Sackcloth & Ashes

“It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper!  It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

But here is something else about that paper - the smell!  I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad... 

It creeps all over the house.  

I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs.   

It gets into my hair.”

From Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper

**********

Dear Alex,

Yellow is confusing.  Is it cheerful - tulips, sunlight, honey - or nauseating in sulfur and pus?  A primary color, it has no derivatives.  Entirely original and lonesome, hostile or hospitable, brilliant but boring.  A carat of emotions to be weighed. 

The yellow wallpaper is my skin.  It seals and secures me, stretches and shrinks with my longings, spoils me in comfort.  There is no reason to cover my skin in sackcloth and ashes.

Or is there one?  

In the heat, the yellow wallpaper is cracking.  The sun exposes my sallow face, jaundiced nails.  What are you looking at?  

I am looking beneath and within my yellow skin because it is smelling foul.  It wreaks with self absorption.  Come closer and it will sting you.

It is about time to leave the room encased by the yellow wallpaper.  I will not hide in the prison of my skin.

Tomorrow I will venture out for my first time without a specific agenda or aim.  I will shadow a few counselors at a local community program helping folks in crisis - people just like me in more ways than not.  To be there for and with other skin.  Being human to a human being.  

I do not want to say too much for now.  Get ready for tomorrow.  Strip down to the marrows.  Stare at nakedness.  Wear new skin in sackcloth and ashes to touch beauty in flesh.  

Yours, Kate

**********

Dear Kate,

It is hard to read this story again without thinking in terms of the very specific time and space of Gilman's writing, the early "feminist" implication, or more generally treatment of the mentally ill in the early 1900s.

I suppose we "progressed" quite a bit since then.  This is a blessing but also a burden, that someone else "moved forward" to the right direction on my behalf, and now I am reaping the benefits of others' struggling and enlightening.

We don't mind being enlightened, but could do without the weight of struggles.  But can any true enlightenment come without any personal, firsthand struggle, as if it is a birth right, an inheritance, free money from our parent's bank account?

"Pretty much everything can be explained by science," my son told me more than once.

"I suppose this includes why this father should love and care for you?"

So we look back at the older, more "primitive" time, from our entitled moral high ground, with better knowledge in our head, things and people already experimented with to give us our "common sense," ever-progressing ideas executed by ever-improving systems, life's responsibility contracted out at the price of tax to governing bodies, dues to higher learning, and levy to whatever conforming assumptions that happen to saturate the air we breathe.

When we read a story like this, do we see it's not about how we have come a long way to become better human being than before, but that every generation falls short of the glory of our human vocation in our own particular and peculiar ways, that there really is no moral bank account we can freeload from, and every fight against ignorance and thoughtlessness has to be fought anew, personally, continually, first against oneself?

Would wearing a pink t-shirt help me to go against the bully it keeps cozy and warm?

Bless you in your new volunteer position to bless strangers, people you will never fully know with troubles you can never fully understand let alone fully resolve.  We have everything to give.  We have nothing to give.

Yours, Alex