Just Noticing

I don't talk much here about my day job, but I make my living in the oddest way. I teach graduate students to read medieval languages, especially medieval Latin.

The habits of mind you need to master a dead language are complex and painfully slow to acquire. My students are generally extremely bright and accomplished. Most of them are perfectionists who don't take well to not getting it right on the first go. There's always a danger that their frustration at what they haven't yet learned will demoralize them. Think about what it's like for an adult with fully formed, sophisticated musical tastes, just starting piano lessons for the first time. You want to play Bach fugues, but you're stuck with fingering exercises that you still haven't mastered.

Yesterday afternoon, I experienced one of those flashes that teachers pray to have more often: an insight into what specifically was going on for one of my students who just wasn't getting it as we worked through some material. It was clear to me in the moment that she was overshooting the simplest and most obvious solutions because she was looking for more complex options, then getting tangled in trying to make sense of what didn't need to be so difficult in the first place. Faced with translation of a common word, she'd combed the dictionary for its less obvious meanings, then mistranslated the rest of the sentence in order to make it conform to her choice.

After the class was over, I decided to share with her what I'd noticed, but I hesitated, because I wasn't sure the observation would necessarily do her much good. It's one thing to be aware of a habit of mind, and quite another to translate that knowledge into a new way of proceeding: if that weren't so, most of the therapists on the planet, and at least half the teachers, would be out of a job. As soon as I remarked on what I'd noticed, she not only confirmed that she'd been aware of it herself, but that the experience of overshooting the mark--of looking for an answer more complicated than it needs to be--was an issue as well in other aspects of her studies. I heard the note of frustration in the admission, and I feared that in pointing out to her what I'd seen, maybe I'd simply given her grounds for an extra layer of self-castigation.

And then, weirdly, in the middle of a narrowly academic conversation, I found myself talking about mindfulness practice: encouraging my student just to notice when she finds herself  devising a more complicated answer than the problem requires; not to take it as a a reason to blame herself for getting it wrong again, but instead to see it as a "win" when she becomes aware of it, because with that recognition comes also  the possibility of choosing to do otherwise. As we continued the conversation, I grew painfully aware of how easy it is, in my own life, to treat self-awareness not as grounds for compassion towards myself, but as fuel for yet another cycle of self-recrimination--for what Pema Chödrön calls the "subtle aggression" we indulge in against ourselves, in our often relentless drive for improvement.

I thought as well of how little such self-recrimination actually helps us to improve, most of the time: energy we could put into gently guiding ourselves toward something different in the future goes instead into the dubious pleasure of rehearsing what we've gotten wrong, how we've screwed up. Instead of moving on, we just dig ourselves, as Julian of Norwich would put it, deeper into the ditch. (In a few weeks, a good slice of the piety of Lent will offer its yearly opportunity to wallow in a penitence that doesn't actually change much of anything--except to raise the world's general misery quotient.)

The more I thought about it afterwards, the more the exchange with my student seemed like a small, vivid example of a choice we're continuously confronted with: whether to stand outside ourselves as taskmasters fixated on our every flaw, or to make friends with ourselves, and with our mistakes, and to look forward, not back; to balance the wisdom of self-awareness with the compassion of self-acceptance.

Why I Love Shortbus

I can count off on one hand the movies that I don’t just love but credit with changing the way I look at my life:

Word Is Out, the 1977 documentary that assured me there were any number of ways to be gay in the world, most of them interesting, many of them desirable;

Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, which helped me find the courage to walk away from spiritual abuse at the hands of a dogmatic, life-denying religious hierarchy;

Babette’s Feast, which goes on reminding me that the only way to find the deepest joy is to give joy lavishly away;

And Shortbus : John Cameron Mitchell’s sexy, sad, funny, compassionate vision of a queer utopia, set in and around a Brooklyn salon/sex club hosted by the outrageous and divine Mx. Justin Vivian Bond (then still pre-Mx. and pre-Vivian).

When the movie came out in 2006, I was raw from a long, obsessive breakup with plenty of confusion, grief, anger, and blame to go around. Mitchell’s film showed me people trying hard, fucking up, struggling against shame, longing to connect, fleeing from connection, hurting those they loved, forgiving themselves and each other. I found myself in more or less every scene.

I had a chance this weekend to take part in a conversation about the movie with twenty other gay men--some of us newcomers to the film, some fanatic fans for the six years since it came out. At the end of the evening, one man who came observed that if the leader had screened the end of the film as one of the clips to prompt discussion, he would likely have cried through it, as he had before. I expect I would have too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ6y1eBDUYc

In candlelight during a blackout, Mx. Bond sings "In the End," more or less summing up the vision of the film. Songwriter Scott Matthew's lyrics are anything but upbeat: "We all bear the scars," they begin. "We all feign a life." But it's the tenderness and affection that Bond brings to the song, and that Mitchell and his cinematographer bring to the shooting and editing of the scene, that convey what matters here: that the participants in this "salon for the gifted and challenged" have touched what a Buddhist teacher like Pema Chödrön would call "the genuine sadness at the heart of things": bodhichitta.

This is the realization that our lives are infinitely precious because they are infinitely vulnerable. The end of the song erupts, with the incursion of a marching band--I'm not making this up--into a riot of musical and erotic carousal. In the end, the characters celebrate their humanity not despite but in and through their flaws. They find community, but only because they accept the aloneness that we can't overcome.

Some less than appreciative responses to the film, including Bruce Diones' snyde notice for The New Yorker, objected to the utopianism of the final scene. But the inbreaking of what isn't expected and can't be foreseen, until we let go of our attachment to the illusion of perfection, is the whole point. "I never saw that one coming," Bond observes through a bullhorn in the last line of the film. "You never know what's gonna happen in this neighborhood."