A twelve-year-old tender mercy

He's about 4'10" with brown hair and dark skin. He's a clear petite Filipino build with Camille's face and a nice big set of front teeth that I assume he will grow into. His voice is cracking even though it will probably not drop lower than it currently is. He gets his hair cut about every two weeks and likes to play video games and baseball. He's a catcher.

When he was about four years old I was packing for girls camp. I took a length of chain--the kind you wear dog tags on--and wrapped it around his wrist. I told him that if he took it off I would never come back. When I got back a week later, my mother scolded me and he presented his wrist, with the chain in the same condition as I had left it. I unwound it and never second guessed his love for me again.

When he was eleven he asked for a sketchbook for Christmas.

"I didn't know you liked to draw," I said.

"I do" he answered. And he isn't that good at it...yet. But he likes to do it and somehow I'm content with that.

Then on Sunday night he told me something odd. "What have you been up to?" I asked him. The usual answer to this question is 'nothing' or 'just hanging out.'

"I picked out my books for summer reading."

"Oh! What books?"

"Antony and Cleopatra and Much Ado About Nothing." The answer took me back. He was going into eighth grade. Did they actually assign those books? Are they nuts? "They gave me a list of books I couldn't read, so I chose these" he offhandedly answered. No, they weren't nuts, my brother was.

"Do you want help?" I asked him.

"Yes" he answered simply. So I volunteered to call him every night around midnight and we would read together. He used to like hearing the stories of the books I read. We would lay in his room late at night while the rest of the house was sleeping and I would tell him of my travels through literature while we both waited out our insomnia.

It still surprised me when he agreed. It surprised me more when I suggested we start then and his eagerness to read the entire first scene by himself.

He was never a good reader. In fifth grade we made fun of him for being stupid. He couldn't read well, and most of the time he didn't know what he had read. I was a freshman in college then, and it bothered me. Why didn't he read more? I wondered. When my mom pulled him out to do home school that year, I volunteered to teach him English. I looked back on the books I had to read as a fifth grader and assigned them to him, then I wrote comprehension questions for him and vocabulary lists. It took him a month to get them back to me because he had to do it through email and he is really bad about doing homework. I suppose the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and I think it has something to with my Dad.

Since then, we would discuss the books he read. But Shakespeare at 12? That was pretty hefty. And it did prove to be a challenge for him. He stumbled through most of it, but then he would take a deep breath and keep plowing through it. Then he would stop and reread it silently to make sure he understood it, and ask if there was something he didn't understand, even with the footnotes on the bottom of the page. It surprised me a lot.

What surprised me the most was when he asked if I was still going to call again the next day.

"Do you still want me to?"

"Yes"

"Yeah, I'll call."

"Ok. I'll see you tomorrow. Well, I'll talk to you tomorrow."

"Ok."

"I love you" he said simply.

"I love you too" I answered before he said goodbye and hung up. I don't think I had thought about him loving me since he was four, but it felt good to hear it. And then I realized how to him, I wasn't his parent, or his teacher, I was his sister. His favorite sister. The one who baked cookies with him in the middle of the night and told him stories. The one who he could talk to when there was no one else willing to listen. The one who told him secrets, the one who asked what he had spent his day doing. The only one he openly loved. The only one he missed.

I am convinced that he is my brother for me.

A little bit of Theory

Wulf Barsch von Benedict once told me to go read Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane. It was the hardest thing I think I have ever read because the concepts were so incredibly simple. I gave a copy to Dan Muhlestein and I think it made his head spin too. Wulf said that in the Bauhaus, where he went to school, everyone had to go through what they called the Fundamentals, and no one touched a pencil until they had. Wulf decided that since Kandinsky taught him the fundamentals, Kandinsky might as well do the same for me. He did let me touch a pencil during that period though, if only to make up for lost time.

Kandinsky says that a point does not exist, at least not a geometric point. I’ll explain why: any given point on a plane is bound within a plane. A line is composed of the moving, changing point, or a collection of points composed in a linear fashion. Thus the point has one set property. Except in this form it is not a point. A point actually appears at the intersection of two lines, or two planes, if we’re talking about using the third dimension. Because this is the only existence of the point—at the intersection of two lines—the point both exists within the planes, but at the same time does not exist at all.

To an English major a point (.) is a period. In itself it means silence in language. In context it acts as a barrier between thoughts, to signify the end of one, and at the same time allows for the beginning of another. Thus it is part of language even though it doesn’t actually say anything. Kandinsky says this is the inherent nature of the point. That within it’s boundaries it exists for and to itself, yet like being on the inside of a window, it can still play a part in it’s surroundings merely through existence.

Keeping that in mind, what if time was linear? What if the timeline my high school history teacher made me draw was actually how time works? What if there was another line that moved down that timeline, through the events, and that line was me? I then have two lines and at the intersection is the present moment. And it is completely independent either line. On the vertical—time—there is all that has happened and all that will happen on either side of “now” and on the horizontal—self—there is every decision I have ever made and every lesson I have ever learned and on the other side is every decision I will make and every lesson I will learn. And where “now” rests is dependent on time and where my mentality is at the moment.

And what if that is broken? What if time isn’t right and what if I’m not making decisions at all? What will I use to define my present? What if the past is missing? That is why constructing the narrative is important. Because without two lines, the point does not exist. And so when, in war, the time aspect is completely incomprehensible, soldiers like O’Brien and Jimmy Cross are grasping at the physical materials because they exist and use them to find a bearing place in that linear system. And from there they can find a place on their linear self to use to define that point, to create a present and therefore have truth and all that other stuff that postmodernism is constantly trying to find.

Transverse Line by Wassily Kandinsky, 1923.

In Arcadia by Wulf Barsch von Benedict

Meeting Mr. Dickens

I remember when I first met Mr. Dickens. It was, in fact, dearest Pip who introduced us. My mother gave me a copy of Great Expectations when I was 15 years old. That was the beginning of my library. I collect books. I collect lots of books. They contain worlds that I will always escape to.

Gaithersburg, Maryland is a suburb of Washington D.C. It is not a ghetto. It is not inner city. But it wants to be. Because there is no money in it. Well, there is no clean money. Bethesda has money. Rockville has money. Silver Spring even has money. But Gaithersburg has no money. It had money, once upon a time, which is why it can never be a ghetto, but it wants to be, oh, so badly. I lived in a neighborhood called Laytonia. Laytonia was the essence of Gaithersburg—families who have lived in those houses since they were built never learned to upkeep them. The houses are old and junky, including the one my parents bought when I was eight.

I’ll admit, my parent’s house is in a better condition than some. But it is slowly being eaten away by the wear and tear six children tend to inflict on it. It wasn’t destined to be the war zone it became when it was built. But it was all the same. “Someday,” I told my sister’s ex-fiancé, Paul, “she is going to have to explain why there are holes in the walls the perfect size of chair legs and no locks—save the front door—actually work.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?” he asked.

“Acknowledgment wasn’t going to save your relationship,” I answered with a shrug. And who really knows why Camille doesn’t ever tell the men she dates that she is inviting them into the midst of a raging battle. I certainly don’t. It is better, I think, to not invite them home at all.

There was a boy I loved, and I loved that he had never seen his father hit his mother. I loved that he had never lost a classmate at the hands of another at the local McDonalds. I loved that he had never had to sacrifice a grade on a group project because his partner got expelled in the middle for drug possession (it wasn’t even his deal that time—he was framed). I loved that his closest friend since Primary did not have a restraining order from his daughter’s mother because of anger management issues. I loved that he went trick-or-treating every Halloween until he was 16 years-old because there was never a drive-by shooting to be afraid of. He had never even heard a real gunshot. I loved all of that, and I loved that when I was with him, I didn’t have to say I had experienced all of that. It wasn’t real and I didn’t have to say it was. I could simply read and play and go to school.

School is a safe-haven. It is removed, like books. It is an alternate world where Mr. Dickens tells me of people who have life way worse than I. A worn copy of Great Expectations rests on my shelf right now, offering the same escape I used as a girl. I have other escapes now. More escapes, a wide variety, like Thurber’s Walter Mitty or Allen’s Kugelmass.

But at night, when I would talk to my mother in the dark, none of that is real. Gangs are real. Fights are real. Holes in walls are real. And someday I too will have to explain their existence. But for now, isn’t it enough to merely say they exist?