rather I’d like to suggest that it is the kind of movement that would make philosophers and astronomers of old cringe because it’s so irregular. Perfect things like love and the courses of the planets, in their minds, shouldn’t be irregular (they certainly spent a lot of time trying to fit orbits to circles and spheres and various other “regular” geometries). I’m certain that had they been given the chance to choreograph this video, the dancers would have spent their time spinning and revolving, locked in perfect form. In other words: acting utterly fake.

The planets don’t move in perfect circles, nor do moons or asteroids, often they don’t even follow the same path twice. Nor do people follow prescribed orbits around each other. Still both are driven to move towards each other, but with the freedom to spin and fly off-course as they choose (thankfully there’s a mathematical description for one of these). “Modern” just allows for bumpiness.

[3] Interpolation: On closer inspection maybe I feel like I have to ignore people too.

 Thesis: I’d like to suggest that I’ve been raised in a culture where physical contact is mostly forbidden,* because there seems to be little else to explain why I feel all sorts of antipathy about brushing up against other people despite having to fighting a constant battle with loneliness that could easily be solved by interacting a little more with the people around me. Judging from all of the ads for depression meds that flooded TV a few years ago, a significant portion of the cable-watching world is also lonely yet from my own observations no one goes out of their way to interact more; they in fact act similar to myself (the only significant breaking down of barriers and rules against contact, physical or otherwise, that I see is when people get properly drunk (how do think people get four hundred Facebook friends?) or in the context of romantic relationships†). If there’s a whole group of lonely, self-restricting people walking around, what does this say about the culture that they/I live in? It’s at least inconsistent or paradoxical on our part (unless we have some subconscious masochistic desire to withhold our own cure). Perhaps it’s even wrong to inflict so much angst on ourselves over a one-second-too-long glance.

*Detailed justification for using a strong word some folks might object to.

If you’re confused, I’m not saying personal contact is strictly forbidden by law, enforced by authoritarian rule, like it is in some Islamic states right now. Rather this is a self-enforced restriction. You’ll have to recall for a second: when you grab a seat on the bus or in a waiting room how everyone spaces themselves out and the seating suddenly seems to hit a critical density when every other spot fills. Walking into such a space, I become painfully aware now that I will have to squeeze in-between two people (cue sweat glands to start pumping) and I pause to look for a two-seat gap that I can straddle. There are none. Standing might be more preferable at this point. Is that two people leaning away from each other? I just need some place where my butt will be less obtrusive.

I’m a gawker, a habitual voyeur and I can see this restriction when I’m walking too. I look at everyone and everything when I go somewhere (it’s the reason I walk rather than drive because when I gawk and drive I have a natural attraction to guard rails). ‘Looking at everyone’ might sound like it comes off as being creepy, and it is, but I get away with it because, for the most part, no one else is gawking enough to notice me. As far as I can tell, everyone on the street seems to be looking at their feet or their phone, at the person they’re walking with, into shop windows, anywhere but the people approaching. ‘Looking at their feet’ is probably an exaggeration, the only time I do that is when I’m dodging cracks. They’re probably looking at other pedestrian’s feet since that seems to be the best way of avoiding collisions (in the same way that looking at each other’s elbows ensures a successful hi-five). Where exactly they’re looking aside, I know that I avoid oncoming gazes too. Quite a lot. Once I’m not gawking, eye contact suddenly becomes nerve wracking. I walk and walk until at the upper limits of my vision I see feet. I glance up long enough to see their face, if they’ll notice me as I pass. I wait, eye’s raised until their eyes unfix from wherever as they register my approach. Mine snap back before eyes meet. Contact can only last for a fraction of a second. If you don’t time it right it will last too long or you’ll have to yank away and don your blinders before you get past‡. I’ve refined the protocol for encounters: two steps [away], glace, one step, nod and mumbled greeting, pass (note: this occurs at roughly 90 steps per minute, adjust accordingly). The point is that I’m avoiding just looking at someone else, that more than a momentary glance makes my stomach withdraw into my esophagus. And I have rules to prevent such discomfort. I, at least, am forbidding myself contact, to the point of intangible contact. I’d be willing to bet (even though it’s probably some kind of fallacy to assume that my thoughts or feelings with align with anyone else’s) that some of you are denying yourself too, hence my claim that it’s cultural, not personal.

† Don’t forget that many of the cable-watching, observable folks around are looking for relationships when they’re not in one, which adds a whole other layer of complexity to aforementioned loneliness.

‡The best way I can describe the idea I have of myself when the blinders are up is with a little mental cartoon of a Victorian gent, monocled and cane in hand, strolling with his wife. Up the road they see a pauper, eyes shining hopefully, but holding his ground so he still seems modest, not desperate. Five seconds before the couple reaches his post they give him an icy glare, their heads pivot on gimbals turning their eagle-beak noses straight up and they cross to the other sidewalk without a word.

[4] Petals on a wet black bough moment*:

I’m outside the threshold. The door’s wide open but I’m leaving not arriving so I stay stuck at the metal strip. I wanted to say goodbye but my words are feeble, faltering when something else takes over.  I don’t know how far away she is, my focus is too narrow. Her face is both inches from mine and incredibly distant, like the moon’s through a telescope.

 A hand reaches down deep into my skull and tugs at something, moves something around so that a second later I descend the stairs not remembering if I said anything audible at all.

*And how it’s not in any way irrelevant or tangential:

                Up till now I’ve completely glossed over why one-second-too-long eye contact makes me extremely uncomfortable. The reason is that eye contact means something.  Yet it’s all in my head; therefore it’s a highly personal meaning which would literally take volumes to define. Everyone has (I assume) their own definition as well, with none of those definitions including “unimportant, meaningless, or completely irrelevant.” Those distinctions set it apart from the rest of our communication, mostly consisting of words, which have universal meanings that you can go look up (and tone of voice, which serves to clarify which definition you mean).  Also, words for the most part don’t affect us on any significant level, they mostly contain trivial things and they’re just too common to reach down to that animal part of us that real contact gets to.

                Eye contact can’t just be left as personal though. It’s too profound and so shaking that I’ve spent weeks pondering what it meant to the other person. I keep going over the question: if it means ‘this’ to me, what does it mean to her? What does she think it means to me? Is she wondering what I’m thinking at all? Did she even think it was important? It goes on and on… and there are only two ways of resolving the problem. The first is just to talk it out, and I’m still doing this, years later (I’m telling you, volumes). The other option is to have everyone agree that eye contact (really any kind of contact) has only one meaning leaving no ambiguity. Armed with that meaning, a touch or a glance, exploding over every inch of our mind reaching down even into our backbones, doesn’t waste its power confusing you for weeks on end. That meaning focuses down the impulse, leaving one question to mull over, to act or not.

                Though I already chose to work with the first option, that doesn’t mean I work solely with it. I can’t possibly explain my every impulse for staring, nor is there enough time to talk to every person who might catch a glance, so I’ve learned to use the collective definition well. Being fluent in significant looks I’ve finally put into words what such a prolonged glance communicates. It simply says: I’m interested in you. Deep-down-in-my-backbone-and-other-parts-of-my-body interested.

[5] Something else that’s deeply relevant despite initial appearances:

                If you’ve never been to a spiritual healing (something I highly recommend doing no matter what your faith) the service consists of about three things. There’s a small bit of guided prayer and meditation. It’s getting you in the zone and sometimes almost feels like a very serene, freeform yoga class. Once everyone is set up to be serious and caring, people start telling their stories. The stories cascade into rivers of hurt and guilt and sometimes bits and pieces of humor that find their way through things that weren’t ever funny.

I’ll tell you right now, that being at the center of that is just as terrifying as it sounds. I finished my stories hugging my knees while gently rocking even though I had only scratched the surface of what really needed exposure/healing. After each person heaves the weights off their chest, everyone gathers around and lays their hands on the “broken” person, praying in silence. I don’t break easily, only when frightened really, so throughout the service and my confession I stayed composed, almost stoic. As the hands piled on though my containment broke down and however brief it was, it was equally intense. Being hit in the face with a grocery bag full of broken glass might be the closest sensation—it’d certainly provoke that same kind of crying.

I don’t think the Holy Spirit descended on me in that moment (otherwise this episode would end up being wholly irrelevant) and I certainly didn’t walk out of the service a better person. Probably my moral status has degraded somewhat in the intervening years. However I did walk out feeling remarkably connected to people whom I had never met before and haven’t seen since. I think both this feeling and my violent outpouring of emotions were caused by a sudden redefinition of what contact meant for me when the hands pressed down. All of the powerful, deep rooted emotions that come from a touch were aroused by a completely different gesture, one with no relation to the agreed upon definition. Still it was meaningful and comfortable, so much so that the standard definition* had to be expanded upon.

*The real Thesis:

                Despite all the personal definitions one might have for any kind of contact, living with only one rigid definition for too long, I think, causes you to forget that any other definitions may exist. Given that eye contact and touch are collectively defined, also given that they can be redefined, maybe what I’d like to suggest is a revised collective definition for these. Because I think there’s something deeply wrong† with the way they’re defined now. Or maybe I just want to add another definition since the old may be impossible to erase. It might simply be a poet’s impulse on my part, but I’ve always thought that words and phrases grow more useful as they accrue more meanings. Why shouldn’t that be the case for these too?

†What exactly I find so objectionable in the current “definition.”

                Avoiding eye contact may just be the best way of showing others that, despite our proximity, we don’t have that deep interest in each other. However there more ways than one to be interested in someone and more importantly there are more ways than one to look at a person. Shutting off any connection just to clarify that you’re not looking at a person in a specific way seems to result in a lot of missed opportunities for other connections. What’s really wrong is having a simple binary form of communication where you can either be “interested” or couldn’t care less. It doesn’t hold true to the number of different meanings a glance can hold, and living with the assumption that interested or not is the only choice we have, limits the complexity life can have, that life ought to have.