A Dangerous Box of Thoughts

This last week has been a challenging time for me. I was trying to be a bit of a Pollyanna, but things did not go as I hoped, and I am now feeling more like Pandora. It is all well and good to say there will be winners and losers in an election, but sadly, the real loser here is our country’s ability to be united. The upcoming administration will not be kind to many people, and the long-term ramifications may be dangerous to our sense of community as well as the global order. The incoming group of folks have agendas that support egos and financial interests, not the interests of our society as a whole. It makes me sad to realize this is the direction the majority of Americans desire. It also makes me want to crawl into a shell, pull in my head and wallow in sadness. Careening thoughts can be dangerous to mental health, and I am struggling to contain them in my life. 

This artwork speaks to my current chaos. I suspect some will find it “creepy”, but anxiety can be creepy, taking over a person’s health and well-being with an insidious creep. The artist (name unclear) titled the piece “Privacy”, with the box a metaphor for their brain storm. The work is a pen drawing, and spells out the artist’s worry:  “In this box are all the secrets and hopes of my life. Don’t look inside. Don’t peek. Mine mine mine.”

I do sense the artist was a man, though it is unclear why he felt his privacy was threatened, and unclear why he included the two birds. I am not as concerned about my privacy, but I do relate to the box metaphor. I remember as a child thinking of my brain as a file cabinet. I literally visualized a file box, and when I could not recall something, I would mull where I might have “filed” it. This explains my obsessive need to organize – a way of managing the chaos of life so I can function smoothly. I do think it is partly due to my dyslexia, as my siblings all were effortlessly intelligent and skilled at mastering things I could no more do than I could fly to the moon (foreign languages, musical instruments, standardized tests). I compensated by organizing my life, and when emotions became overwhelming, I would clean. Still do actually. So in case you are wondering, my house is currently undergoing a rather draconic purge.

When I was in college, my younger brother was residing at a school in Minnesota for various issues. Our family traveled to MN for a family meeting, with my journey rather involved as I was living in London at the time. The meeting was to support our brother, and discuss our family issues. I do not think it was a very successful project, sadly, as the issues in our family were too entrenched and all of us were rather “unevolved” at that time (1984). What I do remember is telling the therapist I felt each of us were trapped in a box, defined by our siblings as a certain way, and forced emotionally back into that box when we returned home. The therapist loved that visual, and actually used a long paper, drawing boxes on it where we each wrote our ideas about siblings. What I wouldn’t give to see that now! I do not have any recollection of what was written, but the visual of a person being hemmed in by other’s opinions of them resonates with my feelings today.

Pollyanna was a fictional character in a book written by Eleanor Porter in 1913. The girl, an orphan, has a positive attitude and sunny disposition. Moving in with her aunt challenges her as the woman is strict and dour. Pollyanna works to remain positive, and bring cheer to those around her. This book actually created the idea of the Pollyanna Principle, the idea of positive bias in people. Sadly, this can morph into the “Pollyanna syndrome” where folks are excessively positive and thus blind to the negative or real, seeing the past as much rosier than it actually was. Our current access to polarizing sources of information on the internet seems to only exacerbate this idea these days– we have become “tribes” that somehow are incapable of speaking to each other with any sense of understanding. The “boxes” of our political system have gotten out of hand, and the sweeping generalizations that result are dangerous, both to ourselves and our nation.

I look at my Privacy artwork and see the pink hair flying all around, and wonder what is to come. The pink hair, to me, seems charged with electricity, a sense of escaping tendrils that are reaching out from the safety of the box of thoughts. Is the hair holding the box together, or trying to escape? Unclear. But the birds also bring up thoughts that imply flight. Flights of fancy? Or harbingers of a future that currently feels unsafe?

And then of course we cannot forget Pandora, another patriarchal architype of female danger. If it isn’t Eve eating an apple, it’s Pandora unleashing pestilence on society. The box itself was a symbol of human desire for knowledge and curiosity, both of which can impact us for good or for evil. Opening the box, Pandora let loose violence, greed and disease which feels horribly apropos these days. However, she slammed the lid shut before Hope could escape. The evils are always with us, and it is up to all of us to contain them with hope, to overcome the nature of human beings to avarice and power. Religion was used for centuries to do so. Our current society relies on elections, and we are about to see how well that structure holds up. Hope is looking very flimsy at the moment.

Last night I came across a quote by Toni Morrison which offered me some peace. She was feeling despair after an election (in 2004 when the Supreme Court handed an election to G.W. Bush). A friend asked how she was and she replied:  “Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything…” The friend chided her, saying “No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work – not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!” Morrison continues her thoughts:

“I felt foolish…especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed…This is precisely the time when artist go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge – even wisdom. Like art. https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/11/15/toni-morrison-art-despair/ 

And so I circle back to art. My words are nowhere near as powerful as Toni Morrison’s, yet I recognize the idea that art and language are tools to move forward. I will try. At least after I tame my hair.