Tell Me Your Universe and I'll Tell You Mine

My students were at the seminar table discussing Seamus Heaney’s poem, “Digging,”  a last minute addition to the day’s work as Facebook Memories reminded me that it was the anniversary of his death.  In the poem, the speaker watches his father dig up potatoes which then leads him to a memory of his grandfather doing the same archaeological gardening.  Heaney’s attention is microscopic: he hears the rasping of a spade and the squelch of soggy peat, palms the cool hardness of new potatoes, and corks a milk bottle with paper.     

I was about to hand them back their first poems of the semester with my cryptic scrawl all over the pages, words circled, crossed out, underlined.  Assignment: list poem, a catalogue of concrete nouns that correspond to an abstraction.  Love: cellophane cicada wing.  Only they answered abstraction with generalizations.  Love: full heart. 

Before I handed the poems back, I said, “Your worst fears are confirmed: Not good.  Not because you don’t have talent or didn’t work hard or because I am the Demagogue of Doggerel.  You didn’t follow directions and allow your eyes to rest on the world, on a pinecone, a locket, a bruise.  The quality of your attention reveals your intentions.  If your eyes glide over the surface, you will miss how the ordinary is extraordinary, which is the reason for language: to name and call into being.  It’s why I tell you a truth about your poems—I am calling you into being, into seeing.  I won’t shrug you off.”

Silence as they read through my comments, deflation, but then nodding.  They were reading carefully, that is with care.  All of us want to be seen, to know that we matter inside the regard of another even when that attention rests on our mistakes or stumbles.  Regard is vision with integrity.

Regard: from the Old French meaning “to guard”: to consider another in a relational manner.  You are in my field of compassionate concern.  Gaston Bachelard, writes in Poetic Imagination and Reverie, “Tell me what your infinite is, and I’ll know the meaning of your universe: is it the infinite of the sea or the sky, is it the infinite of the earth’s depths or the pyre?”  Tell me, let me see, let me know what you see and imagine and feel.  How is your universe specifically different from mine?  I think of the Syrian refugees I passed on the street in Morocco months earlier.  A husband, wife, and a toddler sitting on the groundbare, dirty feet, faces blank with exhaustion, their hands open, hoping for money, hoping for help.  Pedestrians’ eyes glided over them, mine, as well, after I handed them the equivalent of two dollars—to stop and see would be to admit their universe of pain, loneliness, fear, and desperation, and I was late for a dinner with friends with an attentive waiter filling my water glass with each sip, delivering redolent tagines, and tending to wax dripping from the glowing candles.

I spent years in hiding.  In high school, mute with depression, I cut my arms with razors and glass, concealing the cuts and scabs with make-up and long sleeves.  My lonely desperation was discovered, not by my parents who saw me every day, who sat with me at the dinner table, who walked past my bedroom door at night, who slept through my middle-of-the-night bathroom trips where I locked the door, sat on the toilet, pushed up my pajamas, and cut into my arms.  They didn’t see or didn’t want to see, didn’t want to admit my universe of pain.  One day, during English class, I was careless: the sleeve of my white, oxford shirt bloomed red and my teacher paused.  He looked at me and said, “Stay after class.”  I sat at my desk, my heart a tattoo thrumming in my chest.  After all the other students left, he sat in the desk across from me.

“Your sleeve,” he said, his voice equally horrified and tender, “can I see your arm?”  I couldn’t breathe inside of his gaze, but pushed my sleeve back.  “Did you do this to yourself?  You don’t need to hurt yourself.  We need to take care of you.” 

My parents were called and I went to the Emergency Room where an attending doctor asked questions about my depression (How long have you felt this way?) and about the cuts on my wrists (Do you want to die?).  He failed to see, to take into account all the other scars, evidence that this wasn’t just a one-time bid for attention (as my father, afraid of my pain, called it), and sent me on my un-merry way.  “Try therapy,” he said.  “It will help to talk.”  It didn’t, but what kept me alive then was my English teacher who offered the most important help: his regard.  Every week he waited in his classroom for me, and we talked about books and ideas that mattered, and he read my journal, reminding me that I mattered, too, and he told me that one day, the universe would see that my words mattered.

I didn’t stop cutting, not then, anyway.  It took years to move through my pain without picking up a sharp.  As a result, my arms are crosshatched in dozens of white scars, some flat, some raised, no mistaking their origin.  I continued to hide the scars under stacks of bracelets and long sleeves, terrified and ashamed that students and strangers would see them, might ask questions I couldn’t or wouldn’t answer.  And at the center of that shame and terror was fear: If they see, they will know, and I will lose their regard.

I don’t hide my arms anymore.  Most people don’t look closely, anyway, or if they do notice, don’t ask, don’t stop, don’t run their forefinger down the length of my forearms (I see here and here and here and here, that might say).  My last therapist, in the waning days of my self-injuring, told me to push back my sleeves: “If I don’t see your wounds, how will I know you need tending?”  He wanted a weather update as my arms were barometers of pain.  Once, the damage fresh, he left his office and came back with a first aid kit, wiped my cuts with alcohol, then carefully covered them with Band-Aids.

The quality of attention reveals intention.  Recently, I met someone while canvassing for a local candidate.  We walked a neighborhood, chatting between houses.  He asked me about my move to Georgia, about my teaching, about my dog, and at the end, I drove him back to his car, and we decided to get dinner.  I was wearing short sleeves (can you wear anything else in Georgia August?) because I no longer think about my arms beyond the fact that they are getting kickass stronger through CrossFit.  At dinner, his gaze was direct, intentional, unswerving.

“I feel like I know a lot about you,” he said, “just from watching you.  I noticed your arms while you were driving.  Do you want to tell me a little about your story?”

Tell me about your universe, and I’ll tell you about mine.  I was inside his regard, and while there weren’t any glowing candles, that regard was a compassionate light falling on me.  I confided in him about being Bipolar, about the long climb to stability, and he confided that his own family had dealt with mental health issues, as well, and how important it was to tell my story.  Shame scatters to the dark corners in light.  Universal regard inside an ordinary hour made extraordinary.