Illusion of Martyrdom
Yesterday, I was flipping through a book of Joni Mitchell interviews, and I came across a painting that she’d done entitled 40 Below O. The contrast between the bright yellows of Joni’s clouds, which bled into the dark blurs of barren trees that defined the shiny snow of the road that bisected the canvas, transformed the painting into a window.
Memories of my windows flooded me. When I was sixteen, I drove out to Brookfield on a snow-hardened day to visit my terminally ill Nana, who spent her days in her recliner, wrapped in as many afghans as she had in the house, listening to Ask Your Neighbor on local radio, and looking out her window at I don’t know what. It turned out that on that January day in 1990, she was looking out for me. Freshly licensed and woefully inept, I made the turn onto the shiny snow of Nana’s and Bupa’s cul-de-sac’s road, having to make two abrupt right turns. I executed the first one with perfection, which got me into the cul-de-sac, but the second one gave me problems. The snow was too hard – and I was too unskilled – to make the glide up their driveway elegant and true. I turned the wheel too abruptly, and my skidding and jolting to a stop just short of their garage door was theater for my ailing Nana.
My antics had transformed the living room’s window, out of which she looked on an hourly basis, into a surprise – a physical comedy starring me: falling as I got out of the car, drenching my MUHS letterman’s jacket in show, and falling again as I tried to get the snow off of my shoes on the black, dachshund-shaped scraper that was just outside their front door.
When I finally managed to stumble inside, I found Bupa standing as tall, thin, and strong as always in the entryway. He was waiting for me – and before he could finish saying, “That was quite a performance, Paulus,” he had me on my way to a hot shower and a change of clothes.
So that was why I wore Bupa’s flannel shirt and cords, which seemed to have been beamed to their retirement home directly from the 1940s or 1950s but were oddly and simultaneously contemporary to the grunge scene that was brewing up in 1990, to greet my Nana. She turned to look at me, so that I could see her weary face framed in her window out of which she usually looked and hear her say in an equally weary voice, “You’re a good driver, Paul.”
Improbable statements tend to ring true more and more as time passes; I now know what my Nana understood about me that day. I am an amalgamation, a composite, a site where the roads on skill and ineptitude meet. I am tragicomic; I am absurd. I am alone; I am with others. I am sick with the cardiomyopathy that will one day kill me and, predictably unpredictable, more alive and vital than ever.
I am a window to a cul-de-sac, despite my attraction to Joni’s road, which straightly and brightly recedes into the canvas and demarcates the possibility to achieve illumination through the contemplation that loneliness affords.
Like a Buddhist monk, like Leonard Cohen maybe, Joni was built for the road of inward journey – for the straight drive into the infinity of the self, where enlightenment lies in wait.
I was “Paulus” – as Bupa called me, parodying the Greek version of St. Paul, after whom my parents named me – a cul-de-sac of a boy destined for the conversion of himself and others, for writing for and about others; a boy destined to fall off his horse and have visions, to lose control and take it back again, to offer others the gift of freedom through the institution of control; a boy destined to become a preachy writer of a man who died a martyr to the cause about which he wrote so vehemently in at least seven of the Epistles of the New Testament.
The picture of Paulus that hung in my childhood bedroom – which rendered his frail body and the sword, the instrument of his martyrdom – scared me and somehow imbued me with the cul-de-sac of contradictions and confusions of which I’m constituted.
The picture oversaw my dreaming as I recovered from the cancer that shaped me by destroying my heart. And what is a novel but a dream? And what is my dream but the illusion of martyrdom?