The Deep Dark Place

This blogosphere is a strange animal. I think the point of my first entry was to dance around my uncertainties regarding its purpose, its value, its focus – for me.

Just as I didn’t really “need” the internet when I first got a computer, and e-mail was a bizarre novelty that I didn’t fully appreciate or understand for awhile, this blog is a kind of mystery. My friend Ken O says it ought to be the most natural thing in the world for me, because I keep a journal and try to write a little every morning. And I’ve been doing so for many years. However, writing a journal and posting a journal are two different things. There are things I have consigned to my the journal that I would be disinclined to share with my family and friends, much less the general public. There is a reverse-voyeuristic quality to revealing anything deeply personal to nobody in particular. Exhibitionist, I guess that would be called.

Seems like most blogs serve some purpose – are “productive” in some way. They convey information, or entertain. I like to peruse “Things White People Like.” The satire is very subtle. I also like “The Deacon’s Bench” because Deacon Kendra explores topics that resonate with me and he is a extremely capable and gifted commentator. And because he more or less got me into this blogging business, by example.

But this blog is no Deacon’s Bench; I am still failing to embrace “Aqualung My Friend” as the title, but at the same time...nothing else comes to mind. My subtitle was “Don’t you start away uneasy,” but “Spitting out pieces of his broken luck” is a lot more compelling, if melodramatic. After all, my morning pages (or mourning pages) are frequently the repository for those shadowy, distressed thoughts – what Ken dubbed My Deep Dark Place. Perhaps that is a better title.

But in this age of violence in the streets, in schools, in shopping malls, in churches, in Iraq – I am loathe to title my blog something so foreboding. However, I do think that using the picture of Benedictine Hall being torn down would be compelling. It speaks to a certain violence that is not personal or criminal or random. To me, it was a violence perpetrated on the past, a violence against the soul of the school – and by extension, my own soul.

It may be unintentionally revelatory why the demolition of Benedictine should effect me so much, since I was there such a relatively short period of time, and I never graduated. A ha. There’s no going back. Literally.

The DEEP DARK PLACE

Perhaps, unintentionally – or intuitively – “Aqualung My Friend” hits too close to home. This image of “Aqualung” that I once so closely identified with for theatrical purposes, as described in the initial entry – this is a character whose life is in shambles, who is detestable, perverted, disgusting, half dead, to be avoided at all cost. That’s not the way I see myself, of course, nor have I ever had the DDPs to such an extent. But: is there a part of me I do disown, disavow, a shadowy part that I would like to pretend doesn’t exist? Jungians would say therein lies my unrealized, creative potential – but it’s experienced as dangerous, chaotic, part of the underworld. The stuff of nightmares. Not evil, but rather brokenness, the part that needs redeeming, fixing, TLC, the part that has been ignored, dishonored, relegated to a low status.

The part that needs befriending.

The paradox is that I can ascribe an allegorical image of this “lost part” of my self in the person of Aqualung – but I don’t really know who he is or what he wants from me. A younger version of him was The Punk, who showed up on the stairwell during the Assigioli guided visualization exercise in 1979. I thought that The Punk was a nefarious character, menacing, dangerous, inexplicable, showing up in my nice orderly house filled with mostly Servant versions of my Self (the good boy, always). Only later did I recognize that The Punk was warning me. The Punk could see that something wasn’t quite right within the house. Or rather, within the guide.

That was 29 years ago, but The Punk has still not had his say. He entered the realm of Queen Maeve and tried to quash reality with addiction, and when that was faced, he seemed to vanish. Then he came back in dreams, in the guise of policemen, security guards, authority figures coming after me. Giannini instructed me to stop running and confront – ask my nemesis what gift he had for me! And I did this. How is it I can’t remember the answer?

So I guess that Aqualung, My Friend is a more suitable title than I realized. Aqualung is about unfinished business and unrealized potential. Perhaps that is the source of my anger and the violence that was noticeable in my blog postings against Phil O and Mr. Basso on the Deacon’s Bench. There was a lack of discipline, a lack of control evident, along with a lack of compassion or generosity of spirit. Something harsh and unyielding. Something immature. Something Punk.

Seventh Circle of Hell

So, I’m back to work, after being sick for a week. I got my doctor’s note, and I will have to find a union steward and go see “Attendance Control,” which always reminds me of “Animal Control,” and isn’t far off.

I suppose there is a long suppressed part of my self that is furious with me for letting this happen – “this” being my job as a baggage handler for 29 years come April 2. It seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact, it was the answer to my earnest prayers. “Lord,” I asked, “Just help me find a job that doesn’t require a degree, or a skill, or a lot of training, and that pays well and has good benefits.” Bingo. Be careful what you pray for, as they say. What was suitable for a 22 year old – a job I could use to pay for school, working afternoons and weekends – is a dead end for the 51 year old. But, at some point, I turned the corner and settled, accepting this job as the one I will retire from.

A decision, or an accommodation, that I have never fully embraced – how could I? The work is drudgery. I am interacting with bosses who are roughly the same age, or even younger, who are light years away in terms of responsibilities, pay, benefits. I may be respected for a few talents like being the union newsletter editor and taking pictures, or being associated with the airport chapel, but I am easily caricatured. Thus, my discomfort whenever the General Manager Art P. would see me and imitate someone snapping a photo. This was my identity in his eyes – it’s what he knew about me. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing belittling. But it raised the question in me: Is this what it boils down to? Is this what I am to be known for – the guy who runs around snapping photos?

Actually, yes – as far as Art P. Is concerned. At work, at the airport, I’m the guy who helps out at the airport chapel, or writes the church history piece. I’m the guy who works in the bagroom – the guy in Pier 4. There are little fragments here and there. Pretty soon, I start believing my own press – yes, that’s me, I’m that guy. And I sink into my DDPs, because I’m more than That Guy, and I know it, but how do I show it? How does one live his most authentic life? How does one restart the process of actualization? I have long clung to the notion that it is bound up, inextricably, with education. Thus, finishing college becomes a metaphor for flipping the “on” switch of Life. Even still: it’s hard for me to figure out just what it will lead to, so deeply have a suppressed the way I used to think about it as a pathway to a new career.

So the half demolished Benedictine Hall is a fitting metaphor. It’s the place where I had most of my classes, where the faculty had offices, where I would sit with Dr. O’Brien and commiserate about the sad state of academic affairs and student awareness while failing to get my own assignments done. Perhaps I haven’t sufficiently recognized my hubris as I jumped from student to pseudo-faculty, just as I did in high school, writing notes for members of the student newspaper to be excused from class.

And it wasn’t Dr. O’Brien’s fault. He recognized a modicum of maturity and sophistication and he honored that; he still required me to do the work. He advised me well: go to Rosary and get a real grounding in Literature & Communications. There was no shortage of good advice. There was only a failure to follow that advice. And the irony is that all these years later I am hovering around the periphery of Rosary, now called Dominican, looking for entree, and as Liesl so trenchantly observed, putting my nose to the glass like a child at the window of a candy store. It was a powerful and perceptive observation, and little did she know, I am sure, its antecedents, its particular, powerful irony.

I came across an interview in the Reader featuring Dr. O’Brien a few years ago. He was running some program that used to have offices in the Loop but was being closed down or moved. It had to do with promoting local writers and getting their books published. I’ll have to research it. Of course I have the clipping, somewhere downstairs, somewhere, nowhere in particular. And the article said he was at Bloomington-Normal, Illinois State University, and I sent him an e-mail. No reply. That was disheartening. Perhaps there was simply nothing for him to say. Or perhaps it went astray. HA. That’s the excuse I use to comfort myself when ignored. I used it before, when writing to another person from college days. I want to say, writing to another old friend from college days, but I don’t know that Dr. O’Brien and I were actually friends.

Originally I was going to title this passage “Productive.” I had been reflecting on the fact that I am at least a productive member of society. I provide a service. And this is what passes for productive these days: clearing my belts of accumulating baggage, stroke counting a lockout sheet, delivering a pre-load if necessary, waiting for the green Pavlovian light to signal me that lock-out time has arrived, delivering the lockout and paperwork, and returning to the bagroom. Five flights a day – 1565, 851, 419, 1571 and 321. After awhile, you know the numbers and the departure times by heart. The gates change, the bag count fluctuates, but otherwise, it’s all the same, five days a week, eight hours a day. Meanwhile there is this other life going on, trying to peek out, running down the battery on the laptop, insisting, against the best evidence, that this is not what I am meant to be doing right now. While the orange light at the end of the pier flashes its warning to the crew chief that Aqualung’s belt is full.

It occurs to me – a scary thought – that this blogging, itself – this could be the manifestation of Aqualung, of that shadowy side, going out on a limb with entries for anyone to see, not really thinking much about who might read it.