this is the truth

I don’t know how the blogs started. I don’t remember how private conversations climbed into the prolific public and threatened the pulse of intimate relationships. I claim I did it for the sake of my art. I claim it was an experiment with form and a practice session in dialogue. I claim that I wanted a departure from the abstruse poetry everyone criticized for being too difficult to understand. I claim that the narrative evolved from my interest in exploring the narcissistic culture of online journaling and YouTube. I claim that I only continued the narrative because I was fascinated with the idea of writing chronologically in reverse chronology. But to tell the truth, I know how they started. The truth is my truth. The truth is, the blogs started.

***

“Oh, that reminds me, I just discovered this band from Canada I think you’d appreciate. They blew me away the first time I heard one of their songs,” he rises from his chair to upscale his beer and the background music, “They’re called the Arcade Fire, do you know them?”
“The Arcade Fire?” I punctuate my ignorance, “No, but I like the name.”
“Yeah, isn’t it original? You can definitely pick out their influences, but they aren’t like all those other indie bands, you know?”
“You mean indie bands that are trying to be indie bands instead of just being an indie band?”
“Exactly,” he rhythmically concurs and plays the only sound that has ever changed the course of my blood, the sound I had anticipated my entire life, that would soon be my addiction, my tragic flaw, my faithful companion on midnight bike rides through the empty neighborhood streets of memory, between “the click of a light/and the start of a dream,” the sound that would fibrillate my sound into a defibrillated rhythm.

***

The process was messy. The title to the collection, “defibrillation,” was born in one of the first blogs with a pulse that I shocked to life again. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the initial lines I used to introduce my father and the fate of his heart disease would determine the fate of what would become an obsession with exploring my bi-polar disease through fictionalizing private conversations with friends and family; it would determine the fate of a pulse that finally felt like my voice but that would disrupt the rhythm with every person who desperately wanted my heart, and with those who had it:

"My father is dying. His heart--shocked alive by his defibrillator 11 times in the last month-- is dying. Shock after shock, surgery after surgery, medical science has kept my father alive since he was in his early 50's. My mother called yesterday to tell me that the doctors in Birmingham wanted him back for tests. I could tell she'd been crying by the tell-tale nasal echo and sniffles. "It doesn't look good," she says, attempting to hide her emotion. My father is dying. My mother is crying. I am ashamed to say I feel nothing."

I don’t know how the debacle started, or if it ever ended. I wasn’t well. Depression had plagued my fragile mind…again. I had been reading a lot about bi-polar disorder at the time because my mother wanted to understand me through a shared reading of one of the worst “self-help” books I’ve ever half read. That’s the half truth; she wanted to blame my anger and depression on someone, some thing other than herself. That’s my truth.

I wanted to give my brain a rest. We argued. Her plea for me to stop yelling brought back memories that were too painful, that had always been a part of my too much pain. All I ever wanted was for someone to understand the depth of my disease. Or, is it a disease? I wanted to prove a point:

"Don't you think he deserves to know the truth about his heart?" I ask, knowin g she won't recognize the double entendre in my question.
"Well, what do you think I should do? I mean, he can't talk about anything, Ashley. He doesn't know how to communicate, you know that."

I think of the story about my dad and the butcher knife that she revealed to me yesterday, when I complained to her about not hearing that story years ago, because perhaps it might explain some of my fucked up behavior, and perhaps I could have caught it early enough to do something about it.
"You still have time," she had said in tears. I've never seen my mother cry so much. "You are 28 years old. At 29, your daddy thought his behavior was perfectly acceptable."
I can feel old man anger swelling from all the familiar places, stomach, heart, teeth. I try to control it. I can't.
"Yes, I'm twenty-fucking-eight years old, and I'm not getting any better. I know my fucking behavior is unacceptable, but I can't change. I've been to therapist after therapist, tried every fucking drug on the market, and I'm still a fucking child, just like my fucking father."
"Don't yell at me," she pleads.
"Who the fuck do you think taught me to yell!!!!" I scream over the phone. I can hear her quietly sobbing, but I can't stop now. "Do you know how many nights I sat in my room trying to drown out your yelling and arguing with music, praying to God you would just shut up or get divorced? Why the fuck do you think I'm an atheist? And for years, about the only thing you didn't call dad was "dear" or "honey," so how do you expect me to suddenly switch "lying, cheating, son-of-a-bitch" to "regretful father who does love me but doesn't know how to show it?"
I am done now. I know she can't handle anymore, and I don't think I can either. That was yesterday, before she reminds me once again that he can't talk about anything because he doesn't know how.

"Don't you think he'll be relieved, if you tell him?" I decide to answer.
"What do you mean?"
"Aren't you relieved? I mean, you sound relieved."
"Are you saying I'm relieved that he won't have to go through surgery?"
"Well, yes, and that the suffering might be over soon."
"What?! I don't want your daddy to die."
"I didn't say that, all I meant was..."
"I have to go in and check on him so I need to go," she cuts me off.
"Mom, don't be immature and blow me off because you don't want to face this."
I talk for a few more minutes before I realize that she has already hung up the phone on me. I don't know what she heard so it doesn't matter what I said. It never mattered. I turn the music back to full volume. I turn back to my writing.

Or was it my writing? It was my writing, but was it something more? I’ve had to use this Socratic irony on myself several times in the past week. I’ve been traveling, listening to music, imagining myself as someone outside this miserable life, as I did when I escaped into music when I was a child. Something changed around 1987, when I was nine, when my soul died with my ability to dream.

***

Last spring I purchased the newest Arcade Fire album, Neon Bible, at a small music store in Chico, CA, a purchase inspired by someone who believes that artists should get paid for their work. Although I wrote a blog defending the album as a brilliant commentary on the current political climate, it has proven to be a significant commentary on my life as an artist. Perhaps my favorite lyric from that album is in the title song: “Not much chance for survival/if the Neon Bible is right.” I know I have no chance of surviving if I don’t learn how to be that child again, if I don’t stop believing in endings written with sorrow.

During my travels, I made an overnight stop to hear Walter Sickheart and the Army of Broken Toys play at a small café/restaurant in Salem, Massachusetts. I watched more than I heard, because they performed more than they played. Past Walter’s seductively raucous voice, beyond the green suitcase of broken toys spilling, no, exploding onto the stage into a volcanic pile for Edrie’s hothanded rummaging, even past the most remarkable ludic strides she made through the audience, sometimes ending up in someone’s lap or on a table unfurling her fishnetted leg to the drone of the child’s accordion, was a lubricious art, and an audience watching a couple performing the process of their art more than the maracas and monkeys could possibly procreate.

Walter and Edrie, the broken toys and the broken hearts, were making love to each other, and to the audience; even more, they were making the private public. I was fascinated with the audience’s reaction. Some were mesmerized by Edrie and watched every move she made with wide Sargasso eyes they could not close. Some were visibly uncomfortable and tried to watch their hummus wraps and the heads of their Belgian whites but could not hide the tale-tell signs of their voyeuristic desire. Husbands looked away from wives, tops looked away from bottoms, didn’t matter. The point I wanted to prove in my blogs, perhaps, is what I saw in that town of tale-tell scarlet letters: they were looking even when they weren’t.

***

I am eating at a small café/restaurant in Maryville, Tennessee, where I earned my BA in English at a small liberal arts school, the school that changed my life. I watch a professor greet his students when he saw them sitting at a table crowded with chairs, at the close of the semester, “Studying for finals?” he jokes, and they look up to him with that look of knowing they inspire him as much as he inspires them. Last night, I begged my best friend from school who teaches at the college now to call the security guard to let us in Anderson Hall, the first building on site, the campus light, the one that lit the fire in my belly that I’d let burn out. I wanted to relive a moment, I wanted to click on a light in a third-floor classroom and touch the chalkboard that fibrillated my heart for the first time. Where I heatedly argued with a Yeats poem and the idea that love is work. I wanted lightning to strike again, and when my friend couldn’t reach security, I realized, finally, that I didn’t need Anderson to shock me back to me…again, because someone else, in another third-floor classroom, already had.

The truth is, this is how the blogs started, during a storm that hit, when I was looking even when I pretended I wasn’t. I couldn’t stop staring with blind eyes. That’s how they started. And that’s my truth. It’s the only truth I know how to tell, and perhaps the only story I want to tell. It’s the story of my life. It is the ending I needed to finally answer that question all artists are asked at least once: How do you know when the piece is finished?

When it feels complete.

***
may my pulsing heart never fall from god’s blessing