Things We Couldn’t Have Known

Ten years gone

We were both struggling, you and I, when we met that unfortunate day.

I remember it well. You were reading Broch’s Spell, that classic piece that captured the rise of Hitler better than any history book could.

I had asked if you read Le Bon’s Crowd, and then we both went straight to Orwell’s 1984.

We both had an affinity for dark thrillers about human hysteria–the world of mobs, cults, and scapegoats, where nothing is true and all is projection and misplaced aggression.

You had no patience for dry records of dates and facts: you were after the psychology behind movements, and the causes behind symptoms.

I think you were searching for your own cause and meaning, and were simply taking a detour through the collective historical psyche, a sort of safe roundabout way into your scarred soul.

I believe we experienced ourselves as independent, relatively wise and kind.

The truth was neither of us were kind to ourselves. We didn’t even know we weren’t kind to ourselves. The world was an unkind place, we told ourselves.

Your grandfather fled China when Mao’s band was making murderous examples of petty landowners, You were born in Taiwan, but moved to London when you were three years old.

You went through the British school system, obtained a solo seal in ballet, read Orwell and Wilde, and became an international language student…in China. You were called a monkey in primary school, and in China, you were viewed as a tall, English-speaking curiosity. You had come full circle from your fleeing grandfather.

For my part I grew up in California, and was mistaken too. Being third generation Sicilian-American, I was often mistaken for a Mexican or Arab. During the gulf war, I was confronted in a parking lot and told to go back to Iraq. My favorite writers in high school were James Baldwin, JD Salinger, and Sylvia Plath. I was depressed and angry and didn’t even know it. I experienced myself as plain, benign, invisible, accommodating, even normal.

The second time we met was on college campus. It was an autumn day in Chicago and you were drinking coffee and listening to Bach as you rifled through Jung’s Synchronicity, while I carried Freud’s Civilization And Its Discontents under my arm.

This fateful afternoon would mark the beginning of a decade long debate about which psychologist was more prophetic of our own times. I was for the brooding, brilliant pessimist, Freud, whereas you had a soft spot for the more magical and mystical Jung.

We argued, but we had fun arguing. We knew there was never any point that could be proven right. We were just exercising our young egos, and, in a strange way, escaping from our more real, personal pain. Straight up ignoring it, in fact.

In these next ten years we never learned to be kind to ourselves. We struggled at school, struggled at work, and struggled against our families and the world. We also struggled against each other and hated ourselves for it. But we simply called it “life”.

Growing up, our parents both hit us. This is not a point of blame or shame, but a fact. We took the abuse for granted, and just thought it was a part of stressful parenting. Didn’t all kids get smacked around? You would even joke that it’s what made you a good ballet dancer.

Those hits and kicks and shocking screams and smacks sculpted us like hammer blows from a Bernini or Michaelangelo. As adults, we didn’t need to be hit anymore, as we hit ourselves, constantly, for every little thing. We thought it was normal to privately beat ourselves up, berate, criticize, and curse ourselves.

Not even in our college psychology classes, where we watched case episode after case episode of crazy patients and victims, did we ever suspect that there was anything wrong with us.

So we completed our degrees and got heavily into debt. Financial stresses added to our friction, and we started to argue more. I took to drinking more and more and became depressed, as I scraped by in jobs that I felt were beneath me: call center work, a bank, an insurance company, a city council, bars and hotels.

You hated your job with the same passion, as you went from one bureaucracy to another like some sad pawn in one of Kafka’s nightmares. Our passion for each other died a slow death, creeping in like a slow disease through the inevitable toxins of workplace politics, money, pressure, and that perpetual residual self-abuse we couldn’t even name.

When it was over we didn’t even know how we got from A to B, and looked at each other like two strangers on a commute train.

It was time to walk off into the great big night, ten years older, and none the wiser. I cannot speak for you, but it would take me ten more years to realize I had some real shit I needed to face.

© Carlo Zeno 2022

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