PROLOGUE
Much (most, actually) of my adulthood has been pretty solidly consumed by mundane, routine, practical matters; acquiring and honing “marketable” skills, securing (ideally) related work, paying bills, and the like. In my off hours, which has represented a fraction of my time, I have turned my attention, generally passively, to more soulful concerns like how my mother wound up on the streets, the gnawing curiosity of seemingly transformative inner (or are they?) personal experiences, and so on. Over time it has become harder and harder to escape the nagging ever flowering sense of the inauthenticity of my life, given the disconnect between how my days have been spent and the weightier preoccupations of my heart. This is why I decided to return to school. My profound hope is that, in doing so, I will construct a life more in alignment with my psychic energies and more true to my nature.
I think it is precisely because I have been so yearning to carve out some meaningful reflective space that I felt like my “Residency” experience at Goddard actually began on the Greyhound bus ride from Boston to Montpelier, given that those three hours gazing at the shifting landscape were as still as I’ve been in some time. And in fact, the often cacophonous din and near-cyclonic whirlwind of the the actual Residency was so much, in spirit, like the bustle and frenzy of my adult life that, for all of its unique, even soulful, flavors, I felt the deepest impact of Residency just prior to arriving at Goddard, and immediately after leaving. Perhaps it’s fitting, given what I plan to focus on this semester, that I felt most inside the Residency experience when I was just outside of it.
…
Ripples.
I saw them as a fish snatched a treat off the top of a brook in Montpelier. I thought about how that one flash of a moment lingered on in those undulating concentric rings long past the quick snap of the fish’s lips. I thought about how the mesmerizing motion of those orderly expanding circles seemed in stark contrast to the convulsive chaos of the initial violent act.
I thought about memory.
I thought about my mother.
I thought about how the ripples of the pogroms expressed themselves in my mother’s homelessness nearly a century after those initial violent acts against my Jewish ancestors in Odessa.
I thought about my father.
I thought about how the ripples of the Nazis terrorizing my family in Vienna over half a century ago express themselves today in my father’s chronic fear and omnipresent sorrow.
I thought about how, like that momentary snap of the fish’s lips, the memory of a singular violent moment of persecution continues to live on for generations in abstract, ever expanding ripples of pain and grief.
And I thought about how, like the rings on that Montpelier brook, we cannot so easily know the source that set the ripples of anguish in motion as they expand out across many millions over many decades.
Few escape being touched by some tragic fate, and most know the long tail of suffering these tragedies inflict upon a community. A mother loses her young daughter to cancer, triggering such despair that even the local grocer carries the heartache of the loss. A promising young student accidentally kills his best friend in a night of youthful indiscretion, creating wrenching sorrow not only for the effected families, but for even the custodian in the school that both young men attended.
As awful as these events are, however, they are somewhat routine. Neither disease nor folly are ever in short supply. So the circles of suffering generated from these sad moments radiate outward, but they are ultimately limited in scope and impact because of their relative banality.
But what about unthinkable inhumane horrors committed on a mass scale? What of the butchery of Rwanda, or the savagery of Stalin? So shocking and broad are such atrocities, it’s very hard to imagine those ripples not touching nearly every living soul, for generations.
It’s not all that hard to fathom that a near catatonic heroine addict hunched over at this very moment in an alleyway might be at the mercy of a ripple rolling over him, a ripple that started decades ago, or longer. Ripples from Auschwitz, or Wounded Knee, or the generations of strange fruit swinging from the trees.
For years I have been intimately aware that I carry the burden of my family’s anguish. This is not a particularly unique or profound insight. But as I flowed in the torrent of travelers through the fluorescent corridors of Boston’s Logan International Airport, weary from the final leg of my return home from Residency, I began to feel the ripple inside me too. I began to feel the weight of untold lost and broken lives spanning generations interwoven into my story. Recognizing this was not particularly pleasant. But feeling the presence of all those souls did make me feel, curiously, more authentically me.