Photo © Steve Ford Elliott
The Breaking Point
There is a point in a singer’s voice, between upper and lower register, where the voice breaks, where the instrument must shift. A similar threshold exists in my own soul, where I move from the power of thought and action to the power of prayer. It is a place I return to often.
The position of this point adjusts itself almost daily, buffeted by moods, hormones, caffeine consumption. Certain philosophies help to raise its level: the Stoics’, to use an ancient example, with their suggestion that I trust in the wisdom of nature enough to allow it unquestioned license to direct my life; the Tao with its image of water taking its natural course, filling the empty places, moving around obstacles without force. These and other methods of thought have aided me when I am feeling particularly vulnerable and my breaking point requires some repositioning. But, I have never managed to push this point out of reach. Something wise tells me not to.
Certain sights are sure to hurl me reeling to this point: a neglected animal tied up in someone’s backyard, a half-crazed parrot in a lonely cage, one of my plays (I am a playwright) that has not been allowed a life, sitting on a shelf in my closet. These and other images of life unlived and unloved easily threaten to break me.
Several months ago I reached my breaking point over what most would deem a non-breaking point issue. It all began in a local pet store where my husband and I were buying dog food. We were headed out the door when a rather vigorous woman turned to me and seemed to continue a conversation that I had not been aware we had started. She apologized for her dog, whom I had never met, and explained that the animal had been a rescue case. I glanced out the window of the store and did see a couple of canines in a car. She went on to explain that a veterinarian in Connecticut had begged her to take on a difficult stray, a female mixed breed, who was big, aggressive trouble. The vet told her that if she didn’t agree to take the dog, they would have to put her down, as no one but this woman, with her noted powers of animal communication, could handle such a creature. She promptly drove to Connecticut.
At this point I turned to my husband and told him that I would meet him in the car.
The professional pet psychic (for this is what she professed to be) went on to tell me of the miserable fights that this new dog was having with the dog that already lived in her home. Dreadful, bloody battles these were, until she laid down the law. She grew quite animated.
“I took them both by the scruff of the neck and I said: APOLOGIZE TO EACH OTHER!!!” And, reliving the scene before me: “YOU WILL APOLOGIZE THIS INSTANT!!”
I was still trying to work out how I had entered this conversation.
“Well,” the pet psychic puffed, “they never fought again.”
At this point there was a slight pause, which I gathered I was to fill. After careful consideration, I asked, “What’s her name?” This seemed the safest question and one that could be answered with only a word. It seems I misjudged my new acquaintance.
“Purity,” she answered. “I always let my animals name themselves.”
“Oh,” I replied.
“My other dog insisted on being called ‘the Sundance Kid’.”
“Hmmm,” I replied and scooted out the door.
“So are we to assume,” my husband asked in the car, “that this dog had seen the film and wanted the Robert Redford role?”
On the way home I reflected on my pet psychic. I do believe in communication between human and animal and have known people who seem to have a genuine gift in this area. But the pet psychic didn’t seem to view this ability as a gift so much as a power, a power that she possessed over animals. There appeared to be no mystery, no delicate balance. She ruled and they followed. Not only could she boss around her own animals, but she could come for a fee and boss around yours.
This is why, I went on to reason with myself, I would never bring such an item as a cat into my home. I do not possess this woman’s confidence in control. My dogs would be sure to make hourly attempts to murder the poor thing, and I would be a wreck over the domestic disharmony.
The next day the cat happened.
He had been living for the last two years in a horse barn on my farm, about a half-mile from my house. There are many feral and not-so-feral cats living on the farm, but this people-friendly cat decidedly belonged in someone’s home. The day after the pet psychic incident, the cat became very ill and I rushed him to the animal hospital. After three days, several near-death experiences, and a thousand dollars, the cat was recuperating in an upstairs bedroom, as my dogs lounged around the living room in unsuspecting canine lethargy.
Within a week I could be heard laying down the law: “APOLOGIZE TO HIM!!” I firmly suggested to the dogs, after a rather unfriendly chase scene. “APOLOGIZE TO HIM THIS INSTANT!!”
This did not seem to have the least effect. In fact nothing that I did or said was of the slightest use, and I was therefore completely dependent on repetitive begging of the Heavens for intervention. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been that annoying. I feared they would never listen to me again.
The issue was that I could not bear the thought of taking the cat back to the barn. It would have broken me. Not only did he have a condition that required human supervision for him to remain alive but, from the moment I picked him up from the barn, half dead and purring, I was completely gone over him. When I allowed myself to imagine the situation not working out and having to return him to the barn, I burst into tears. In fact, I was a big weepy mess for several weeks.
If this seems an exaggerated response, I think I can explain. In some way, the idea of bringing this new being into my home reminded me of when I bring something I have written into the world and that something languishes on the vine and I can’t look at the thing without crying. Had I brought my kitty back to the barn, I never could have looked at him again without a fit of melancholia. So I kept him.
It has been just over two months, and somehow, a slow, creeping miracle has occurred. An atmosphere of perfect peace has seeped into our home. I never would have dreamed it possible. Yesterday I saw one of the dogs licking the top of the cat’s head, and it wasn’t to test if he were done. We are all palling around now in harmonious bliss, due partly, I must assume, to my incessant nagging of the divine.
Perhaps, just perhaps, this is a hopeful sign for the little neglected plays, the ones that make me cry. The ones that, I confess, almost daily threaten to break me.
I can understand why certain philosophies attempt to avoid this breaking point altogether. It is never a very comfortable place. The New Age offers its various recipes for avoidance. The New Age is a very general term and mustn’t be viewed as a single philosophy. It might be seen as a blowing apart of rigid, dogmatic thinking, and of this I greatly approve. Unfortunately, some of what is left after the dust settles, to grossly generalize, too often amounts to just more positive-thinking theology.
William James, in his essay “The Religion Of Healthy-Mindedness,” writes of this circling, sanguine philosophy. (Apparently there was a New Age that occurred at the turn of the century before this one.) “Mind-cure,” the movement was called. He points to the familiar, mad avoidance of negative thinking, and the great benefits of thinking positively. This “Gospel of Healthy-Mindedness,” James writes, “is wholly and exclusively compacted of optimism.”
Reiterating the philosophy of one of the “most vigorous mind-cure writers,” James quotes: “Pessimism leads to weakness. Optimism leads to power. If your thoughts are of health, youth, vigor, and success, before you know it these things will also be your outward portion.”
But how are we to manage, one wonders, when we are no longer either youthful or vigorous? When our health fails? When we fail?
I knew a woman once who worshipped at the shrine of youth and vigor. She took a hundred vitamins a day and at age ninety still proudly managed a bicycle and a pair of cross-country skis, and associated with no one over the age of forty. Indeed she had no patience with “old people.” When, at the age of ninety-four, she was finally diagnosed with cancer, she came home, went to her bedroom, shut the door, and screamed.
“In some individuals,” James notes, “optimism may become quasi-pathological.”
I am reminded of those today who will claim that “everything is perfect.”
“American soldiers are torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison,” one might mention.
“Hmm, well, you know what they say. Everything’s perfect.”
“Perfect? . . . Oh, you mean perfectly abhorrent.”
“No, perfect.”
“Ah.”
It’s interesting that the “Religion of Healthy-Mindedness” has circled around again. For the remainder of the century, it seems, positive thinking may be its own reward. Grace, some call it.
Of course there is power in affirmative thought, power in all thought. Much has been written about this force and its connection to healing. There must be some truth to the notion that a healthy mind will produce a healthy body, but it can be a cruel, heartless notion for those who are not healing if they are made to feel responsible not only for their inability to heal but for the disease itself. And, how can this attitude be of any value to the unhealthy mind? I have had depressions land and lift like great dark, heavy birds. Perch and fly away with no explanation. At such times I seem to have set up permanent camp at the breaking point. Had anyone suggested, during these strange roosting periods, that I simply apply the power of bright-thinking, I would have fallen over the edge.
There are times—when someone dies too young, your house burns down, you find yourself in a prison camp—where cheerful thinking simply will not answer. The idea that we are the absolute creators of our lives is very tricky. “Be careful what you ask for,” you hear, as if some idiot God were up there blindly filling orders.
Much of this turn-of-the-century thinking supposes that we were sent into this world simply to discover the secret to a winning life. Apart from the fact that so little appears to be learned from winning, what conclusions are we to derive from the lives of those who very decidedly lose? Are we to assume that the Jews of the 20th century were just a group of negative thinkers? the Afghani a pile of poo-pooers? the Haitians a bunch of sourpusses?
My suspicion is that this thinking is far too tied-up with the reward/punishment theory, a nasty ideology which has plagued religious thinking for centuries. I highly suspect any philosophy that views suffering as punishment and grace as reward. Any doctrine that suggests that if you follow this and that rule, you can control the level of reward and punishment that comes your way, whether on this side of the grave or the other, should be detoured.
Reward/punishment, success/failure, winning/losing, Heaven/Hell, all of these systems rely on blame and deserving; entirely focused on the past, they deny the eternal. They misguide us and create systems—our prison system, for instance—that go nowhere. I met a woman once who believed that good people were granted easy deaths and bad people difficult ones. I fear this heinous system of thought is more entrenched in us than we might like to imagine.
When I tell people about my mother’s wrestlings with Alzheimer’s, for instance, I often hear things like: “Oh, she didn’t deserve that.”
Does anyone? I think.
“She was so vital.”
So should this only happen to the dullards? I wonder.
Don’t imagine that I have discovered a foolproof method to avoid this kind of thinking. In my weaker moments, while contemplating the possible future stages of my mother’s illness, I have imagined myself before a Heavenly tribunal, arguing on her behalf. Eventually I put forth that insidious argument: “But she doesn’t deserve this.” I hastily apologize: “But I’m not the one running this world, am I?” If I were, we would all be perpetual softies with perfect teeth, wallowing in our daily winnings. Every day would be Christmas, our pets would all outlive us, and we would never feel discomfort, not even sunburn. In short, we would never come anywhere near the breaking point. And when at last we find ourselves standing there, like the woman who couldn’t admit that she was aging and would someday die, we are sure to suffer spinning vertigo.
To return to the metaphor of the singer, when I spend too much time in the lower register, I, like the pet psychic, begin to fool myself into thinking that I am in control. When I spend too much time in the upper, I begin to doubt whether I have any control whatsoever, whether I shouldn’t just spend my days under the covers in a state of badgering supplication.
“I’ll pray about it,” is a much-abused phrase. Once, I had a lengthy conversation with a woman about another whom we feared was on the verge of suicide. Having agreed on the severity of the situation and the need for intervention, she replied, “Well, I’ll pray for her.”
In the sixties we called that a cop-out.
“Oh, goody,” I was tempted to reply, “I’ll go back to my nap.”
But why then are we on the ground? It’s all well and fine to ask that the air force be called in, but at some point, I’m afraid, we must expect to be deployed. How else is this divine aid going to manifest itself?
I do not wish to imply that I am immune to this upper-register thinking. My list of prayers is far longer than my list of good deeds. The challenge has always been to bring the two into some sort of proportion. This, I believe, is where a trip to the breaking point comes in handy.
The Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield suggests that we take the feelings that consistently threaten to break us and look them dead in the eye (I paraphrase) and name them. This naming of such responses, he promises, will eventually result in their losing their power over us. Mr. Kornfield refers to names such as Anger, Fear, Disappointment. I’ve taken his advice and have named the feeling I have at the sight of a neglected piece of writing. I call him Bob.
When Bob raises his mighty head, instead of looking the other way, as I might have done in the past, I might say, “Oh, there’s Bob again. Let’s skip the preliminaries, Bob,” I suggest, “and go directly to the breaking point.” I imagine us on an arid sort of rocky precipice, dangling off the side of a gloomy mountain. “Sit down, Bob.” I offer, “let me look you dead in the eye.”
My next move is usually a mad, searching look to the Heavens. “Help?!”
This method of avoiding whirling nausea is, I am happy to report, having its desired effect. With every return visit, Bob grows a bit thinner and I more robust. I can stand quite close to the edge now without dizziness and I almost see the day when I’ll be performing gravity-defying acrobatics.
I can see the wisdom in this return. This is why I believe life is so exquisitely designed to bring me back to my breaking point, because it is at this point that I let go the illusion of self-control as well as the assumption of divine-control. Stripped of these two extremes, I hope to find myself one day, trusting, just inches from the edge, executing the perfect cartwheel.
Copyright © 2009 by Margaret Dulaney
