Blessing My Enemy

March 4th, 2010

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

Enemies have driven me into your embrace more than friends have.

Friends have bound me to earth, enemies have loosed me from earth and have demolished all my aspirations in the world.

Enemies have made me a stranger in worldly realms and an extraneous inhabitant of the world. Just as a hunted animal finds safer shelter than an unhunted animal does, so have I, persecuted by enemies, found the safest sanctuary, having ensconced myself beneath your tabernacle, where neither friends nor enemies can slay my soul.

This afternoon I learned of the death of one of my former professors, Raimund Abraham.  He was an architect from Austria who taught at Cooper Union, where I spent the first two years of college.  In studio and critique, he loved to digress into diatribe about the violence of tectonics, the dialectics of form, and his cats.

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

They, rather than I, have confessed my sins before the world.

They have punished me, whenever I have hesitated to punish myself.

They have tormented me, whenever I have tried to flee torments.

They have scolded me, whenever I have flattered myself.

They have spat upon me, whenever I have filled myself with arrogance.

Abraham (as we knew him) was both immensely talented and immensely troubled.  He ran his studio with a gleeful sadism, promising us we wouldn’t sleep for days and lambasting us with choice expletives when we got too relaxed and seemed to be enjoying ourselves.  He frequently told us we were stupid, foolish, and would never succeed in architecture, and he failed or forced withdrawal on many to prove himself right.  In his furor, he ripped drawings off the wall and snapped carefully-assembled models into pieces to “fix” them.  He gave tacit approval to ideas and then turned on a dime to skewer them later.  He never gave specific assignments, but he expected us to work until we passed out or injured ourselves using box cutters and power tools in a sleep-deprived state.  He took evident pleasure in belittling and slandering others, both behind their backs and to their faces.  He could sense fear better than a wild dog, and if it was present he would capitalize on it, refusing to give his approval even when we bent over backwards to win it.

He made us cry, and not just the women.  His abuse made my father say, “I can’t remember the last time I just wanted to deck someone,” and a pious, devout friend called him “the reason they invented” a certain seven-letter word.

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

Whenever I have made myself wise, they have called me foolish.

Whenever I have made myself mighty, they have mocked me as though I were a dwarf.

Whenever I have wanted to lead people, they have shoved me into the background.

Whenever I have rushed to enrich myself, they have prevented me with an iron hand.

Whenever I thought that I would sleep peacefully, they have wakened me from sleep.

Whenever I have tried to build a home for a long and tranquil life, they have demolished it and driven me out.

Truly, enemies have cut me loose from the world and have stretched out my hands to the hem of your garment.

This man almost singlehandedly drove me away from architecture.  Worse, he made me question my faith in God, the faith that had sustained me through a childhood I now realize was wonderfully uneventful.  Where was God when Raimund Abraham, who didn’t seem to like anybody, decided to teach a class full of young, idealistic teenagers who wanted to change the world — and instead turned to cigarettes and shrinks to cope with their feelings of worthlessness and despair?  Where was God when we failed crit after crit, unable to produce something he would like and frightened for our academic future with expulsion forever on the table?  When we got sick and depressed, flung ourselves into loveless relationships and rejected the advances of friends and family members who worried about us?  When I had the darkest thoughts of my life (and even wished for the courage to end it), desperate to prove to someone, anyone, that I was the smart, funny, creative person I knew myself to be?

At one time I would have said quite freely that Abraham ruined my life.  He certainly brought my dream of living and working in New York to an abrupt close; when I took a leave of absence from Cooper Union, from which I never returned, I couldn’t afford to stay in the city, and by then it held so many painful memories that I was happy to leave.  Years of antidepressants and therapy helped, and I can honestly say I’ve forgiven him, but the pain is still there, the insults and taunts embedded deeply in my memory.  That time is a part of me now, a part that will never go away, like the dot of rapidograph ink  just below the skin on the palm of my right hand, another wound born of late-night drawings and despair.

Bless my enemies, O Lord. Even I bless them and do not curse them.

Bless them and multiply them; multiply them and make them even more bitterly against me:

so that my fleeing to You may have no return;

so that all hope in men may be scattered like cobwebs;

so that absolute serenity may begin to reign in my soul;

so that my heart may become the grave of my two evil twins, arrogance and anger;

so that I might amass all my treasure in heaven;

ah, so that I may for once be freed from self-deception, which has entangled me in the dreadful web of illusory life.

Enemies have taught me to know what hardly anyone knows, that a person has no enemies in the world except himself.

“The world is your enemy,” Abraham once told me during a critique.  It seemed to imply, within the context of the entire tirade, that this is why he was so hard on us: he wanted the weak to crumble away and the strong to conquer all.  And he succeeded.  I never had the heart to return to architecture school, partly for fear that my awful experience might repeat itself at a different institution.  This failure remains one of the biggest embarrassments of my life.  I will forever have to explain to people that I started architecture school, but didn’t finish it; that I received C’s and D’s and F’s when I had put forth my best effort, all that I had.  That I couldn’t succeed, no matter what I did; no matter how much I prayed and wheedled and fumed and sobbed, my best wasn’t enough.

I thank God for that experience.  I thank God for teaching me, through Raimund Abraham, that the world is a fallen place; that we should never be too comfortable here, too used to getting what we want and think we deserve.  I thank God every time my husband teases me about dropping out of architecture school, or my students ask why I changed majors halfway through college, or a friend remarks on the photographs of the East Village that grace my kitchen, the only visible reminders of that wretched time.  It was a time when I had nothing and no one to turn to, when I was friendless and alone in a city that was happy to continue on without me, and it was a time when I realized that suffering is a blessing — that it is only through doubt that we learn to have faith, only in torment that we learn to have peace.

One hates his enemies only when he fails to realize that they are not enemies, but cruel friends.

It is truly difficult for me to say who has done me more good and who has done me more evil in the world: friends or enemies.

Therefore bless, O Lord, both my friends and enemies.

A slave curses enemies, for he does not understand. But a son blesses them, for he understands.

For a son knows that his enemies cannot touch his life.

Therefore he freely steps among them and prays to God for them.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon the soul of your servant Raimund Abraham, a sinner.  And as the first among sinners, I beg you to have mercy on me.

Prayer by Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich. Originally published in Prayers by the Lake, Serbian Orthodox Metropolitanate of New Gracanica, 1999.

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Posted in Faith, Life, Methods, Virtues | 5 Comments »

Ups and Downs This Week

March 3rd, 2010

Maybe it comes from teaching adolescents, but I have had a roller-coaster week from start to, well, middle at this point:

Down: Discovering that only half the school got the latest edition of the paper.  Somehow, I forgot to remind all the students about their assignments.  You know, the assignments that have been on the board since we made up the schedule LAST SEPTEMBER.  Additionally, we’d run out of 11 x 17 paper and no one had ordered more.

Up: Discovering that there was in fact a whole case of 11 x 17 paper, hidden at the bottom of the stack of boxes in the basement office behind the forklift and among six prepositional phrases.  Glad I didn’t wear heels that day.

Further Up: Getting excited about the upcoming field trip to the Washington Journalism Center, which I’ve been planning since January.

Down: Getting two parent phone calls several minutes apart in which mothers told me their daughters couldn’t attend for various annoyingly understandable reasons.

Up: This means the entire class can now fit into my car, so I don’t have to drive the school van.

Down: The dearth of submissions for the literary magazine, even with the incentive of a contest with cash prizes.

Up: The cheerful willingness of the staff, all volunteers, to make announcements, place flyers and talk about layout design, even if it’s all in vain.

Further Up: Most of the computers in the lab finally got layout software installed on them.

Down: I’ve been requesting this, also, since September.

Further Down: An anonymous negative comment scrawled in blue highlighter over a copy of the newspaper and placed in my mailbox.  Our latest issue, centered around food, was conceived, written and designed by students; it included an article that interviewed the school’s physician about eating correctly before sports events, an tour of the Asian market with a Filipino student, polls about favorite Food Network stars and local eateries, and an article about the Culinary Club’s philosophy of home cooking.  The comment said, “Whatever happened to writing about the students?”

Up: The support of the vice-principal when I showed her the comment.  “It’s not like you would tell them how to design their class,” she said.  “They shouldn’t tell you how to run yours, and I sure don’t see anyone stepping up to take over.”

Further Up: Rob suggested I post copies of the anonymous note in the faculty room with the caption, “Whatever happened to writing in ink and signing your name?”

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Posted in Life, Media, Methods, School policies, Vices, Virtues | 4 Comments »

Breaking the Waves

February 27th, 2010

I spent one blessedly-short summer in the retail industry, selling high-end clothing on commission in SoHo.  I hated it.  Having to constantly think about numbers, and using formulae for everything from accessories to jokes, was not my natural style.

Halfway through the summer I had lunch with a high-school friend and his mother who were in town.  Carole was unlike any other friend’s mother I’d ever met: “young at heart” sounds cliche, but she really was dreamy in the way of an adolescent girl, constantly perched on the edge of some alternate reality.

We all sipped our juices. (Well, I barely touched mine; I’d watched the barista make it, with three apples and a huge hunk of fresh ginger, and it made my head want to explode.)  She asked me how work was going, and I told her truthfully that I didn’t like the job.

“Humanity is so strange,” she mused. “People come in . . . waves.”

I thought this was probably over my head, philosophically speaking, so I didn’t think much about it until my next shift.  Then I started to notice how right she was.  There were long, nearly unbearable periods of boredom, pacing the marble floors and obsessively spacing hangers and tucking in tags.  And suddenly, my hands were so full I wasn’t even sure I was getting credit for every sale; I didn’t have time to walk each client to the register, as I had to be in the dressing rooms assisting the next one.  This happened even at the oddest times: not just during the lunch rush, or on weekends, but smack in the middle of a weekday morning, when the crowd consisted of separate parties of one and two each.

I’m no sociologist, but you must have had the experience of getting in a short line only to see six people behind you a moment later (or, more unhappily, to be one of the six who simultaneously decide to bring their shopping to a close.)  I suppose, at heart, we are more group-oriented than we realize.

For a teacher, the Sheep Effect can be frustrating.  The first year I taught Creative Writing, the class was capped at 12 with a waiting list.  The second year, it reached 12, but several students dropped it in the first week; I finished the year with 8.  The third year, four signed up, and one dropped it halfway through.  This year, no one signed up at all.

If anything, I promoted the class more eagerly as I saw the numbers start to dwindle, but my efforts seemed to have an adverse effect.  My greatest fear happened this year: there was no class at all, no pool from which to choose work for the school’s literary magazine.  I’m running it as an after-school club instead, and given the overextended schedules of our students, you can guess how successful that’s been.

But the students’ course selection forms are due this week, and suddenly the wave is cresting again: half a dozen have dropped by to ask me excitedly about the course, and as many teachers have remarked that they’ve been signing off left and right (it’s an honors course, so requires the consent of their current English teacher.)  I can only hypothesize that since so few have taken it in recent years, the aura of mysterious enticement is back up.  Perhaps it will break in a year or two, and we’ll be right back where we started.

Why do people work this way?  Jack Handey was right.  Mankind is a mystery.

Posted in Life, Literature | No Comments »

Grammar Emergency

February 26th, 2010

Thanks to Lauren for making me laugh hard at this great headline.

Three cheers for local news!

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Posted in Media, Vices | 1 Comment »

All Kinds

February 24th, 2010

“It takes all kinds to make a world.”  Yes, to make a world full of trouble.

Today, one more day of trying to teach while ensnared in a web of red tape, I’m thinking specifically about two kinds of people:

1. The kind who thinks the rules don’t apply. You can give them the Suzuki Speech before beginning lessons, but they still don’t understand that they need to be involved.  You can tell them tuition is due at the beginning of the month, but they won’t bring it until you remind them, sometimes multiple times.  You can even make them sign a contract, but they may or may not abide by it, depending on the weather.  Their lives are just SO complicated and SO busy; you couldn’t possibly understand what they are going through, but at least try to understand it’s much more important than anything you care about.

2. The kind who takes a mile. Growing up, my mother had the same job I do now, so I learned early the value of a professional relationship.  It drove us crazy the way her students would tromp through the kitchen exclaiming, “Wow!  That smells GOOD!” or “What are you reading?”  We felt invaded, even when the people were our friends — imagine your friends following you to the office and trying to make small talk while you work.  Eventually, she trained them to come in through the front door, and I’ve done the same with my students.

Except then we had this little storm, and shoveling four feet of heavy, wet snow is exhausting; it was all we could do to clear a path from the street to the front and back doors.  I (generously, I thought) offered to let my students use the back door that week.

Now the snow is melting and the walkway is clear, but they have still been coming in and out through the back door.  I feel awkward refusing, especially when they look at me with Bambi eyes and say, “It’s soooo cold, can we go out through the back?”  So I say of course, and they walk through the kitchen commenting on dinner / dishes / decor.  It throws me into the most grumpy mood imaginable.  Is it a big deal?  Of course not.  (And at least it’s reasonably clean.)  But I hate feeling like a sucker when I was just trying to be nice.

Now, I’m willing to bet that I’ve played both parts on occasion.  So I’m actually, in a sick sort of way, grateful to the people who have inspired this rant post.  Because of them, I am more than careful to honor my commitments and respect the boundaries others set.  Here’s hoping that’s contagious.

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Posted in Business, Life, Vices | No Comments »

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