Following Northbird

Shin-pei at Northbird posted on Country Boys, a Frontline special that ran a while back about life for two boys growing up in Appalachian Kentucky. She links to the program if you have the time. I confess: to this point, I have not had the time to sit down and watch it. I hope to. Nevertheless, what she says in her post seems poignant enough to me -- I get the sense that, in her few paragraphs, she kind of covers it. The weariness, boredom, and dissociation of a lonely kid; the groping for faith in isolation and redemption in community.

Shin-pei touches on her own experience as an immigrant to this country and relates to the steep price that can be asked of an adolescent by a set of difficult family circumstances. It struck me reading her description of the two boys and from what she expressed about her own life that my own experience may be the exact opposite -- being someone who was basically sheltered and, out of all well meaning, not asked too soon to face much that was threatening. Yes, there was the neighborhood terrorist. And of course there was much else that was troublesome, that was carefully hidden from my view and experience. But what's a neighborhood bully when you've got protection, or a damaging secret when you haven't got a clue? For many who are not so well protected the lessons come early and hard and it's sink or swim.

Shin-pei says that "The... thing I pay close attention to when I get a chance to get close to another life is how people live their days - how they get to work or school, what they do in their free time, how they get their groceries, run everyday errands, how they choose to get together and meet other."

Something that I try to figure out when I get to know someone is where they are coming from; what shaped them -- what have they witnessed and what they have had to do. I have a profound interest in people's childhood years, how they feel and talk about it. This can be difficult to know. For one thing, I'm not the type to conduct probing interviews and, for another, these are things that people, often for good reason, will take pains to suppress. But -- if you're paying attention to those that you're close to, you will usually come to know these things about them. And when you know these things, you may feel as though you understand them for the first time. And in my experience it's been for the better.

It's easy to forget, while pushing through the usual crowds, the wildly varying circumstances that have created each one of us, even those of us who are in the same family, or group. We push into our categories and begin the difficult work to conform, to fit into it something somehow, into someone else's potential satisfaction with us, perhaps. We may at first ignore our different histories -- we may have to -- not out of open-mindedness, but so we (so we think) can begin afresh, as though the time before we met could have been anything at all, so it's not a hinderance. But the time before is too crucial to be ignored long. And when the ignorance persists, there is the greater potential for sudden and deep divisions, mistakes that are misunderstood, seemingly arisen from nowhere and unfathomable. We are used to not knowing, not asking, not telling, not really caring about or wanting to investigate our real differences -- this may even be so that we can get along. But origin is the best trail-head to the current reality. It seems it's always ignored at the longer-term peril of a relationship -- or a society.

I say all this, not necessarily because it's on point, but just because Northbird's post got me thinking about it. I know there's a lot more to it.

Shin-pei also talks about moving to the big city, and how she felt less lonely being unknown there within its clamor, then she did in the suburban community of her youth. This is interesting. I always remark to anyone I happen to be travelling with through the Bronx on route 95 how incredibly anonymous and dejected it can make you feel from the vantage of passer-by. How all of those hulking, sprawling, apartment buildings and projects seem so nameless, so lost and desperate. When you look into the distance and perceive Manhattan in all its daunting complexity, it too seems like something that could never really know you, and that you could never really know.

But then you live there for awhile, experience it from street level. There is little sense of isolation -- you're crowded in close with so many going through the same motions, seeing the same things. It's incredibly comforting to know that you're alive with all of these other people in the same moment, the same city, the same neighborhood, the same block, the same building. I've lived in other big cities, and I've never stayed in NYC for too long a stretch of time. But -- and maybe this gets into all of those "New York State of Mind" cliches -- there's no other city I know that's as comforting to the individual, and yet as collective-identity crazed. There's no other city that is as entertaining when you're solo. And it's not just a "hey what was that, isn't that kind of weird?" type of novelty entertainment. The city's geography is an everyday poetic landscape on par with a great wilderness or abiding myth and its everyday people seem presented -- as though on a stage -- exclusively for prolonged and often provocative character study. Relating to others, and connecting with others, becomes easier the more you observe them. In New York, the community quickly becomes a part of you.

But then I think of those gloomy, massive, anonymous-seeming buildings that loom and surround Manhattan. How that eery weight must be a part of everyone who lives there. I think of those "Country Boys" whose backwood isolation seems a curse to them. And I have a question. If solitude can be a healthy and necessary thing and if isolation is a given, no matter who you are or what you do, when does solitude and fleeting isolation become exile? And exactly how much of it are we willing to allow in our midst?

"Exile," a collage by Paula Rego