Autobiography

I have never been at peace, from incubator and cradle to now and, I am sure, on my eventual death bed. Take that term, “peace,” not as an idea of consensus but in the simplest clinical sense. I don’t remember a moment, maybe age three but certainly age four, and after when there wasn’t a baseline sense of wrongness – which is not the same as depression or anxiety; a grey color in my mind and eyes instead of a bright color. Prior to age six, I remember looking out the Wilmington, Delaware apartment’s living room window and feeling more comfortable with a gloomy rainy day than a bright and green spring day. I would listen to different kinds of music in those pre-teen years, but only “got into” the darker neurotic feelings in Chopin’s Polonaises.*

Since my family was not angry or abusive, but dissociated and neutral and on the balance mildly fake-happy, there would be some sprinkles of sugar on top of my ground. I remember a transient, unstated joke I had with my mother: She’d be lying on the couch and I’d look down at her upside-down mouth and chin. That section of her face would look like a mini-face where I’d imagine eyes in her chin. Funny. But I never actually pictured her as a person.

Many people don’t remember their childhood. I remember only one birthday party – not mine, a neighbor girl’s. The only memory of it was my getting away with cheating at pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey (I could see through the blindfold), and the girl’s father passing through the room and dismissively saying “No prizes.” At least ninety percent of my scant and cloudy childhood memories are of embarrassments and humiliations.

Clearly, it was easy for me to start off in life that way. It took no effort and came from the conjunction of birth and emotionally buried parents. If there is a difference between me and countless other people, it might be that I’m aware of and accept the validity of this erroneous ground. It is a kind of dark asleep or catatonic infrastructure, seeded with muffled birth trauma and the first couple years post-blast, what might seem like peace but isn’t. And because of it, happy and proud and loving moments don’t last, but neither do depressed or anxious or terrible moods. All eventually flows into a quiet, disquieted lake in the middle of an unseen land.

One time, my mother described me as “serene” as we were walking along Michigan Avenue, Chicago. I was in my one abortive year of music graduate school, probably subconsciously knew I was bound for failure, and had absolutely no idea of what I could possibly do with my future. But I looked “serene.” I’d wish only on my enemies that their mother knew them this well.

I have a good life in meaningful ways. Fine wife, fine work, and in my fifties and sixties I’ve been able to smell the roses. But too deep and long a draft of the roses and I’d descend into that underground cavern of birth.

Do other people, most people, have more peace than this? They may think so. And that would be the only benefit of thinking one’s way through life that I could endorse. In fact –

I am Everyman.

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* Try some of my age six favorites – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8igbcXJTJg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy9BOgXWXyo, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj4XjCrN0nk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehm_kDU563Q.