My resolution

I cannot expect "S" to understand me. He may vilify me and distract me in order to provoke a response. He may tell me or imply that my experiences are less profound than his. This is natural because he is in pain. Either willfully or inadvertently, he will not understand my pain and the darkness I have been in, nor the dark impulse I have fought. It is not important that he be made to understand this. Do not try to make him understand, out of either indignation or pain, or a need to be understood. Know that he will not understand me. Expect it. Remember that this is our last encounter. It does not serve to become angry or distracted. It will not make things better. It is already over – why create more agitation or sorrow after we part ways? It is better to leave this encounter with sweetness in the mouth and tenderness in the soul. It is important that he not be made to feel guilty or bad.  Do not seek to blame. Seek only to understand.

I am here to gather as much information and understanding as I can. I am here to try and understand what has happened in "S"'s life. I need to know the high-level details; the progression of his thoughts and feelings; the decisions that he made and why he made them. Do not interrupt. Do not judge. Do not offer suggestions. The time for that has passed. He is living his life now and he has made it clear that our lives are separate. I wrote to him and closed things in August. Do not look for ways to link back in. This has ended. What we had is closed now. As much as I may long for him, as much as I would give anything to be with him, I don’t have any control over this. This has ended.

If what I hear from him leads me to believe that this option may be possible, I am here to ask him to give me a child. This is a tender and delicate subject. If he has the strength to do this for me, it will be a beautiful thing. There should be no guilt and no manipulation in this request. I will not demand a response now. I will ask him to think about it.

Be strong. Strength is to be found in directness. In being calm and loving. It will be natural to experience joy when I see him again because he is my match. Experience it completely. Savor it. But don’t forget that this is only a brief and beautiful moment. This is the last time. It will not happen again. It’s okay to be lost in the moment but don’t forget why you have come. When you leave, be sure you leave with the answers you came for.

Creating closure

I called "S" on Wednesday. It has been two months since we spoke. Three months since I saw him last. The sound of his voice made my heart race as it has every time since I first saw him. There is profound relief to know that he exists, a deep ache that is soothed, even in the knowledge that we will never be. He is my match in every way. It is a rarity.
In August, I ended things completely, and have since lived in a place of perpetual grief. I never understood why he stopped everything; why he couldn't tell me. I wondered if there was ever anything I could have done to have made things different. But this isn't a rescue mission; it is recovery/salvage only.
"There is something I need to discuss with you," I told him. "But not over the phone". He agreed to meet next weekend. He writes to me: "I can handle a careful approach, but not more than that".

I told "D" that I was going. He deserves to know. He has been my sentinel against the night; the only person I confessed to about my dark impulse. He waited for me in the shadows the beach in Cape Verde, watching as I ran along the shore or swam too far into the breakers.
"I understand", he said. "But you have to promise me that you will  come back alive. Say it."
I felt irrational anger at this request, trapped  by his insistence. He deserves this from me and I said it, but I feel irritated when I think about it now, dark impulse or no. I knocked his door early this morning, and laid down beside him, grateful that he has seen the darkness I have never shown another soul. I wonder if the promise is enough.

Work

I returned from Dar Es Salaam on Saturday afternoon. There were long flights and long periods of waiting in between. From Tanzania we flew to Addis Ababa and waited for five hours until 0100 before boarding a plane to Rome. In the Rome airport, there was fresh coffee again, lots of nuns, and then a flight to Naples. I wasn't back 12 hours before I began working again.

I can't seem to stop working. Is it the job? The analysis that drives me? Or is it the mission - the sense that I must make the difference I came here to make? Is it anger at the injustice I see, and the inept attempts by "V" and "R" to control me and my work? Or is it simply less painful to focus all energy and hope into a project I feel I might be able do something about? I look around me, at the people on the streets of Dar, or Douala. I wonder if anything I do will ever change their lives even a little bit. I can't seem to have any impact on my own life - what arrogance is it to think that I can impact theirs?

On the way to Cameroon, when "R" tried to force me to share my analysis with him so he could steal it - steal anything I was working on, I couldn't even begin to work up the energy to care. I told him: "I have nothing left to lose. There is nothing bright and shiny in my life."

And this work keeps me awake at night. I stay up until I'm too tired to keep my eyes open - and then it drives me awake again.

One month

It was August 18, one month ago, that I wrote to "S" and stopped everything. I do not believe, even now, that there will ever be anyone else. But it was too dark inside to continue as I had done for nearly a year: Always believing that he would have the strength and courage to come for me. But he did not come and he will not come. Acknowledge that truth, my soul.
I am safer now than a month ago. The dark impulse has left me, but I feel it breathing in the shadows still. I try not to invite it in because I don't think that I will be able to fight it a second time.

The Hospital

The chief of Surgery, "M", is a passionate, dedicated man who trained in China and France. But this hospital is very bad. How could he bear to work here, after he had adapted to a different standard? I asked him, “Why did you return?” He said, “I could go someplace else. But I care about my country. There are many problems here.” 

The military hospital is a series of outbuildings constructed of cement and sitting on red clay mud. There are dips and puddles of stagnant water, and a fine mist of rain beginning to come down. This time, right after the rainy season, is the most dangerous for malaria.  


I wasn’t sure what the plan was. I had come to see the work that had been done on the hospital: the sidewalk that had been poured across the open area in front of the emergency entrance - but the hierarchy here were upset that we were here. Whatever was going to happen next, it looked as though it was unprecedented. "M" was defiant. He said, "I don’t care what they do to me. This is important." 

When we finally had permission to tour the hospital, "M" said to me, “I protect you. So you must protect me.” I replied, “That is worrisome. What do you think will happen to you?” He didn’t answer me directly, waiting while the rain fell around us, then he said again, “It doesn’t matter what happens to me.”

We stood outside in the rain for a while before moving into the open waiting area outside the hospital director's office. This man was well fed with a clean uniform and shiny shoes. The only shiny thing in the hospital. He had a big congratulatory plaque next to his desk, and, like a good name dropper, pictures of himself with important people on the walls. There he was with the General; another photograph with important looking men looking solemn and very well dressed. There was a picture of him at the age of 27, decades ago when he studied in Greece.

The director began by shaming everyone soundly;  talking about the necessity for planning for the visit of a “delegation”. He even scolded us for contacting "M" instead of him. When he finished his rampage, I threw myself on my sword. It is of no consequence for me if I do this –  he merely needed to be appeased and stroked. I explained in a long, sincere, and flowery monologue that he must not hold these gentlemen accountable for my actions. That "M" and the LCDR were not prepared for this visit either, but that I had requested this at the last minute and that they were trying to help me. I noted that the LCDR was not even in his uniform because he was going to drive back to the Capitol city. I told the director, "we are not a delegation. We are friends."

He grudgingly agreed to the tour. 

The hospital is a terrible, contaminated place of suffering. People are piled into small, cement rooms, side by side, arranged like the grizzly offal of some meat processing machine.They lie on metal framed beds with thin mattresses made of packing foam. It is humid and unbearably warm and the flies from the nearby latrine buzz lazily around them. 

There are patients with infectious diseases, but there isn't much to be done about them: malaria, aids, syphilis, cholera. The director was noisy about his tour, his shiny shoes clipping against the tile floor. He walked boldly into rooms with women who were very sick and undressed. There was no regard for their privacy or suffering. No compassion. All this, while he said, “The important thing is not me. The important thing is the patients of this hospital. See what we are trying to do here.” This was a bullshitter, if I ever saw one. I watched the way the other doctors observed him. Mostly with wariness. He took us into the maternity ward, a room without air conditioning containing six beds and thin mattresses. There were four pregnant women in there. One was moaning and clutching her swollen belly. He would not take us into the delivery room because it was so awful. He said it was, “not nice”.

There was one generator for the entire hospital. And a morgue about 300 meters away, with mourners in black who had come for the body of a loved one. 

I learned this week that the director has brought charges against "M" for letting us in. 

lightning strike

He took the girl and turned her into glass

A lightning strike upon the sand, a kiss

And walking in the rain, hand in hand

Down stony steps, where giants had their footsteps once.

Fragile here, so delicate and broken easily in places

Other places, solid as the earth and glistening

I have been glass before.

Before, I was a mass of protons churning

And I have been a star, carbons fusing, burning

And I have been a hundred elements decaying one by one until this

Flesh and bone, spirit, love and agony and joy

Then earth to earth, dust to sand

And then, a lightning strike. 

Return to Cameroon

I'm here again. This place has haunted me more than any other country in Africa. I dream about it sometimes. It is a strange remembrance, though, because I feel everything I have ever felt here, instead of thinking of the individual images or discrete events. I feel the hot early-morning run on Palm Sunday years ago, on the hard packed red dirt road in Limbe, and I feel the onslaught of rain that followed, chasing us back to the ship. I remember the sound of the churchgoers singing, their voices echoing through the hills and the banana and palm farms. I remember a little girl in a pink dress, holding a palm frond over her head to protect her from the rain and the splashes she made in the widening puddles. I remember walking on the chocolate colored beach with Daniel, and working on my laptop while he slept on a bench, his cap set across his face, and the lizards that stopped by to say hello to us, running along the hot cement walls.
Last year, I remember the fish market, and eating fresh Barracuda with my fingers the way that Ombala showed me. I remember Ombala telling me that he would have a daughter and give her to me to raise. I still wonder whether he was serious or not. Will I have a beautiful little girl to raise someday? I remember driving the dangerous road between Douala and Yaounde where the timber companies extract more old-growth timber than my mind can fathom and where the timber trucks kill busloads of people all the time (as they did last week). I remember that Clement told me about his girlfriend, that he was saving money to marry her - saving enough so he could buy a cow. It would take him five more years.
Through all of these experiences, there was always Hans, waiting for me, waiting to hear my stories, waiting for me to come back safely and kiss him. In Cameroon, before, I always felt Hans.
And this year, I am in Cameroon, the country that has stolen my heart, and I find that the heart I share with it is a broken one. I am more broken than I have ever been. I am more alone than I have ever been.
Today, I learned that some of the locals bury their loved ones in front of their homes; when the time is right, they exhume the skulls and bring them indoors. They have conversations with the skull, ask it for advice. I feel that I understand this now. The memory of someone beloved is better than nothing at all.

The God of Improbability

To own the truth: I was a little afraid of reading Dawkin's "The God Delusion". I still hold some glimmer of faith in my agnostic soul. I secretly feared that reading a good, well-reasoned argument against the existence of god would snuff the frail thing out. But the bizarre thing is: his arguments are weak. Not all of them, of course. He has some very valid things to say about the false priveledge that religion holds in influencing politics, the veneration we give religious scholars, and the hateful role religion plays in history. I believe that organized religion is, for the most part, an evil institution. But his refutation against god is by arguing in the improbability of the existence of god. This argument absolutely cannot convince me. 

As a physicist who is constantly in awe of the things I can't possibly understand, who is confronted with half a dozen equally probable but mutually exclusive "grand unified theories" of the universe and hardly any experimental means to judge between them, I cannot, in the depths of my soul, believe this argument. Dawkins ridicules the concept of miracles because they require that some deity change the immutable nature of stuff...such as making chemicals ignite at temperatures below their ignition temperatures, or modifying other "proven" physical properties. But he is discussing empirical physical properties, not fundamental ones. We have empirical evidence that water has a particular set freezing and boiling points. But, when you get to the world of the very very small: quantum mechanics small or even smaller (say, anything less than the Planck length - which we cannot measure, no matter how clever we are), or even very large, the strange thing is: things are mutable by nature. And they may choose improbable paths.  Electrons can choose where they want to go, or they may simply tunnel through a solid object. Time and space can expand or contract. There may not be 3 spatial dimensions as we have always thought, but, if one form of string theory is right: 26. What happens in those other dimensions? 

Interestingly, a probability calculation requires a set of assumptions and conditions. It isn't wrong to try to put this together as Dawkins does, but then he must also concede that the quality of the output is only as good as the quality of his input. Is it reasonable to accurately create the equation for the probability of god's existence when we lack enough evidence to calculate the probability of one theory of the universe's behavior over another? if god does exist, then he or she is certainly more complex and grand than any of these physical phenomena. 

Dawkins goes on to discuss all of the scientists and educated people in the world who are Atheist, as though peer pressure would be enough to convince me that the improbability argument was on sound footing. What strikes me is this: if the every wise person in the world deemed the existence of god to be completely and utterly improbable, well, then I would believe in her/him even more because the god of improbability makes sense with everything I have learned about love.

Love itself is completely irrational. Mutual affection or tribal affiliation serves our own selfish purposes. But genuine love, altrusitic godlike love, short-circuits the most powerful instinct we have for survival.  It is the irrational god who can actually love me. It is the improbable god who forms patterns and creates universes.

Of course, the damning religiousity that rules the world bears no resemblance to the god that I pray to.  

Resources

Today, I began to take stock of the list of resources I have, in case I ever need to draw from them.
I think of these things because it's easier to consider a course of action than to realize that I'm completely helpless in the one area of my life that matters the most to me. It's awful to know that there are certain things I can't influence, regardless of how much I ache, and how desperately I want to act. So, instead, I imagine scenarios where I have some ability to affect the outcome.
I consider a case where the man I love needs rescuing in some foreign place. A gender-reversal, I realize. But it gives me comfort to do something, even if I'm confined to the space between my ears.
What do I know? What do I have? What action would I take? Somehow, if I do things right, I convince myself that I can create an alternate reality and have what I long for.
So, listing my skills, I realize how pathetic they are: 1) Analytical capability, 2) Ability to stay calm in a crisis, 3) Decent understanding of how processes and people work, 4) Ability to talk my way out of things. I suppose that's the sum total of my special skills. Not Laura Croft, by any means. Not remotely in the realm of superhero. When I add them up like this, they look pitiful. How did I get to this age and not learn how to street-fight? In the immortal words of Napoleon Dynamite: "You know, there's like a boat-load of gangs at this school. This one gang keeps wanting me to join because I'm pretty good with a bow staff."
Maybe, after all, it's a good thing that my future happiness doesn't rely on my skills with a bow staff. Not in my list of resources.

Images of the Feminine

Something strikes me about Michelangelo’s Madonna. She is different. So different from every other Madonna that came before. She is muscular. Active. She has bare, sculpted arms and an intense expression. There are nude figures in the background. Seeing this made me realize something about every Madonna that has ever been painted. They are docile. They are enigmatic, unreachable. There is not one woman I could ever relate to or be friends with. They are some perversion of the feminine – in the same way that you pervert a wild animal to become a pet. There are so few real women in art. How can I reach out to any collaborative feminine past if I can’t understand them?

 But they are all painted by men.

Could I trust any man I have ever known to reconstruct an accurate image of me? 

Experiencing beauty

Last weekend I took the train to Florence. I learned long ago that, to combat depression, I have to behave the same way I would if I was able to feel happy. I try to tempt my former self into being, the person who is thrilled at new experiences and who finds life worth living. I try to remember the way I felt when I wasn't dulled by this numbing darkness. I remembered my first trip to Rome, how it made me burst with joy! I rode on the top of one of those double-decker touring buses. In December. In the rain. I was drenched and the wind broke my cheap umbrella. It was fantastic. The ennui that depression causes is a cheat and a liar. 
For some reason I can't explain, this made me think about what it is like to live for hundreds of years - a mythological person like a vampire or Tolkien's Elves. What depression and boredom eternal existence must bring! I think that the possibility of experiencing beauty is inversely proportional to time. It is the fleeting nature of beauty that moves us. Michelangelo was 29 when he sculpted his David. This makes his masterpiece with its technical brilliance and humanistic insight all the more remarkable. The need for learning and leaving a mark is so intense so early because we have no guarantees for tomorrow. If we could last indefinitely, would we enjoy beauty so much?