A Circus of Innocence

This week I am in Maine on vacation.  To keep things moving here at Inconvenient Body, I’ve prepared yet another essay for you from the illustrious unpublished, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. The essay offers a challenging and somewhat strange take on innocence: on how we perceive it and what we do with it.

When Christ hung from his cross and the crowd mangled at his feet, hurling insults and horrors, his side leaking water and blood, his ribs broken, he asked His Father to forgive them because they did not know what they did.  With this question, He cleansed them, perceived them as innocent and so they were, washed and forgiven.

When I stayed in a mental hospital with children who lived like old women and men, I was forever distracted by their innocence. Inescapable and luminescent, it caught in their tiny mouths and hands, when they rested even when they engaged the most profane acts. One ten year old boy described to me beating his infant cousin until the baby broke like a ripe squash on a street curb, and his rage to be loved pushed against his words.  He was a child and I was a child and if I had held him he would have pushed his hands to my sex and whispered explicit and pornographic wishes but he was so perverse because he was so innocent.

“All men love their own form of violence,” my hospital friend, Steven told me and this boy’s violence was impoverished and honest.  My form of violence has always turned inward.

I went to my father’s company Christmas party my first year away from home and was disappointed with adults; by their lack of wisdom and conviction; that there existed no indicative line between adulthood and childhood, only time and a bigger body, only more ingrained ways of being and understanding the world.

I cannot believe in guilt.  Guilt is passive and static.  It creates a sense of helplessness and blame.  This is not to say I accept or condone cruelty.  I do not.  I acknowledge that there exist people who look to hurt people, that derive joy from causing others to suffer, but I cannot pint these people black with guilt, because I see myself in them, because I see them in me, because we all needed at core certain things, because I see the greatest love in the greatest angry acts, love transmuted and hurt, love gone sideways.

For years, scientists and mathematicians have studied the shape of the universe.  They have developed software and theorems and formulas and they have come close to translating, to reproducing a like image, a computer generated libertine shape, but their arrival is only an approach, and always they end, tossing up their hands, convinced, professing that the human brain is, indeed limited in its ability to perceive.  We cannot grasp the shape of the universe.  We do not have the faculty to perceive the universe’s shape.  And i guess, this is okay.  We don’t need to.

None of us know what we do.

When I stayed with Josh to start a book, I went with him to a party.  He talked to a girl who I thought was pretty.  She told him doing math turned her on. I think this admission turned him on.  He got her number and promised to call.  I’m sure he did.

We drove back to his apartment and the changing traffic lights crated a jarring tempo of motion.  Forward, stop.  Slow, stop.  Forward.  I waited in the van while Josh ran inside to a gas station to purchase more wine.  I watched two girls smoke cigarettes with a man wearing a Citgo name tag.  One girl was tall with black boots and orange hair.  The other wore a torn skirt.  She was shorter and her hair was died black.  They exhaled out of the corner of their lips.  They talked with the Citgo man who had long hair, thick glasses and large front teeth.

I rolled down my window.

The man asked them what they thought of Asheville and they said through evaporating, sensuous smoke, “It’s delicious.”

“Delicious?”  You want to eat it?” He said, and they laughed by throwing back their heads and licking their lipstick.

“Yeah…Delicious…” I tried to say something of their innocence to Josh, but he came back too late with a bottle of Cabernet.

Federico Fellini’s film 8 1/2 is a surreal carnivalesque charade in which Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a frustrated, stopped up film director preparing to, struggling to produce a new film.  While Guido suffers to come to grips with the movie he creates, the people from his complex life; his wife, his mistress, his mother, persist in swarming around him with their own demands and imprecise emotional connections and implications.

But the film’s last scene is to where I wish to focus.  A grand cinematic curtain call ends this movie:  the entire cast, all the characters from Guido’s life carouse in an enormous, informal circle, dancing to the music of a circus band directed by a child, a little boy.  These people, these characters, everyone associated in some way with Guido, wear predominantly white.  Some hold hands, and they’re going round and round a dilapidated set, the people in his life with resentments, the people in his life with love.  People smile at characters they once loathed.  round and round to circus music, they dance this curtain call, every character, the characters who hated one another, the characters who loved one another, the minor and major characters, all of them hold onto one another in music and movement, a hundred point of light, a hundred humans in white, circling and singing; and it’s all so absurd, but I imagine the end of each life a little like this, where everyone caught up in the story commences to dance; or perhaps, from a greater scope, the end of the world, Hitler spinning the Jew in merry pirouettes, Hitler spinning too, all of us laughing like insane whirling dervishes.  I can take the hand of the people who have wounded me the most because it is okay; the story is over.