I have often told this story, as a perhaps amusing illustration of attachment terror: I met my now long beloved husband in 1990, and after about 10 months of courting, and much at the urging of my wise old cat, Marti, we decided to move in with him, however, with all the ambivalence of a severely attachment disordered child of trauma and neglect. But we did it; emptied my Berkeley apartment of 18 years, packed all of my worldly possessions and trundled them over the Bridge to our new San Francisco home.
The house was/is plenty big, but in my semi-frozen state I was still very torn about whether I would “stay.” I was on a looping auto-replay of the old Clash song, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” So, I emptied the vehicles loaded all my unopened boxes into one upstairs room and shut the door. For five months. One winter’s day, I don’t remember much about it, I ventured in there and unpacked. Thirty-four years later, here I am…
Once again, that same upstairs room is filled with boxes, and much of the time, with the door again tightly closed. But this time, there is no ambivalence involved. Having made the slow and thoughtful decision, and planned for it for almost a year, I have closed my Oakland office and am consolidating my work life, to my home office. And this time, I am intentionally taking my time to unpack. Partly because I don’t have huge swaths of time. And partly because this is an integrative and meaningful move, and I want to be present and thoughtful about how I inhabit this new life phase, and even enjoy it! The irony is being in and out of that same room, squeezing and stepping around piles of stuff, crushing cardboard, and reviewing my past. The view out the window is largely unchanged, although perhaps the San Francisco skyline has grown taller and more jagged over these years and decades. It is lovely and refreshing to be un-ambivalent, only grateful about this change. Outside, my home office window, seeing my car parked outside unmoving, is another great relief. Ahhh…
However, I am not without chaos! Where, most weeks, I would wake up from a deep sleep with a mostly coagulated, nearly fully formed blog in my head, and simply must bang it out on the computer, this week my mind was also crowded with “boxes,” and disarray. Competing ideas, or should I combine them, find common themes or narrow the field?? George Floyd, Angela Davis, a total eclipse, a sense of self? Dizzying…
Darkness
I was excited to learn that the interview with Angela Davis that I had been wanting to hear, was being re-broadcast. I could listen to it while I was unpacking. Davis, is a long-admired, enigmatic cultural icon to me. She is now 80, and I had heard somewhere that she had re-directed onto a path of non-violence, and I was very curious to hear the story about that. I have always been intrigued by knowing that she had a brief love relationship with Mick Jagger (!) which admittedly I was quite curious about. But all in all, I am a great fan, even a glutton for memoir, autobiography and biography, endlessly curious about who people authentically are, perhaps in that elusive quest to answer that question for myself. I was excited to hear Angela’s story.
As I tuned in, I was distracted by the reading of a dramatic passage from Annie Dillard’s dramatic essay, Total Eclipse. It was the day before the by many greatly awaited 2024 total solar eclipse this past week. Although I am not unduly moved by astronomical and astrological events, except perhaps in the aesthetic sense, I was more aware and interested than at other times, because my best friend traveled all the way from Berkeley to Mazatlan, Mexico to see it, so I could not easily dismiss it. I was jarred alert by the reading I heard:
…From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lit from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams,
At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky… (Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters Harper Perrenial, 2013)
I could not help but listen. The darkness and the screams shook my memory. The vivid image of the sudden total darkness, and the screams, swept me back to a long-ago story that I had not thought about in some time but recently told in an interview. I was not much older than two years old. Plagued by repeated, deafening and agonizing ear infections (I remember feeling like there were men shooting guns in my head.) It was decided that treatment would be a tonsillectomy, an overnight stay in the hospital for a very small person!
I guess in those days, it was not understood yet that little, little kids needed a parent, or someone, to stay nearby, with them through such an ordeal. I remember waking up in the night in that hospital room, to a scene resonant with the eclipse landscape. The world had gone dark, and a natural impulse welled up to wildly scream. I remember the thick blackness in that little room, the cold emptiness it seemed to generate, the terror. Much like the eclipse scene, it seemed apocalyptic, existential, and deathly. I imagine the withdrawal of the mother/the attachment to “other” is as terrifying to the small child as the disappearance of the sun, even for brief moments. Similarly, there is something organic, primordial, in the spontaneous unison of screaming that erupted amidst the crowded eclipse-witnessing throngs.
I emerged from my reverie when the interview with Davis began. Admittedly it was somewhat disappointing.
Whom to Be
Angela Davis, not surprisingly I suppose, questions, why anyone would want to know her personal story. In fact, the interviewer jokingly remarked that she rarely utters the word, “I.” Once in the interview, she made sure to point out when she did. And although she spoke some about being in prison at age 28, it was more in the context of the larger social problem of massive incarceration of people, especially of color, and especially of men and boys. All of that is vitally true and important. However, in my quiet disappointment, I thought of the question of why I was so curious and fascinated to learn personal stories, why I have this insatiable quest to read about the lives of people I love and admire. (I pre-ordered Peter Levine’s memoir when I first heard he was writing it, almost one year ago! It arrived this week, and I can hardly wait to finish what I am reading so I can get to it! An Autobiography of Trauma, A Healing Journey. Simon and Schuster 2024).
What is that? I think for me, as for many a child of neglect, the absence of a sufficient mirror, that widely vacant sky, leaves a vast, blackened void, a cavernous empty space where an authentic self would be: darkness. First screams, then confusion, then rooting for some light, some direction, who shall I be? It seems to take years and years of dogged work to answer.
After the eclipse, I asked my friend, “was everyone screaming when the sky went black?” She said yes, they were, and that she cried a little. But it was beautiful. I am glad she is on her way home. And I know I am glad I am home!
Today’s Song: