Street artist for one night

I haven't sketched anything for a long time.

The last time I thought I might want to draw something, I was sitting in a meeting with a bunch of military personnel getting a five-day forecast from a meteorological officer. I kept drifting off to sleep and, in this state of half-dreaming, I thought I might want to paint a picture: a cat wearing flight goggles and a specially-made harness which was attached to helium balloons allowing the cat to fly. So that's been the extent of my creative impulse: a flying cat. Oh, and there were sunflowers.

I guess you had to be there.

But I bought a sketch pad anyway and I walked down to Via Napoli to see what things might hold still long enough for me to draw them. 

I sketched a sixteen-year-old girl snogging her boyfriend (actually, I ended up by mostly sketching her backside - her bum tucked into a pair of incredibly short shorts that kept revealing the crease where the gluteus maximus meets the hamstring.)

Later, at a restaurant, where I sipped wine and ate heavenly Pozzuoli bread, I sketched the shoulder muscle and flabby tricep of a smoker. Then,a nice couple with a six-month-old baby sat nearby. When the woman sat off to one side and started feeding the baby from a bottle, I decided to try my hand at the subject which every artist from Giotto to Da Vinci can't help but get very wrong: an infant.

I worked quickly: the bottle wouldn't last long.  Eventually, I had some semblance of the child: his chubby arms and legs splayed out and her strong hands manipulating his little body.

I flipped the sketch pad around to try something else. But the movement caught the father's eye and he saw what I had done.

He went ecstatic. He came to the table and oohed and ahhed over the pencil sketch. I gave him the page and he marched it around the restaurant, showing everyone. I was embarrassed, but pleased. I thought, "hey. This is a nice and rewarding moment. Someone appreciates my work."

But the moment wasn't going to last. Next thing I knew, the page was shoved under my nose and the father was saying, "Please, the face."

I knew what he meant: I'd sketched their son with the bottle covering most of his face. He wanted the rest.

Oops.

I took out a fresh sheet of paper and, while the mother abandoned her food to prop up the boy as my model, I began to madly sketch. 

It was awful. I don't have the tricks used by street artists. I imagine that they use special techniques to rapidly fill in the important bits. I wished desperately that I knew what they were.

I drew a circle. The kid was squirming around - attention caught here and there. How was I supposed to do this? The mother was looking intently at me. Smiling. She'd left her food on the table and her husband walked over occasionally to deliver single bites on a fork.

I tried to fill in the features - but people came to stand behind me and see my work and this made things even worse. Every attempt I made - made the kid look like a bobble-headed troll. I was sweating by now. I considered telling them that I couldn't do it. But everyone looked so damn hopeful!

After the third try, I landed on something that looked like a human being. It was rough...but I made it do. Little smile on the face; fat little cheeks; eyes distracted in a sideways glance. When I thought it was passable, I took it to them so that the mom could eat. I didn't wait to see if they liked it. I couldn't do any better.

But as the next course came to the table, the father brought the baby to mine.

He told me his name (Antonio) and the cherub's name: "Francesco".

I held Francesco, snuggled against me the sweet milky baby smell, and he took my fingers and tried to put them in his mouth.  I tried not to think the sad thoughts I always have around babies, tried to quell the longing, and I just enjoyed this one. He was all rolly polly and wobbly. It was beautiful.

Antonio insisted on buying me a slice of cake and a shot of Limoncello. And we said goodbye.

An eternal soul

It doesn't make any logical sense, does it?

I am a sophisticated biological machine. My 'self'-hood is tied up in chemical potentials and electrical impulses and synapses and all these fantastic, remarkable systems working together to make me me.

I speak about the soul because it seems the only way to explain the depth and breadth of an emotional experience that seems to alter the essential self. But is there any real part of the concept that is actually - physically and empirically - true? The dualism of body and soul. Two entities tethered together until the one finally fails to provide sufficient host and the other escapes, somehow in tact and carrying all of those essential pieces of us into...where? heaven or hell?

My parents believe in these concepts - and my sisters, too. Most of the world believes in some form of life-after-death. I did once, as well, when I eagerly devoured Lewis and Tolkien and L'Engle's essays about the love of God and the salvation of Jesus Christ. Michelangelo painted the judgment on the altarpiece of the Sistine Chapel, with the dead called from their graves and the saints demanding justice and the sinners carted off across a Styxian river. But these things seem so illogical to me.

The ideas of an afterlife replete with punishment or reward seem so utterly absurd to me. They seemed particularly absurd to me when I stood on the edge of self-termination (and any time I return there). Hamlet may have worried that the Almighty set his hand against self-slaughter, but I worried that some good friend of mine would have to find and manage the carcass. That my family would have to face the horror of this decision. (If my need to terminate stems from unbearable pain, how could I therefore impose any terrible pain on someone I loved?)

Still, the concept of soul - even the concept of faith remain the only way that I have ever been able to describe what it was to be with and know Sjors. I felt so strongly that my soul knew his soul: as though we had existed for billions of years, linked together as companions through the creation and destruction of stars. It wasn't as though I was meeting him for the first time - but that I'd found him at last. And this is the reason for the depth and horror of the pain I experience every day, knowing that he is lost to me. That he lied to himself. That he lied to me. It feels like a rending - and his absence feels like some horrible wrongness. A loss of self. After long and dreadful months, the pain is still there as awful as if it had happened yesterday. How would this be the case if I did not have a soul, and his soul was not meant to be with mine?

"In the beginning was the deed"

Goethe tells us that this was Faust's rewrite of the opening phrase of the bible.

Not the Word. The Deed.

How interesting that Faust requires that God should act, not speak, to exist. To create the universe.

Is it action that defines us? This was what Faust thought. Faust was an intellectual - but action mattered more to him than words. 

I think about this now. What is the core of me if I remove the deed? If I define myself outside of my actions, I feel a broken person entirely. I am a paper doll: intellect and pain.

Was this Faust, as well? The constant striving; the inability to be at peace? 

If Mephistopheles can give Faust a moment in which he no longer wishes to strive, but begs for that moment to go on, can he win Faust's soul:

"Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch! du bist so schönn
Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen,
Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn!
Dann mag die Totenglocke schallen,
Dann bist du deines Dienstes frei,
Die Uhr mag stehn, der Zeiger fallen,
Es sei die Zeit für mich vorbei!"

 If I shall say to the moment:
Only stay a while! You are so beautiful!
Then forge the shackles to my feet,
Then will I gladly perish!
Then may the death knell sound
Then are you free of your servitude,
The clock may stop, its hands fall still,
And time for me be complete.

I have had this moment and time should have stopped for me. I was completely at peace in his arms and I would have stayed there forever. Willingly died if death could have been so merciful and taken me then. If only I could have stayed there with him. Where I was born to be.

And the moment passed. And Mephistopheles took his due.

And I am damned now.

Goethe was correct.No action. No other pursuit matters.

Clockwork

I once observed to Sjors that life without him was clockwork, not life.

It has been three weeks since his last ugly message to me, four months since I last saw him, and more than a year since he had hope that we would be together. In the first week of October, I will find the two-year anniversary of the day that I first saw him, jaunty in his blue uniform, striding down the hall of the C4I building. In that moment, everything changed for me: all my assumptions about the way that life and love worked. My soul rejoiced, cried out in recognition: "There you are! Where have you been? I've been looking for you for 33 years!"

It is probably true that I will never see Sjors again, but I try not to ever think about it directly. I look at the fact in my periphery or glance at its reflection. The way you are told never to look directly at the sun or it will burn your eyes and blind you. The truth is: I have not been truly "seen" by Sjors for much longer than a year already.

After fighting Mac in that bizarre e-mail correspondence, and filing in the Italian criminal courts, and watching Sjors lie to me again and again, trying to deceive me the way that he has already deceived himself; I am beginning to recover. I do not suffer the crushing depression that contaminated everything for more than a year. I work on as many projects as I feel I can take on. I try to live as much as it may be possible. 

But no matter what I try to tell myself, I know that I will not be whole again. Back in the days when I believed that there were multiple people in the world whom you could meet and attach to: many men in the universe who could be compatible - I thought it was just a matter of finding someone suitable and loving. But for me, this paradigm has become a lie and I know it.

This is the catch about the soul-mate: when you lose that person, you realize that you will always be half-alive. Half finished. You will live a life that is clockwork, not life.

Emily was here for nearly two weeks. We were in Florence, Rome, and drove along the Amalfi coast. This time, I saw beauty. And I enjoyed her company so much. I was happy to have her near. I was not perpetually confronted with the horrendous sense of loss and despair that has accompanied me everywhere for so long.

But I am also very alone. I feel inside me all of the pieces that are missing, and everything else rattles about restlessly. There is the constant in and out of my breath. And the whirr of clockwork.

Know the enemy

I needed to understand my adversary. 

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle”   - Sun Tzu, The Art of War 

In May, I started the conversation with Mac with a fairly good idea of who and what he was. I invited him to be a Facebook friend. Miraculously, his vanity and curiosity and fear were stimulated enough and he responded. I wrote, and confronted him, and he responded again. I startled him and he gave away more than he meant to.

I realized very quickly as the correspondence continued that I needed to understand the world of espionage and covert action. I didn't care about the logistical aspects of tradecraft: blending into scenery or cracking safes or entering secure buildings undetected. What I wanted to know was: "Why? What are their guiding principles? What do they care about? What drives them? What do they want? How do they function?" And, most importantly, "How can I negotiate for Sjors?"

I have my own guiding principles. They have to do with truth-telling to self and others; with being good (rather than nice. They are different things); there is something about protecting the weak and fighting injustice. As I've gotten older, a greater portion of my character is consumed with this last piece. I don't seem able to tolerate injustice anymore.  Like Daisy in Gaiman's Anansi Boys, my personal song has in it the repeat refrain, "Evildoers Beware!"

I know myself. I knew that I had lost too much. I knew that I had lost what mattered most. Sjors was lost to me. What did it matter if I launched an insurgency now?  As it got underway, I knew that this fight was more important than any other fight I'd been in.

I knew what I was willing to do, but I didn't know what Mac and his organization would do. Would they come after me? Would they ransack my apartment? Take my stuff? Would they monitor me? Would they confront me in person? I reconnoitered my neighborhood with a friend in case I needed to know a particular egress. I stored my electronics off-site. I packed a "Go bag" and squirreled it for a quick getaway. I'm not Jason Bourne. I don't have special skills in evasion and I could never win in a street fight, but I didn't want to be an easy target, either.

So I began to research. I read articles and books. I watched movies. John Le Carre was helpful. And there was a book about the British spy ring in Washington DC during WWII: The Irregulars, by Jenet Conan that helped me begin to understand the type of thinking and the egos involved in covert collection.  But the most useful information about the methods and motivations of espionage organizations came from David Perry, an ethicist who interviewed CIA handlers and agents and then wrote a 1995 article about it in the Journal of Conflict Studies: Repugnant Philosophy: Ethics, Espionage and Covert Action.

The article shocked me. The most horrifying realization was: my assumptions about Mac & Co. had been built around a general business model, and the reality was far far worse. I have a fairly good grasp of organizational dynamics and the driving principle to protect the institution. This knowledge and instinct has saved me before now (just try to file a gender complaint within any HR department and watch them circle the wagons). When I read Dr. Perry's article, I realized that the model I had built to understand Mac & Co. wasn't malevolent enough. 

Agencies like Mac's are in the business of deception. Lying isn't merely a company recommendation. It is a requirement. All employees must become expert liars. Dr. Perry cites an observation by Hulnick and Matausch:

The Central Intelligence Agency ex-pects, teaches, encourages, and controls these tactics so that the lies are consistent and supported ('backstopped'). The CIA expects intelligence officers to teach others to lie, deceive, steal, launder money, and perform a variety of other activities that would certainly be illegal if practiced in the United States. They call these tactics 'tradecraft,' and intelligence officers practice them in all the world's intelligence services

Okay, then. So they lied. I could tell that after a couple of exchanges with Mac (and it wasn't as though Sjors had been brilliantly truthful to me, either). What else was there?

It was the management of  operatives and agents that made me sick at heart. I saw in Dr. Perry's description of these methods a form of manipulation that I recognized all too well: the "Subtle web of irresistible compromises" and gently guiding the operatives down a path of self-deception. E. Drexel Godfrey, Jr., former Director of Current Intelligence at CIA, strongly criticized CIA methods of recruiting agents, stating that CIA officers are "painstakingly trained in techniques that will convert an acquaintance into a submissive tool... shred away his resistance and deflate his sense of self-worth."

I had seen these manipulations used against Sjors. Or, I should say: I saw the repercussions in Sjors' psyche as the methods were used to bring him in line and keep him there. Ultimately, they succeeded. Sjors is as lost to me as if he had died.

Mac's organization would not use dirty tactics as a last resort. It was where they started. Knowing this, I walk into this with my eyes wide open.