Mapquest, revenge, and "Finlandia" III

~~ Sunday evening ruminations, Part Three

Finally:

We sang a hymn in church on Sunday. I recognized the melody of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, but we didn't sing the words I was thinking of.

When I came home, I went online and found the words I'd had in mind. Turns out they're Lloyd Stone's:




This is my song 
Oh god of all the nations
A song of peace
For lands afar and mine


This is my home
The country where my heart is
Here are my hopes
My dreams my holy shrine


But other hearts
In other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams
As true and high as mine


My countries skies
Are bluer than the ocean
And sunlight beams
On clover leaf and pine


But other lands
Have sunlight too and clover
And skies are everywhere
As blue as mine



Not only is the melody enough to break your heart, but the words really cut right to the heart of the matter: no matter how different we are, we're the same.

Which means that for every snarky blog posting I write about solipsistic people and emotionally-stunted people and Felix Unger-types who go behind your back and take the hand towel from where you slung it and fold it neatly in thirds and place it over the towel bar so that the ends are exactly even … someone else could write the same number of snarky blog posts about people who talk too much and too loudly and are hyper-sensitive and chaotic and Oscar Madison-types who have to tunnel through the clutter just to find the kitchen.

And all it does is add to the general snarkiness of the Universe and doesn't do a damn thing toward moving anyone closer to that ultimate goal of the friend who sees you and loves you and accepts you just exactly as  you are.

So. Perhaps the time comes when you're done venting and journaling and bending the ears of friends and therapists … when you're done moving the slider in on everything that went wrong and have finally zoomed out to a place where you have a tiny bit of perspective … when you've put (most) of your revenge fantasies away or at least delegated them to friends with more creative imaginations than yours … when you substitute the wine and the Kleenex for a pile of warm dogs and a slasher movie where the bad guy gets it … then you get to that place where glib doesn't cut it any more and perhaps needs a rest, anyway.

That place where you grieve what might have been … the end of what was … and where the sadness comes, too, from the knowledge that there is no villain. So it's not simple and it's not tidy and it's not glib … and the worst part is, it's not your first time at this particular rodeo and it won't be the last.

So you cry.

Yeah, what he said ...

Speak harshly to no one,
or the words will be thrown
right back at you.
Contentious talk is painful,
for you get struck by rods in return.

-Dhammapada, 10, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

Mapquest, revenge, and “Finlandia” II

 ~~ Sunday Evening Ruminations, Part Two
 

Astonishing, when you think about it, in a society where we make such a fuss over The Golden Rule, and where the majority of folks are Christians who can quote you Jesus' admonition to "turn the other cheek," how utterly committed we are to the idea of revenge.

We don't even think about it, usually. Getting back at someone who has wronged you, evening up the score, teaching them a lesson; it's the default response.

No matter what warm and fuzzy things we're saying in church and teaching our children when we're doing so deliberately, the minute we turn our backs almost every television show and movie is preaching the gospel of revenge. Seriously. Take a piece of scratch paper and a pencil and watch an evening of network television and see how many revenge motifs you count. It will blow your mind.

So it's not surprising, I suppose, that as I contemplated the appropriate way to formally end this relationship, revenge crossed my mind.

My former minister (that's what makes this story particularly delicious, I think) shared with me a pocket-daydream/revenge fantasy of hers that always cheered her up enough to drop whatever snarkiness was going through her mind: hitting her ex-husband over the head with a grain shovel, complete with a full-fledged Wile.E.Coyote-type sound effect – kuh-WONNNGGGG!

Of course, let's be frank; I don't really have much to revenge. OK, I got an email that I perceived was unnecessarily hostile/rude and really did, as far as I could tell, come out of nowhere. Between commas, it managed to defame the Minnesota Clean Water, Land and Legacy amendment; the arts; the Guthrie; the city of my residence; my blogs (including the one just named by one Perceptive Soul as one of the Top Ten Best in the country); my friend's radio show; and my behavior two days earlier (I asked him to pull over to the side of the road so I could photograph an eagle. OK, I kinda flipped out over it, but still …). But once I decoded the sentence "…Not to mention, the screaming eagle incident, when which I was very much ready to send you on your own way.... If you only knew, how much I did NOT care for your behavior in the slightest!" I have to admit, I got pissed and started contemplating ways to "get him back."

But the trouble with rumination (defined, [weirdly enough, by Merriam-Webster's Medical Dictionary] as "obsessive or abnormal reflection upon an idea or deliberation over a choice") is that your brain doesn't know when to quit. After I'd written and discarded a baker's dozen of Snotty Emails, drafted and performed at least three Dramatic Kiss-Off Monologues, and outlined at least four Devastate-Him-Utterly-And-Leave-Him-Desperate-To-Get-Me -Back phone calls, I was left scraping the bottom of the revenge-barrel for something to chew on.

For example: even if I did deliver one of these carefully crafted messages; what did I want to happen? OK, I was hurt and wanted to hurt back, but I wouldn't be there to observe his reaction. So how would I know I'd hurt him?  And if I didn't know, how would that be satisfying? Not to mention in the few instances in life where I actually have hurt someone face-to-face, it was such a dreadful experience I certainly wouldn't want to repeat it, no matter how angry I was.

I've always played certain emotions pretty close to the vest. Part of it is the tiny fragment of Scandinavian-ness (-inity? –viousness?) that's survived theater, speech team and years of therapy, but mostly it's the conviction that if you reveal too much, you're giving the world the leverage to … get you. (OK, so maybe he wasn't the only one who was hypervigilant and paranoid.) The point being, you go out in public with your neckline high enough, your hemline low enough, and your psychosis gagged and bound so you're not showing anyone anything you don't want them to see. And if you're going to go all "Fatal Attraction" on the guy who doesn't return your affection, in addition to incurring the wrath of the ASPCA, you may as well take out a full page ad in the New York Times saying "You broke my heart and I'm an Emotional Cripple."" VERY un-Minnesotan. Hugely embarrassing. And if he's already broken your heart, why give him more ammunition?

If you're not going to get any satisfaction from hurting this person (no matter how much your loyal friends insist he has it coming) and you don't want to give him any more evidence of how truly infatuated/hurt/unstable you really are, what's left?

If you're a graduate of Mrs. Van Zant's Humanities course (I, II or III), you know that the true interpretation of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is not revenge. It means that if I take your eye … I must see for you. If I take your tooth … I must feed you. If I hurt you … I need to make it right.

So what obligation do I incur if I lash out at someone with the intent to hurt? I'm not sure … but I suspect I wouldn't like it.

Medea wasn't kidding when she said, "We must not think too much.  People go mad if they think too much." 

Mapquest, revenge, and "Finlandia" I

~~ Sunday evening ruminations, Part One


When you put an address in Mapquest and then click on "aerial map," you can use the slider to zoom in and get an up-close, detailed view of your target, or zoom out to put your target in perspective. Interestingly enough, although you can back up almost indefinitely to see your target's relationship to the neighborhood, the city, the state or the earth, when you try to zoom in too close, you get this message: "Data not currently available. Try zooming out or mapping a new location."

For me, being at odds with someone puts me in an emotional space similar to surfing Mapquest -- to be more accurate, an impatient kid surfing Mapquest who keeps flailing about with the slider.

I'd been dating a fellow for about a month when it became obvious that it wasn't going to work out. So the question became who was going to end it and how, further complicated by the advent of (insert genuflection here)... Deer Season.

First I psychoanalyzed every encounter I'd ever had with this man; marshaling every argument and zooming in on every bit of evidence to support my diagnosis of his control issues, his abandonment issues, his insecurity, his rudeness and his inability to punctuate without scattering a handful commas at random in every sentence.

The Guilty Party thus established, I moved on to composing scathing assessments of his behavior, zooming in on his marital status (and the reasons behind same), his selfishness, his inability to even feign interest in anyone's else's life or interests, and perhaps, as the final blow, to offer a few choice examples where I'd feigned interest. Or ...  faked it. Call it what you will....

We've all been there.  Zooming in to the point where we feel we're trapped in a spider web of  thinking and every thought just enmeshes us further. "Data not currently available"?  Not really the problem.  "Data making you nuts?"  That is the question.  And "try zooming out or mapping a new location" is not bad advice, for Mapquest OR an obsessing session.

So, madness looming and with no appropriate medications on hand, I tried to zoom back and see The Big Picture. What was the Big Picture again? Oh, right. We were going to have to break up. Probably. Unless he got his act together. Unless he changed. Unless he started treating me with respect and kindness.

Unless I got too lonely and decided we'd just let things go until Deer Season was over. 
Sigh. 
No, the Big Picture, seeing this thing in the context and perspectives of Life, The Universe and Everything, was we weren't a good fit. Truth to tell, I wasn't any better a fit for him than he was for me, and the Big Picture was not (really) when to end this … but how.