A Plea for Eros (23 page)

When I say my wound became political in the years that followed, I don’t mean that my involvement in the anti-war movement was somehow insincere or that I have any regrets about my activism. As a champion of the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the poor, and the oppressed, I found a new outlet for the somewhat irrational but nevertheless strong sense I had of being an outsider in a group—uncomfortable, awkward, and quick to feel a slight. Political feeling can’t exist without identification, and mine inevitably went to people without power. In contrast, right-wing ideologies often appeal to those who want to link themselves to authority, people for whom the sight of military parades or soldiers marching off to war is aggrandizing, not painful. Inevitably, there is sublimation in politics, too. It becomes an avenue for suppressed aggression and anger, and I was no exception. And so it was that armed with passion and gorged on political history, I became a firebrand at fourteen. For three years, I read and argued and demonstrated. I marched against the Vietnam War, helped print strike T-shirts at Carleton College after the deaths of four students at Kent State, attended rallies, raised money for war-torn Mozambique, signed petitions, licked envelopes for the American Indian Movement, and turned into a feminist.

But even then, I didn’t believe all the rhetoric—the puerile drivel that escaped the lips of people like Abby Hoffman and members of the Chicago Seven. The militarism of the Black Panthers, the violence of the Weathermen, the shallowness of Guerilla Theater all alienated me. I remember listening to Russell Means, a leader of AIM, one winter afternoon in Minneapolis as he expounded on the superiority of American Indian culture as if it were a monolith and thinking to myself that his polemic distorted the vast differences among tribes to a degree that was nothing short of preposterous. I began to understand that ideologies necessarily push, pull, and tug at reality to make it fit the system. Even when they are committed in the service of a noble cause, lies inevitably make me recoil.

By the time I entered St. Olaf College as a freshman in the fall of 1973, the historical period into which I had been swept had more or less ended. I vividly remember a discussion I had with a sociology professor my first week as a student. He was a former priest who had been a civil rights activist and had marched in Selma. We discussed “the fall of the New Left.”

I
am sitting at the bottom of a row of white steps in a narrow hallway. There is a door with a glass window that leads to the street. I am sobbing. I was sixteen then and had fallen in love with a tall, handsome political agitator five years older than I was. He had ended it. The young women are crouching on the floor trying to comfort me. It is strange that I don’t remember where this took place
—
except that it must have been Minneapolis
—
or who the two people in front of me were. They weren’t close friends, but you would think I could come up with names or at least what they looked like. I also don’t remember how the romance ended. It seems to me that he had written to me, but I have no memory of a letter being delivered to that place. I have repressed it and can’t bring it back, no matter how hard I try. I do know that sitting on those steps, I was inconsolable. My chest heaved. I snorted, honked, and wailed, and the sheer power of my emotion impressed the two hapless witnesses to my heartbreak. I could see it in their astonished faces, the features of which are now lost.

At that moment I was all wound. First loves are often terrible, probably because they are first and there is no conscious history into which they may be absorbed. And yet, the truth is I cried
like a baby,
without inhibition or a shred of dignity to hold me up, and I can’t help but feel awed by that weeper on the stairs. When faced with separation from a person I loved, I traveled backward into the far reaches of my infancy. I would fall in love again, and I would suffer separations again, and I would cry again, but I would never allow myself to sob with such full-throated, unbridled freedom ever again.

I mourned for a year—the year I again found myself in Bergen. I was a student at the venerable Katedral Skolen, founded in the year 1153, and lived outside the city with my aunt and uncle. My parents had arranged it. Although I didn’t talk much about my sorrow to them, they were deeply aware of it, and they understood that I needed to be a world away. In that rainy city of mountains on the western coast of Norway, I nursed my broken heart, visited my beloved grandmother every day, read hundreds of books, wrote bad poetry, and smoked innumerable cigarettes. I was a seventeen-year-old intellectual hermit, and I think it did me good. Not long after I returned to the United States, the old love object appeared at my door. I rejected him, and to this day the memory of turning him away is sweet.

In college I retreated to the library. I have always loved libraries—the quiet, the smell, the expectation of imminent discovery. In the next book I will find it—some unspeakable pleasure or startling revelation or extraordinary nuance I had never felt or thought of before. I sat in the library every day for hours and was happy there, but I hadn’t left home. I attended the college where my father was a professor and where he gave many hours of his time to the Norwegian American Historical Association as executive secretary. The association’s office was in the college library, and my mother worked in the periodical department of that same library. Two years later, my sister Liv was also studying in that library, and three years after that, my sister Ingrid arrived. Only the third sister, Asti, went away for college to work in another library in another town.

One afternoon, I left my carrel to talk to a male friend who was having a sad bout with a girlfriend. When I returned, I found a note on the desk. It was a letter of remorse. The person who had written it had eavesdropped on me and my friend and discovered that his or her ideas about me had been all wrong. I recall perfectly only this sentence: “I thought you were a cold bitch, but now I know you are a kind, good person.” The letter was unsigned. Since I hadn’t been aware of this unknown person’s dislike for me, I didn’t welcome the news, but it didn’t surprise me either. By the time I received that letter, I had traveled great distances from the girl in the sixth grade who wept in the toilet, but I was still suspect and was still an outsider. Provincial life feeds on conformity—on the idea that no one should stick out if she can help it. The crippled, retarded, and senile can’t help it and are forgiven, but sticking out on purpose was regarded as a criticism of the community at large. Who does she think she is? Indeed, who did I think I was? My twelve-year-old self would have loved to be taken in by her tormenters, but the nineteen-year-old had learned to feel contempt for those who lived by the egalitarian prejudice that ruled my hometown and continued to haunt me through my college years in that same town. And yet the child dreaming in the woods behind the family house, who felt solitary and transcendent and possessed of a singular destiny, remained in the young woman in the library, and perhaps people inhaled that strange, arrogant inner belief and reacted with distaste. If the vulnerable aren’t also proud, they are crushed.

I read and I wrote. I wrote stories and poems, far better than the hundreds of pages of awful things I had written in high school. The college literary magazine rejected everything I had to offer. It is interesting to me that I recall those rejections with bitterness but have entirely forgotten other, later rejections. Only a few months ago, I moved my study from one room to another and organized my papers. Among them I found several rejection letters from literary magazines, some of them very long and detailed, which I had no memory of ever having received. It may be that those early dismissals of my writing smacked of personal antipathy, that it hardly mattered what I wrote, whereas the later letters were merely a matter of literary taste. All in all, my inner life with books during college was better than life on campus, and I nurtured vague dreams of leaving Minnesota and its sturdy, sincere, polite Lutherans for somewhere more vivid, more dangerous, more anything.

In the fall of 1975, I signed on for a semester in the Far East. I left home without quite leaving it because the faculty supervisors of the trip were my own parents, and my three sisters came along as well. I was twenty years old, a young woman in a trembling state of readiness for adventure. While a few of my fellow students came down with culture shock, I spent the early weeks of the trip in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in a feverish trance of pleasure. By the time we arrived in Chiang Mai, Thailand, my body had become so awake to sensual stimuli—to the piercing noises of strange birds, the lilt of Mandarin and Cantonese vowels, colors in the market places so brilliant they almost hurt, the new odors of flowers, the pungent smell of meats, and the stink of unknown fruits— that I felt almost reborn. It is perhaps the only time in my life from which I have no memory of reading anything. I must have read because I took classes, but it couldn’t have mattered very much. The words have vanished.

We spent three months in Chiang Mai, and like countless Europeans and Americans before me, I fell under the spell of an eastern enchantment I didn’t want to break. It was a form of cultural tipsiness, I suppose, a need to plunge into what I had never seen or tasted before. My years in Norway had been spent with the familiar. I knew the language. My mother’s family and my father’s relatives lived in that country. In sharp contrast, Thailand was radically foreign. I fell in love with a Thai man, V., and entered a period that on hindsight looks like an explosion of pent-up desire. Every day upon waking I felt it—a wild happiness that surged through me for weeks on end.

My senses remained on high alert, and even thinking back on that time makes me feel giddy. I could never have a similar experience now. I have too much behind me, too many references, stories, too many years of thoughts. I was raw then. Unlike many of my recollections that are weirdly drained of all hues, like a black-and-white movie, my memories of Thailand blaze with color.

I am looking down at the deep brown, wrinkled, and extremely dirty face of a man from one of the hill tribes. He is smiling at me with ochre teeth. His clothes are royal blue and red and covered with silver ornaments that catch the sunlight. In his face I can see that he finds me just as marvelous as I find him.

It is a cool night, and I am standing on the steps of V.’s house when a
tuk-tuk,
one of the small trucks that serve as Chiang Mai’s taxis, stops on the road. P. and several others climb out and walk toward us, but it is only P. whom I remember without blur. He is tripping toward me with an enormous grin on his face, dressed in a white T-shirt, narrow blue jeans, and over his shoulders he has draped a brilliant pink feather boa. He stretches out his arms for my embrace and calls out my name: “Sili! Sili!”

V. and I are walking toward the village on a dirt road spotted with pale marks from the sunlight that shines through the dark green trees. Five or six children are walking toward us. One of them is carrying a blaring radio in his arms that blasts out the popular song about Muhammad Ali. I hear the words “dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” When they get closer, they eye me, begin to shriek, turn, and run fast in the opposite direction. I can see their thin brown legs pumping hard, the dust rising beneath their bare feet. V. turns to me. “The’re shouting the Thai word for spirit. They think you’re a ghost.”

I am watching a small orange lizard on the wall through a gauze of mosquito netting as the afternoon sun shines through the window. The memory is as still as a photograph, and if there was any noise at all, I have forgotten it.

Only the unprotected self can feel joy.

There was another side. I saw two literal wounds during those three months.

The streets are so crowded, it’s difficult to move. The whole city has come out for the Festival of Lights. The Mekong River is burning with light from a thousand boats, some tiny, some larger, illuminated by torches and candles. V. and I are walking together, holding hands to keep from being separated by the pushing throng. My sister Asti is somewhere behind me with other friends, and then ahead of me there is a burst of red. Blood. The back of a man. Something has hit his shoulder. The memory is in slow motion, clearly a distortion of what really happened, and yet I watch as the crowd parts, opens onto a view of what? I don’t know. People are scrambling away, and V. tugs hard at my arm. There must have been shouting and screaming, but I can’t recall these sounds, only add them to the confusion. “Someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the crowd,” V. tells me. I still don’t know how he knew that. I don’t bother to ask. I don’t feel anything. I note this. I’ve seen a terrible thing, and I’m not responding. Was it because I didn’t see it well enough? Wasn’t it real to me? It’s as if I’m anesthetized, absent.

I am near the Burmese border, watching an operation. A young man has been in a motorcycle accident, and his right leg is badly injured. There is blood all over the operating table. I can see the enormous gash in his leg, a messy, deep wound. I am looking down at him and the physicians from a small balcony. Beside me is the doctor with whom I have traveled. I’ve been living with him, his wife, and his daughter since I arrived in Chiang Mai. I look down at the leg and say to myself, Siri, you are looking down at his injury, and you are okay. You are tougher and stronger than you thought. I silently admire myself. A few seconds later, I feel dizzy. Then the familiar nausea rises up in
my stomach. It has happened before. I feel it coming. My knees give way, and I’m fainting.

Not long after I returned to the United States, I fell violently ill. For days, I lay in bed with a head that felt like someone had left an axe in it. I became a vomiting, shuddering ruin that couldn’t stand upright or tolerate any light from the window. The vertigo and nausea came and went, but the pain in my head remained in varying forms and degrees for eight long months. While I sat in the library, dutifully reading through the pain, I blamed myself for generating a bizarre psychosomatic symptom, a punishing head that made it hard to see, hard to read, hard to think—in short, hard to do what I had to do. But the worst was that as time wore on, I became more and more afraid of myself, or perhaps more conscious of the fear I have always had—a fear that within me is some danger I can’t name.