To understand anything I do as an artist, and to get any idea of what I experience here, you have to know that I approach the world in a very sensual way: I lean heavily on and very much enjoy sight, taste, sound, touch...
That said, I love that my life here is saturated with color.
That's what I've been thinking this week, and I've been thinking and writing IN color this week: yellow soccer ball, blue sky, orange flowers, green chitenge, red dirt, purple paint spot.
Since so many of you have enjoyed my "word-pictures," as you've called them, this email is the first installment of a series of color-thoughts (this is a concept I'm basically borrowing from my friend Kelly Heneveld's senior paper at Anderson University, which was sort of a memoir broken down by color).
Plus, this particular strange color gives me an excuse to tell this story tonight, rather than wait until later this week.
There's no real nutshell version of this email, as that would ruin the story, which true to my nature, I've drawn way out mostly for no good reason. Well, for dramatic effect. And for fun.
(As "Dad" says in Grumpier Old Men, "What the...what you talkin' about, a moral? Hell, no, there ain't no moral! I just... like that story. Like that story...")
With my love, I'm sending warmth to you all, and better dreams than I'm bound to have tonight.
BLACK...ISH--BROWNISH--ORANGISHWell, then.
A bit of history, shall we?
When I was a senior in high school, I took psychology with Mr. Iden. He probably doesn't remember, but he had each of us fill out this long, long survey of...well, ourselves, answering question after question about what was in our heads. If I'm remembering correctly, one of those dealt with what, in psych terms, are called "irrational fears": fear of heights, say, or fear of small spaces.
We were supposed to list what we thought were our irrational fears.
(Now, I tend to contest the term "irrational." For example, when a person is up high, he or she risks toppling, right? To me, this is a very logical fear. Yes, it's not so much the being-up-high that one should be afraid of; it's the falling and the impact. So being afraid of high places themselves IS irrational, I suppose. It's being afraid of the impact in the low places that's not...blah, blah.)
Still and all, I thought hard.
Heights? Nah. The last time I was in Zambia, I threw myself off a cliff backwards at Victoria Falls---a bungee-jump-and-zipline combination called "The Gorge Swing." This time, I've spent most days for the last month on tiptoe at the top of a rickety ladder. Tight spaces? Darkness? Deep water? Strange foods? Needles? Not a real problem--I've shimmied through pitch-black caves in Thailand, swum in the ocean, have tattoos and piercings...in short, I'll try just about anything once.
The point here is not to sound ridiculous and arrogant, as I realize I do, it's to illustrate: then and now, I consider myself a relatively gutsy individual with few irrational fears.
...I said FEW. And I did not have to think hard then--nor do I now--about what was at the top of that list.
Spiders.
Folks, to me, this is not an irrational fear, it is a logical fear, and a healthy respect: spiders have fangs, their fangs deliver poison, and poison delivers pain and, occasionally, death.
I fear them, and I fear their fangs, and I fear the poison in their fangs because I have quite a bit of living left to do, I hope.
Let's put me on the couch, here, where we'll flash back to when I was about seven (maybe eight or nine). If my big sister were in the therapist's office with me, here, she might hotly contest my memory. But for my purposes, I'll claim the integrity of this story and move on. The two of us were waiting at Ivy Tech for my mother to finish work. To pass the time, Jenny decided to rent a movie for us from the Warsaw Library. She popped it in, and within short order, I had turned my chair around to face the wall, refusing to look at the screen, where man was pitted against nature--specifically giant spiders--in the movie Arachnaphobia.
I swear to you that for weeks afterward, I could see long, hairy spider legs creeping out from every nook and cranny I laid my eyes on. They were like little fingers pointed directly at me. I want to eat YOU, they said.
I had a great imagination.
It was awful.
For years afterward, I could hardly stand to look at, let alone touch, pictures of giant spiders (like the ones on the covers of the kids' reference books I would shelve when I worked in the children's department of the library. I would hold them gingerly between two fingers and shove them in the stacks as quickly as possible. If I was feeling very brave, I'd take a peek at the pages. That wasn't a regular thing...) without shivering violently. Encounters with spiders produced violent reactions, too. I once caught sight of a large black house spider in my Syracuse bedroom. I'm not a squealer, but I distinctly remember squealing, shooing it into the corner where my door hinged with the wall, slamming the door on it, leaping onto my bed on the other side of the room, and waiting there nervously, reading a book for a couple of hours, until I was sure that poor, crushed creature would have to be dead.
Although I love and respect my sister deeply, to this day, I'll lay the responsibility for all of that on her.
But don't worry, Jen. Over the years, I've healed quite a bit I can even look at Ryan Schlipf's dictionary of creepy-crawlies, the
Big Book of Little Monsters, or whatever it is--and be genuinely fascinated by what he's showing me.
I can touch the pages, now.Apart from self-deprecating humor, there's a point to all of this backstory, very relevant to my present life in Zambia, I promise.
It's just to explain why I yelped when I picked up my paint smock off the floor of the children's centre this morning and went to put it on, and a very large, very leggy, very furry black thing fell out of it and scuttled across the floor to the corner where I store my paints. I squinted hard at corner, where in the dimness, I could vaguely see legs poking out from behind a ball of my yarn. I stomped my foot. No movement. I opened a small bottle of water and splashed the corner. No movement. I backed away slowly and marched purposefully out of the room and across the way to the women's centre, where I approached the four guys working there. I like to think my face was pale, but brave. Still, I didn't even attempt Bemba. I gushed English.
"Benjamin...or...somebody," I grinned sheepishly, "there's a, a, a huge spider in the children's room...I know you're working, but would someone be willing to come tell me if it's a tarantula so that I at least know whether to be afraid or not?" They all looked at each other, it clicked, and Benjamin followed me. I pointed, and he crouched. He picked up the ball of yarn from the corner with his thumb and forefinger and tossed it aside, then I heard a low "ooh ho hooo" from him and murmuring from the other three behind me, whose curiosity had gotten the better of them, I guess.
In a flurry of activity, Benjamin grabbed one of my brushes and stabbed at the spider, pinning it, and kind of chop-sticked it together with another paintbrush, holding it up as its legs flailed. The guys were all grinning.
(Backstory, now, backstory...my heart, as you can assume, was racing, and I truly understood what authors mean when they write about knees that "turned to jelly." I've never passed out before, but I honestly thought I was going to today.)
"Tarantula?" I asked weakly, and one of the guys, in broken English, turned to me and explained that it was very good I'd had them come because this spider would "sting bad" and was very dangerous, especially for children. "Kills them?" I stammered, and he nodded. Benjamin dropped the spider, obviously wounded, on the floor, and it REARED UP on its back legs. There was excited discussion as he picked it up on the paintbrush again, and it reared again. I asked them not to kill it, so someone, I'm not sure who, took it away. The man who'd told me about the spider picked up my two paintbrushes and explained that we needed to wash them well to get rid of the poison (biologists reading this: does that even work?), so we took my soapy water and rinsed them thoroughly.
Not that I was going to use those paintbrushes. Again. Ever.
Not that I really wanted to paint at all, after that, particularly with my head back up in the rafters of the room.
I thanked the guys again and again, feeling both foolish and lightheaded, grabbed my keys, and took my wobbly knees out for a long walk to stave off an adrenaline rush that was going to have me puking if I didn't move my body. I looped around the grounds of Kafakumba twice before I went back to the room and painted, sans the offending smock, until this afternoon.
I found two of the spider's fuzzy legs on the floor by my paints before I left today. With a paintbrush, I nudged them into a baggie and took them home with me to ask almighty Google what the heck had just happened and to compare the legs to any pictures I might rustle up.
Baboon spiders, according to the results of my Google search tonight, are a kind of tarantula. They have an orange sheen to their hairy bodies, and they're incredibly defensive and aggressive. When threatened, they rear up on their back legs and can apparently leap three feet in the air to use their fangs on whatever party they feel has pissed them off.
My four buddies and I were that party, and I am so, so not sorry that Benjamin broke the bully's legs.
If general, practical wisdom is correct, the best way for a person to conquer deep fears is to face them.
Probably, that takes more than one instance of "facing," and frankly, I don't want another. Heck, I didn't choose that unhappy meeting today! Plus, I let a guy fight the actual battle for me, which is just shy of shameful. But hey--
I totally survived way more than touching the pages of
Ripley's Big Book of Spiders.
That's definite progress, my friends, and it's only taken me a decade or so.
Slow and steady wins the race...
Post a Comment