Believing the Bird from "This Fragile Fortress"

“When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird."

-James Audubon

Children are interested in the unfamiliar—it’s what allows them to return excitedly from a hike bearing the bleached skull of a lizard or a mangy raven feather. I once worked at a summer camp where we encouraged kids to treat mystery with reverence. Upon discovery of a spider hole or a wayward raccoon, it is a faithful act to believe that which you don’t understand is only a lesson waiting to be learned.

I find myself on the receiving end of this curiosity frequently. Whether I’m teaching in pristine classrooms, sweltering school portables, or the belly of a museum; whether it‘s a shy whisper, a genuine inquiry, or a vague accusation, the question is inevitable: “Are you a boy or a girl?”

I crouch down so the child and I can face each other. I smile and ask, “What do you think?” They see my collared shirt, my boots, my baseball hat, the sprawling tattoo on my forearm. They propose a clarifying question. My favorite came from Andres, a ten-year-old I taught poetry to in Fruitvale: “Do you skateboard?” I tell him I used to. “Boy,” he says confidently.

They always say “boy.”

“I’m a girl that’s more like a boy,” I tell them on some days, to make it easy. Nods all around. Of course.

I know that parents release kids into a world where they are charged with recognizing incomprehensible dangers. It is true that children can lack literacy around what might hurt them, so it seems that, often, a bit of shorthand develops. The older the child, the more pronounced the sentiment: unknown = dangerous.

Though there are protective qualities in this idea, the result is that an ignorance has been transmuted—often unwittingly—through yet another generation. To be afraid of what one doesn’t understand may simplify things, but it also makes the world a claustrophobic, violent place.

Like most children, I grew up with positive ideas about hybrid creatures. Centaurs were majestic, mermaids were beautiful, unicorns were innocent, a dragon played a starring role in my favorite folk song. During a class at the natural history museum in Pittsburgh, we were to draw objects from the Egyptian exhibit. I picked the friendly-looking Anubis. What could be more magical than the strangely familiar?

It seemed appropriate, years later and a week after surgery, to think of unicorns when I saw my new chest for the first time. Smooth and scarred, hairless and flat, nipples and pecs—I was a myth of my own making.

However, my exposed and tender flesh unnerved me a little, as I remembered the heartbreaking tapestry I once saw at the Cloisters in New York. Intricate and relentless, the rendering from the Middle Ages was of a brutal unicorn hunt. The unicorn, muscled and docile, stepped out of a creek and onto a bank, only to find himself surrounded by waiting spears.

Unlike a unicorn, my scars are not benevolent and clear. They are, instead, reminders of the blades that made them, of loss and ritual and a new kind of myth. That first day, they glowed bright red and bold on the white of my skin. I, too, am a hybrid, a volcano erupting naked, human parts from my core.

I am a product of massive integration. Every moment I absorb and add to the stacks of moments before it—I categorize when possible, I learn to tolerate what cannot be categorized. I study science with a poet’s heart.

My body grows older and my skin and bones are all new and my breasts are gone, which mostly means that my hand can cover my heart without interruption. I regenerate. My anatomy is mine alone. I am four, the day my father discovered me reading a book on the human body. I am fourteen and it is my first kiss with my first girlfriend in the pouring rain under a makeshift canopy of trashbags in the park behind her house. I am twenty-four and eighty-miles-an-hour to San Francisco in a beat-up Nissan. Time moved along and space collapsed into it.

The space between breaths is a tiny, suspended glimpse at death. The focus on the next breath, the next step, the other side, can cocoon so tightly around us we forget that there’s even a mystery that we’re being protected from: for each of us, at some point, the crest will not come. When we forget the space between, we forget the wonder of that.

Despite my affectionate childhood understanding of hybrids, both centaurs and mermaids are vilified, portrayed in their unclassifiable bodies as violent and primal or wild and lonely creatures. They are warnings, used traditionally to promote the importance of man’s separation from the baseless, animal world surrounding him. The truth is that these mythical creatures were also uniquely qualified to see, with clarity and understanding, the spectrum of life around them.

Unicorn hunters believe that force makes you powerful. Real power, however, is as invisible as love, mutable and omnipresent as rushing clouds. I am the unicorn, torn open at the chest, healed and scarred, at once; but I am also more than that. Listen: I am the mermaid calling sailors home, not to a watery grave but, instead, toward a clear and complete reflection of themselves.

Haywire from "This Fragile Fortress"

“Things fall apart/the centre cannot hold.”

-W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

North American loggers in the nineteenth century were branded a “haywire outfit” if they regularly used the wire involved in binding up hay to make hasty repairs. Their methods were makeshift, unstable. 

It is defiant to make permanent what is clearly temporary, but is that not our nature? We often hold stubbornly to old solutions despite mounting evidence of ineffectiveness. 

We 

b 

e

n 

  d 

the bough until it br

eaks 

and then we must make a choice: clumsily tie it back onto the tree, or relocate ourselves. To choose to adapt means to recognize the strangeness of the space we’ve landed in. What is scarier than the structure collapsing? What is more frightening than freefall? Who are we without our bearings, unsteady as they might have been?

Objective reality is impossible, yet we live in the shadow of its illusion. We build cultures and bridges on the basis of its laws. We may conceptualize our world into being through memory and myth, but that doesn’t make it any less real. 

The solidness in question is less about the tossing of the trees and more about the uneasy sound we hear when this fragile fortress finds itself a whistle played by the wind rushing through its mighty, splintered doors. 

Bend/break. 

When imbalance occurs that which protects us can morph into disease. Fever is a symptom, almost always, of infection. Symptoms are generally signs of healing. The body ramps up the temperature in an effort to kill off sensitive pathogens and aid in white blood cell reproduction. 

While the body usually regulates temperature effectively, sometimes it calculates wrong. Sometimes the infection spreads and the hormones produce fever in the brain and the hypothalamus keeps coordinating a rise in internal heat; like a stuck, spinning wheel. Sometimes the solution becomes the problem.  

Shame, as a coping strategy for traumatic childhood abuse, epitomizes the psychological version of this paradox. The haywire ceases to be a quick fix and becomes a habit. What was originally an adaptive solution to an overwhelming situation often grows cancerous for the survivor that employs it. 

Children don’t utilize shame consciously, but they don’t choose to be abused, either. They do choose, almost always, to grow in the most intact way they can imagine. The chaotic implications of an adult—especially a caretaker—seemingly bent towards annihilating the child’s sense of self is too much to bear. Internalizing the aggressor’s perspective—which is basically the aggressor’s whole objective in directing abuse toward the child in the first place—is the child’s only protection in a world without rules or safety. Children will absorb the toxicity of their environment in order to ensure their survival. They will sprout out of cracks and brutality and generations of entropy. Survival isn’t the question; the question is can a plant grown in bitter soil not be poisoned? 

At one point does an adaptive strategy become maladaptive?  Perhaps when the wind breaks the bough or blows down the door and we rely on the haywire rather than allow the faulty solution to come to its natural end. When the poison becomes the orientation, the symptoms carry the disease. The body’s temperature skyrockets. The shame grooves the neural connections in the brain until they are smooth with wear. The adaptation controls the organism. 

Psychological coping mechanisms, unlike the clean and highly refined process of biological homeostasis, are regularly messy. All learning happens through successive approximations, which suggests that our minds work more like blunt instruments than laser beams. 

The importance of the conscious flexibility required to manage our emotional lives—though no more important than in the ever shifting terrain of the body’s needs—clashes directly with the core fear of change, uncertainty, and impermanence inside us. 

It is consciousness that is afraid; consciousness that contains the construction of memory and myth that cry out for haywire solutions in the face of what is broken. It is conscious perception that builds castles in the sand, right next to the shoreline, again and again. Consciousness is what allows us to see ourselves as separate and, thus, alone. 

Consciousness, however, is also the basis of choice and—in yet another of life’s spectacular twists—it may be choice alone that can override maladaptive drives. As in the case of any mythological monster slaying, the hero must first decide to embark on the mission and this requires an intimate relationship with both fear and the mechanics of perception. 

Plants grown in bitter soil can thrive. In fact, Sunflowers are often planted in order to purify toxic soil so that other vegetation can live. With shame, what is leeched can eventually be expelled, but only through an intimate assessment of its purpose. The fortress materials must be inventoried. It is here, on this dark landscape, that something new may be built; perhaps something discrete and powerful as a tree tilting steadily into the wind. 

Needle in the Camel's Eye

Few things are more satisfying to me than closure, especially the variety that involves some sort of ritual or commemoration. I'm clearly not the only person that feels this way, as evidenced by memorial services, graduations, goodbye parties, and so on. Though these ceremonious events are often intended as benchmarks, the weight of expectations piled upon them often crushes their effectiveness. The other sort of closure, the "I've forgiven my ex/parent/estranged best friend" type, often happens gradually and without the participation of the other person. Though this is a beautiful thing and illuminating as to the ways we heal ourselves, I've often felt that it doesn't create quite create the closed-loop current of connectivity that being witnessed in our endings does.

As a teacher, the last day of class provides the opportunity for that closed loop, but the risk of failure in organic closure is high, especially with notoriously guarded teenagers. It was thrilling today, therefore, to end my year as a beginning creative writing writer-in-residence in such meaningful way. 

The school district and I hired my partner, the artist Michael Braithwaite, to spend a week handmaking book covers for my students' individual twenty page projects. The covers looked beautiful and the projects, created by mostly ninth graders, included: a graphic novel about an abusive father, a short story about a man who loses his job during the Cold War and behaves as if the world is about to end only to find that it does not, urban fiction about a woman and her boyfriend on the run in Miami, a short story about two girls trapped overnight in a creepy department store, several poem collections, and a heartbreaking nonfiction story chronicling the life of the uncle of one of my students. Something you should know about these projects: other teachers said it couldn't be done, that my students were not capable of this kind of output. Many of them did not have computers, printers, or the internet; several did not know how to type. To receive beautifully bound copies of their work today was a tangible sign of their achievement, and it showed. They passed the books around excitedly, volunteered to read their work aloud with double the usual level of enthusiasm, and made thoughtful and kind comments about each others work. 

When I handed my students their books, I called their names and had them receive them like diplomas. For some of these kids, this is the closest to a diploma they'll get. Some will receive full ride scholarships to fancy schools but some will drop out next year, others will repeat the ninth grade, and others still will transfer to better funded schools. Two of my students have spent at least part of this year homeless, one has watched her mother dying, one has tried to kill herself, and others have been bounced between parents who seem to take only a passing interest in them. One of my favorite students, a delicate bird of a girl who I composed a reading list for, did not show today and I doubt I'll ever see her again. After class, I gave the kids my email and told them to contact me with their achievements or their questions. Five or six kids came up  to me as I packed up and hugged me, suddenly articulate in their emotions. One, very formally and fittingly, shook my hand. 

Leaving campus, I knew I would not return next year. I will probably not hear from most of these kids, who will go on to lead lives as tragic and full of possibility as my own. They are a scrappy bunch, and my identification with several of them--those bearing the most potent brew of defiance, passion, and honesty--reminded me regularly and painfully that we are not ever that far from the person we used to be. 

I like closure because it means that, just before the new beginning begins, there is a sweet moment of transcendent assessment, a little window into the world you're leaving. I think music exists for these moments, and I have a full repertoire of songs stemming from times when loss and movement twin  (relatedly, "I Shall Be Released," by Bob Dylan, is the song I hope will somehow play for me as I die). 

As I walked down toward the MUNI, the fog clearing and the air rich with the quintessentially San Franciscan scent of Eucalyptus trees, "Needle in the Camel's Eye" by Brian Eno burst through my headphones. I was suddenly transported to my senior year in high school, driving around Pittsburgh with my best friend in his crappy car, aimless and also full of a giddy, chest-bursting sense of the life I was about to leave for the alien world beyond it. We were all teenagers once, all so desperate and wise and wrong, simultaneously. It was a moment of poetic symbiosis at the Forest Hill MUNI stop, and I couldn't have asked for a loop more closed, an ending more electric, than that. 

The Body Haunted from "This Fragile Fortress"

This is an essay excerpted from my book, "This Fragile Fortress." All written material is copywrighted to Page McBee and may not be reprinted without my permission. 

The near constant recycling of cells in the body ensures that we are never who we were a few years before.  The skeleton, skin, liver, and stomach are all replaced in their entirety every ten years. The same fingertips that touched the sparkling texture of two weeks ago are gone, the moment has passed and so has everything that’s felt it. We begin again and again. 

Except we don’t. 

Because many of the cells that do not get replaced are in our cerebral cortex, integral to memory and consciousness. Paradoxically, we are both newly created beings and imprinted carriers of ghost moments. We are haunted. 

Haunting, in its usage, implies a lack of resolution as well as a need to return. The prefix re means “back” or “again.” To visit old haunts is to reappear within them. To be haunted by the past is to continually engage with it; to question. To not allow it to “rest.” When we refer to someone as “haunted,“ we imply regret, and what are ghosts but regret manifested? 

Ghosts, like the neurons that compose our memories, carry in their wispy glow our refusal to forget. Ghosts are trapped in a conscious world, unable to transcend. They are energy without use, disconnected from life and without death. They exist until something is made “right.” Ghosts remind us of our failings, hold us accountable, haunt us, set us free.

Matter is reabsorbed. Like air, my ghosts are of me 

and then in me and then 

of me again.

We are imprinted with our slippery sense of past. Through the cellular structure that composes us we are constantly reintroduced to what’s existed before. The eyes and the brain are full of cells that have witnessed our history and so the gut and skin and bones cells are ingratiated into their perspective. Ghosts in the bloodstream, ghosts in the muscles, ghosts in the nervous system’s echo whispering warnings down the spine. 

And what of time? 

Moments that matter can stretch across the horizon or crush abruptly into wisps of themselves. A car accident can last forever, each moment smeared slowly open; or it can look like whiplash, a violent overwhelm of imperceptible shapes blended together in a swollen flash. 

The cerebral cortex and its witnessing neurons allow us to orient ourselves in relationship to our perceptions. The cerebral cortex constructs sense. Since the interpretations we construct are our own, discrepancies can haunt us. Ghosts can look a lot like leaks in the floorboards: they occupy the tension between what we wish to be true, and what exists anyway. 

Memory is time travel. Autobiographical (or episodic) memories are thought to eventually translate into “facts” in our minds. We need truth like we need structure. The bones that hold us together only know a slice of what our brains know. Cognitive dissonance blooms ghosts. 

To be haunted is to return, remember, regret: a stolen cigarette out of an attic window the summer before college, the glass bottle with a half inch of yellowed ash water balanced on the sill. A quiet night but for the nagging fear that nothing ever really changes, that this moment would define me no matter where I went next: the creaky ballet of my family living below and me, in the dark, with my head stretched out the window. 

The cerebral cortex constructs sense. The ghosts will leave when the wrong is righted. That night, I flicked the cigarette onto the roof below. I watched the smoke curl, curl, curl until the cherry burned away. Truth is what you know. 

It was all on my fingertips, caught in the grooves of my skin.