00 Departure
01 Initiation
02 Crossing back the Threshold
☞————— a (Goodbye Shyness)
—————— b (Girls)
03 Rebuild of Evangelion
Id, Ego, Superego
Crestfallen after the Bar-Mitsva party, I turned to the internet. I don't know how it occurred to me to search for ’psychology’, though it might have been more trivial than it seems to me now. The Hebrew internet was young those days and the articles I found on the topic were largely summaries of Freudian thought —about the id, ego, super ego and their relationship— which I took to be the current state of the discipline. Sooner or later I came across the concept of ‘social phobia,’ thereby identifying my adversary for the next decade at least.
As when I finished to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion, I felt that the recognition of the problem was a foray just short of its resolution, which aligns with the false psychoanalytical, and generally human, notions on the matter. I began spreading in my own way the word of my condition, as if its recognition by others would cure its effects. By then MSN Messenger was widely used by my classmates, and I wrote about it to people I had barely ever spoken to in person. Hillel laughed and said I did not have social phobia. I thought he was wrong but understood why he might think so. But relief did not come. So next I asked my parents to be taken to a psychotherapist. Beside my own motion, I'm surprised to remember, perhaps was also at the time, how my parents took it. They respected my request, neither discussing nor raising objections. It was in tune with their parenting style. Yet, however unexpected this request seems in retrospection, it must have come from somewhere. From the internet? There had been one precedent that might have served as an inspiration:
For some months until our family moved apartments at the beginning of my second grade year, from Dizengoff street to the south east end of Tel Aviv, I had been attending a moadonit —the Hebrew diminutive of the word for ‘club’— after school, where children got a meal and played. After the move I unwillingly had to stay at home alone after school until the first parent arrived from work. I recall a day when nobody had arrived long after I expected them to —this was before cellphones— and I whiled the time pacing the apartment in worry, certain that I was left orphaned in the world. After discussing the first manuscript of this here text, I learned from my parents that I used to cry, scream, block the door whenever they wanted to go out in the evening — poor terrorized parents; about an engraved memory of my mother, they coming back from a wedding and seeing me standing weeping by the window. In turn, I remember being frightened, when alone at home, by a painting of my mother by my father that hung in the living room of our Dizengoff apartment. Pale faced and wearing a black veil, the woman in the painting seemed to eye me, ready to leap out the moment I turned my back. When I finally said something of the matter, my father said that it was my mother, as if I missed the semblance or it would turn the woman into mere paint on canvas. Perhaps it was precisely the semblance that made it uncanny, my mother but not my mother, stern and cold. On the other hand, I remember watching by inertia whatever followed the movie I had sat down to watch on a recorded VHS, which happened to be Kubrick's The Shining, and that with equanimity, despite the blood gushing through corridors underneath ghost twins feet, despite the crazed Nicholson chasing his wife and child with an axe.
To combat my anxiety about staying home alone I was taken to the psychologist. It was group therapy, I was the youngest member in a circle of minors accompanied by their parents. Each had their own special issue. I remember none of it beside that once as another was speaking I was day dreamingly shooting hoops and the session leader thought my raised hand indicated a request to speak. Either way, whether it was helpful or not, it was only a couple of years before I spontaneously understood that which my father had told me about enjoying those private durations.
Still, the extension from “group therapy to acclimate myself to staying home alone” to “therapy to absolve myself from social phobia” doesn't seem trivial. Be as it may, I remember the latter one-on-one sessions better. I remember tests administered at the therapy's inception. I was tasked to draw a person, perhaps specifically a child. I drew a boy, somewhat in the style of DBZ but in plain clothes and hair that obeyed gravity. I demurred when the therapist requested a drawing of a girl next; I knew that girls looked differently but I didn't know how so and felt embarrassed to try. I was given the Rorschach test. The test had more currency back in those days, and I recognized the first, bat-like plate, seen once on Batman Forever,1 the first movie I ever went to the cinema for and the last time I went to the cinema with my father. I also recall my response for what must have been plate number nine: the cementing of a pact of alliance between two extraterrestrial factions through the digital touch of their leaders. My self-consciousness was aroused —cementing the memory— by the awareness of the fansticality of the response, and my giving away of sci-fi-y fancies that I assumed were outside my therapist's, a young woman, conceptual world.
One session I reported of depression and suicide ideation. I was brought —at least my father was there, then, too— to the psychiatrist one room over. We stood by the door, which retrospectively seems to have made a difference, keeping the matter unsettled and free to move. The option of being administered antidepressants was brought up. I'd think now that that a parent was summoned and I was young the question was directed at them, but it was left for me to answer. I don't know what made me think antidepressants would be a bad idea; perhaps merely the feeling that it was a big deal and I didn't know enough to take it. I declined.
The single insight I took away from those sessions was that the smallness of my family, having few relatives around, might have provided insufficient practice in social interaction. As the weekly sessions became routine, I increasingly felt that it was not going anywhere. After a while I decided to stop going.
Development of loneliness
Around this time some of my classmates began “going out.” I think none of my friends were involved, but either way it was going on mostly by the north Tel Aviv kids, who had a critical mass of number and the money to spare. Getting a whiff of it from school talk, I did not quite know what it meant; I remember having a section of central Tel Aviv's King George Street in my mind as I thought of it. It was a source of depression, the notion that somewhere outthere classmates were together having fun while there I was, alone at home. One time, in desperate depression, I punched through my window's slats, one broke and fell four stories down. I was not reprimanded. I suppose my parents understood my woes and handled the matter with sensitivity.
High-School
There was improvement during high-school. The demand for adaptation to a new social environment was practice. My girlfriend during the first year, who had been the one doing the hitting on, boosted my ego by telling me that all the gals of the class had their eyes on me when I joined, though it made little difference in my behaviour and attitude. That she urged me to be “more assertive” was not at all helpful. Still, high-school could have been better. I was in the ‘gifted class’; the other classes were not only bigger but their kids were shuffled every year, such that in virtue of my membership I stayed in close association with a small number of kids throughout the three years.
Army
My time in the army, as described elsewhere, provided the most significant amelioration of my shyness. During my 14 months of service I was transferred often, almost monthly, to a new unit. Each time I had to get acquainted with new faces, adapt to the situation, and each time it was a little easier. I got along well, peers and superiors spoke well of me.
College
At the beginning of college I was aware enough of my then diminishing shyness to recruit trickery to my assistance. First year international students were welcomed on campus before the official start date. Already settled, I kept my watch as the American dormmates arrived in cars and SUVs and leaped to offer my help unloading trunks and porting to their rooms. My idea was that before they had formed groups and cliques, newcomers were approachable and open for connection.
I know that I still viewed myself as shy since I saw my initiation difficulties as tripartite. Beside my shyness, I had to speak on the freshmen seminar in a language I had barely spoken before and with a voice lost to sore throat I had developed within a day of arrival. But speak I did, and experiencing it as safe, became sooner or later a vocal student, often asking questions in class. I wonder if it's a cultural thing; I once ran a simple experiment, found that jumping around the timeline of arbitrarily chosen YouTube videos, lectures in Hebrew were often interrupted, venue permitting, in their midst by questions from the audience, while those in English very rarely were. And this inclination of mine despite having attended very little university in Israel, though I wonder if it could have been picked up at school. Or is it merely the epiphenomenon of deeper cultural characteristics?
Such were my hermetic studious tendencies that the buzz of campus was kept at bay. Though like-mined coevals were always in the immediate surrounding, it would be some time before friends would barge into my room à la Seinfeld's Kramer. And though the seclusion was precarious and transient at best, it didn't always remain behind in my room. Nor was it determined by the resolution to study, it was more a state of mind. I recall a retrospectively shameful event. I was eating lunch alone at the dining-hall when an emissary from another table, a guy (named Guy), approached and invited me to join theirs. I found eating alone, when no friendly table had been espied, to be a deeply stressful condition, isolation made publicly manifest, the depravity of my character for all to see, as it were. And yet, I turned down Guy's kind offer. I think it must have been pride, as if by doing so I expressed that my solitude was willed and not haphazard and thus as if accredited myself dignity. I regret it.
When I was departing for college, Hillel dispatched me with a Go get 'em Tiger. American college gals had a reputation in Israel. Mid sophomore year my girlfriend and I broke up, and suddenly I realized where I was. Saw the fish and the sea. It would remain as it had been, half so wild, but my isolationist bend began undoing. I started using civilized paths to move about the campus, to potentially bump into others, letting go of my insistence to walk the straightest line from A to B which often went through lawns, slightly wooded areas and otherwise off-track land. I annulled my subscription to a long held view that only stupid people danced. Another instance of Bootybanger, a notorious party line, was coming up. On the day I told Sho-chan, my smartly dressed roommate, that I was interested in going but that I didn't know how to dance. He comforted me that the students at Bard didn't know how to dance either and added that whenever he went back home to Japan (that we were roommates ultimately had to do with the fateful evening with Cowboy Bebop, but that's another little story of its own) he felt ashamed of his moves vis-à-vis club goers. We concluded that the important thing was to look confident. I hoped he would invite me to come along but he and Shin-chan, who helped organizing the party, left the suite quietly. While a house party hosted by my suitemate whom I no longer liked was going on on the other side of the door, I was shut in my room with a Lovecraft novella checked out of the library for research for an erotic horror story I wrote for a student ran magazine.2 It was a dual, apparently self contradictory, force that got me out of the suite that night. On the one hand, it was my studious spirit, distracted by chats coming from the common room, that sought quiet. On the other, the social adventurous spirit that yearned for the Bootybanger. I put Lovecraft in my pocket, turned off the light and left the room through the ground floor window, seeking to create the impression that I had never been in the suite when I returned.
I went to Olin, the humanities building, abandoned at night, where I sometimes studied, where from midnight on I could hear the blasting music of the guy cleaning the bottom floor, whom I met once at four o'clock when he finally reached the room I studied at. Reading Lovecraft I turned to the computer in the room to look up a word in the dictionary. An art history student's presentation had been left open, about the artist Lisa Yuskavage whom I did not know, full of tantalizing nude figure paintings. I emailed myself the presentation and walked whistling away. At midnight or beyond a security man came, said the building was closing. On the way out we chatted, he told me he had a short night shift. I asked if the shifts were being changed and he reminded me that that night we moved to summer time. It was spring, its spirit in the air.
I went to the Campus Center where the Bootybanger party was taking place, telling myself that I'd just check it out. I peeped into the hall. The goers were hardly enough to fill it, aggregated around and on the DJ stage. The only light came through the outward glass doors, illuminating a ridiculous picture of as if hidden people, behaving as if unseen but really exposed to all, but this was rather a projection of my own embarrassment outwards. On the left was some security, on the right a couple was making out against the wall. I left and went to a friend sitting at the cafeteria whom I had greeted before entering, stood by tentatively until I was invited to sit. She expressed surprise at seeing me there, as I usually didn't go out to such events.
A friend of the suite whom I likewise asked how to dance had to clarify herself the question before answering —“oh, you mean clubbing”— and said that I should “make love to the music,” which was abstract but a useful complementation to the instructions I would recourse to a few days after the uneventful Bootybanger night. It was a pre drink plenty of water and eat fresh fruit era of WikiHow. It taught me to dance with six easy steps: listen to the beat, nod to the beat, shift your weight from foot to foot to the beat, move your legs, move your hips, lift your hands high up in the air (thus showing others that you are having fun, quoth the instructions), to the sides and forwards, alternatingly.
One day I finally said yes to an invitation by a fellow Jewish Russian student, Regina, a coursemate on a math class who had repeatedly invited me to events which I insistently declined. I finally accepted an invitation to dinner at the diner. I didn't know most of our party, which ended up at her suite for more drinks. One of the gals called for clearing the square table and got on it to dance. After much encouragement another otherwise reserved gal got up and danced. And then my name was called. I took off my shoes, got on the not so steady table and put the theory into practice. I shifted the weight from foot to foot, occasionally lifted one, and raised my hands to the sides and up in the air so they would see I was having fun. Overall I did fine. The guys, called to action after me, refused, and, having in mind also one of the gals who sat quietly on the sofa, again I experienced the sensation of moving from the back- to the foreground.
Standing on the stage
I grew to love dancing and had lost my inhibitions by the end of college, not worried dancing in a small crowd or even being the first dancer on an occasion. Yet public speaking proved to be a more enduring challenge. I had made much progress by the end of college. Indeed, while during high-school I had to give a six minutes presentation which made me so nervous that the first nasolabial fold carved itself onto my face overnight, on my senior year of college I gladly wrote and performed The True Shenanigans of Alvin Bender for This Bardian Life, a student ran podcast modelled after This American Life, recorded before a live audience. I'm not sure that to say I gladly performed it is quite right. I was happy to have done it, but the experience itself was stressful and its anticipation was unnerving. It should be said that despite such platitudes as “nothing to fear but fear itself,” every wariness is ultimately grounded on a potential danger, and putting oneself on the public sphere exposes oneself to backlash, which I got a taste of. Of the more polite feedback posted on Tumblr to one of the episodes was the following:
Okay, so, I am debating with myself whether to say anything or not? But I feel like I really should, because I don’t know if anyone else will. Also, Bard has some serious problems with racism that tend to just get swept under the rug? Also, I am totally not a part of thisbardianlife, but I think it is a really great thing in general!
BUT.
I listened to this person’s piece (it’s the first one), and, coupled with this photo, I am sensing a lot of Very Bad jokes being made at the expense of Native peoples, perhaps in the pursuit of irony (??). The white author plays a character called Alvin, who is 1/64th Iroquois and whose “Native American name”3 means “running water with rocks,” while dressed in a war bonnet and face paint. At the very best, it could read like he’s making fun of people who latch onto small parts of their heritage, but at its core, the joke is still awful/marginalizing, and appropriating Native garb as caricature is fucking offensive.
Other Tumblr comments put less finesse into their invectives, though what rankled in my mind for days after was the personal approach at the show's end by a self-professed native American, who asked me what I knew of their history. I admitted I knew little and honestly invited him to tell me about it. He didn't. I asked him if he had watched my piece and he said no. Due to a stranger than fiction coincidence I knew that if it was true, it meant that he had walked out on purpose (obviously taking offense at my dress up); we had arrived to the venue at the same time, I held the door for him and because he reminded me of somebody else, I remembered his face. Now he turned away and left, joining a couple of waiting friends. The lack of closure would fester with me. During the following self-examination I would recall that at the venue, before the recording started, I made a little unrestrained dance. I felt anxious and had in mind to shake it off. Nobody said anything about it, but retrospectively I thought it might have been perceived as part of my supposed mimesis. That I did not succumb to the abyss was thanks to one of the organizers and my liaison with the production, Zappa Graham, blessed his memory, who supported me along the way. Before the next installment he asked me to tune it down a bit. I couldn't leave the apparent controversy unaddressed; I appeared with my face made as Johnny Depp's in the then upcoming new The Lone Ranger, whose trailer came upon me in the meantime, with a plush owl on my gulliver to boot, and weaved the matter into the plot. To what effect, I don't know, but a guy whom I knew only by appearance and never talked with before or since came to me and said that he had no idea what he had just seen, but he loved it. I suppose that others had had too, since, to interpret a note of Zappa, who must have known something I didn't, my flick had something to do with the growing popularity of This Bardian Life. When I performed my first installment the show was in its second running semester still recorded at a dorm suite's common room. Shortly thereafter it was recorded in the Admission Office building's drawing room, and the last show of the year, my face stricken with bird legs, was recorded in the campus chapel, where Amanda Palmer would later give a talk/ reading, where I asked her awkwardly and fumblingly for a blessing as a future artist/ writer.
As with dancing, I'd come to like giving presentations, but as opportunities to exercise were much sparser, the journey was more episodic and less even. On the first year of my master's, during group formation and allotment of project topics in class, I had a premonition that got precisely realized. While all else were in groups of three, I was in a group of two, and that with the only member of the course who was not from our class but from two or so years earlier who repeated courses he had missed for unspecific health related issues and who had been and would be, just like at the hour he was partnered with me, absent, so while all others could work together between lectures, we, or is it I, could not. I saw no trivial way by which to express my grievances during the appointment. I'd have said that my suppressed indignation was just a matter of gratuitous begrudging, that really I preferred to work alone than with others, but thereby I'd have overlooked the fact that during that academic year I was barely keeping up with academic assignments and always a little behind in understanding the material. Division of labour would have been welcome. Though, perhaps above all, I simply did not like the guy; I found his company and manner of making conversation unpleasant. At the end of the presentation, which I prepared on my own and delivered alone, one of the professors acknowledged my challenge explicitly, which made me feel vindicated, for a lack of a better word. The work I had done unwillingly, as if I was serving time in a labour gang, was elevated to a commendable achievement.
The second years was mostly lab rotations. There was a gap between the time I contacted my first lab and my entry, and it so happened that the PhD student who was supposed to supervise me graduated within two weeks and left with no replacement. Regardless, like everyone in my class save two organized students, I dallied longer at each of the lab rotations, later on my thesis, than was mandated. I had fun working at that one lab but after my computational model failed to match the experimental data (concerning the self-orientation of desert ants), later transient bouts of inspiration notwithstanding, the lack of attention from anyone on my work made me grow apathetic towards it. I put the mere minimal effort on my presentation. Thereafter at the office of the principal investigator, the head of the lab, whose table was covered in fossilized objects to the exclusion of anything else, the only time I had been there since my first arrival, he expressed his discontent as he signed my papers. It was the only time ever that I had an antagonistic relationship with a teacher or professor, and I can't help but think of Stoner and his problematic student. Writing this I think for the first time about the possibility that, that professor having had some political clout —he was close to retiring— he could have used it to denounce me, which could account for the cold shoulder I would get later when seeking a lab to do my thesis with. I didn't get to know him well enough to say whether it was likely or not —during my master's I saved a bit of money by bringing lunch instead of going to the dining-hall, though I wonder if even otherwise I could be made to have lunch before noon, as he did— and anyhow it's impossible for me now to find out.
Regardless, thenceforward things got better. Two presentations of mine in a row, one for a course and another for a rotation, were earnestly praised, enough to turn presentations from a dreaded task to one I enjoyed fulfilling and even sought. There was still an accompanying tremour, but this became a characteristic of the activity rather than the feeling that defined it, a sign that I should avoid it. Yet later, after having raised my hand rather out of principle than in conviction during a call for volunteers, I gave a short talk on a Python conference. In short, as far as public speaking was a litmus test for the absence of shyness, I seemed to have completed my quest. Or did I? I have come a long way from resembling the meek Ikari Shinji of Evangelion. The third episode of the series is titled “The non ringing phone,”4 referring to Shinji's mobile, symbolizing his shyness. My friends I think rather know me as “the ringing but never answered, we are giving up on calling, phone,” an opposite that perhaps comes to the same. Regardless, I think that that state of the phone had to do not with shyness —but perhaps yes with introversion?— but with a regrettable attitude on my own part, and some other deficiencies, together rather beside the point.
Well: has Mark completed his Hero's Journey, become a person transformed? No. First, if only for a recent experience, I learned that no magical transformation had happened. When this past year I performed my poem Regen, written for a neighborhood initiative, I was seized with tremour and trembling by my sense of inadequacy with the language. I had half expected it, but after having thanked my audience for coming with as much feeling as Russian dubbing actors, I lost trust in my recourse. It felt as if I tugged at the cord but the parachute didn't shoot. I had planned to open with the admission of my nervousness, a tactic I had employed in the past and which I was sure would put everyone on the same page, and me on calmer footing. But up over the little audience it seemed foolish, perhaps even an insult: here you gathered to listen to literature and I, who can barely speak your language, am wasting your time. I read the poem and fled the stage. A fellow poet whom I'd met in the audience told me that I did fine, but I could hardly believe it.
We could say it's natural to feel nervousness reading a poem on stage, of one's own pen, in a second language, before a room of complete strangers — that's not the point. I don't see it as a problem, either, though I'd be happy to get better at it. Rather, the point is that shyness is motivated by personal inclinations, developing into and thus realized as a set of habits which lend themselves, therefore, to being altered with practice. But whatever habits are assumed, the inclinations remain. It's not the problem; however wild or docile we are by nature, we can develop the habits to put ourselves in harmony with others or closer to our own ideal self. Cultivate ourselves, really. The word habit comes of course from the Latin habitus, attire —and still used thus in English, though mostly when speaking of monks or other offices distinct by their dress— which in turn is related to the verb habeo, “to have,” that is, one might say, as distinguished from the verb “to be.” We are born one way but with can, with enough determination, put another one on. At least as far as our behaviour goes. Well, at least we can try.
But, second, over the years I had come to realize that I do have a problem. Its presence had been there for as long as Shinji had been on my mind, it was a source of abysmal feelings of inadequacy, of despair, and emanated from an unyielding core of shyness, one elusive to ameliorative practice since it was not about placing me in public, but about, or so it felt, infringing upon others. With the other cases the proper action was clear. I was aware that I wanted to dance, that it was a good idea, but I felt shy; I could push myself to act despite my feelings. Or I wanted to read a piece I felt confident about but still got nervous when on the stage, a nervousness which gradually got dispelled the more I had the experience of reading without being booed by rotten tomatoes off the stage. Not so in the other case. Well, I'm referring to the steadfast provocateur of my shyness: girls (also known as young women I set my eyes on).
Though not the very same plate, since the Rorschach test plates were protected vehemently, somewhat ludicrously if you ask me, as copyrighted material.
The opinion of the readership, exclusively female as it happened, was sharply divided. The magazine's editorial was not among the enthusiasts. Their verdict was:
Although we appreciate the sexually graphic quality of your story, it is a bit too long for our publication and needs to be more tightly edited. Two pages is ideal, no more than four. There are also parts of the story that may come off misogynistic - the psychology of the work and your prerogative as an author need to be solidified.
We receive a lot of writing submissions and are only able to print a few. Also we realize our time restrictions may have rushed your work. Please submit next semester.
A few friends “really enjoyed reading it.” The most laudatory comment was “The story is awesome! Its got all the right ingredients of bizarre-ness, perversity, humor, plot twists and cannibalism.” The harshest was given 5.5 years after the story was written, by my then girlfriend, a year into our acquaintanceship, “I feel like you degraded me, my mother, my friends.” It was read amidst days of conflict between us, which must have set the tone.
Alluvium. My own footnote.
鳴らない、電話
I appreciate the honesty in your writing.