Climbing Up to Visibility

It’s the small window of time in the morning when classes are switching, from math to science to study. Sarah wants to talk about her project.

“Tal, can I focus on Bobby Sands? Oh, and I have U2’s song ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday.’ Can I play that?”

“Of course.”

“I’m just going to research my project,” says someone else.

“I am such a bad reader. I’m slow. I’m like…” a voice calls out.

“Tal, do you like my John Lennon drawing?” asks Yared.

“Yared, I am helping Sarah on her project right now. I can’t look at your drawing.”

“So you don’t like my John Lennon drawing.”

“I can’t say cause I haven’t seen it.”

“Tal, do you know what this is?” Yared says. “ It’s the bird.” He draws a crude six-fingered hand on the white board.

“Yared, that hand has six fingers. That’s a terrible hand.”

“You don’t like me, do you, because I’m black!” shouts Yared.

“Miles, Miles, not cool, bro,” comes another voice.

“Sorry, sorry!”

“Oh my god, my game that I made that I made for math, it’s called Geomatrictionary. It’s really fun,” says Rider. “I think I’m going to market it.”

“Yeah, it’s really fun,” says someone.

“Yeah, totally.”

“Let’s hug.”

“Okay, that’s weird.”

“Don’t take my computer,” comes a shout.

“Uh—awwww.” There is a brief scuffle around the computer.

“I’m going to eat it. The computer! It taste like chicken. Robot chicken!”

Anneke enters the room. “I was late because I went to the doctor. They gave me like all this stupid medicine. It was like I was two again. Great, now he is writing everything I say. No Tal, Non, no, no, no!”

“Anneke, I heard your voice! You’re back!” exclaims one of Anneke’s peers.

“No, no, he’s typing everything I’m saying!”

“Hey, Rider, let’s look up sports cars,” says Miles.

“No, I’m going to do doing my work.”

“Tal, I’m going home because I have the sniffles,” says Evan.

“Evan, are you a wuss?”

“Tal, that’s not what I said.”

“Anna, tell me about your retreat.”

“Okay. It is called Metta-Earth.”

Metta Earth Retreat? Anna, Why don’t they call it an advance? Why should you be retreating. You should be advancing.”

“Okay,” she says, smiling.

***

“You know what I like to talk about,” Rider says, interrupting. “The difference between ‘precise’ and ‘accurate.’” No one is really listening, but he’s telling us any way.

“Hey Tal, we finally got some guitar music in the big room,” says Ollie. “My guitar is finally in tune.”

“You should play “All Blues” by Miles Davis,” says Rider. “That song is sweet.”

“Miles Davis is the boss!” says Yared.

“I am, aren’t I?” says Miles.

“Play ‘Chameleon’ by Herbie Hancock,” says Ollie. “Or ‘So What,’ by Miles Davis. I’m learning that on guitar.”

“Wait. How does it go?” Yared says, strumming his guitar.

“I’m named after Miles Davis,” says Miles.

“Goddammit,” says Yared. “I was just practicing it this morning. Now I can’t remember it.”

“Clearasil rapid action medication,” says Claire, prancing into the big room.

***

In the lead up to the trip there is the usual high social/hormonal excitement. Apparently the car one is riding in is the most important factor for happiness in the next 48 hours.

But under the hype is the quiet movement of emotion that runs under everything we do, everyday. Insecurity? That’s the abstract word for the feeling of invisibility, a sense of powerlessness that rises when one fears he will not be able to articulate the developing inner world.

Rio feels like others are criticizing him for what? Being lazy? Out of it? Not caring or intense. Never working hard or with focus?

“Or is it that you feel like you are not getting something inside of you across to them?” I aks him.

“Yeah.”

“So they may have a picture of you, but you are aware that you are struggling to bring out anything that would change their picture of you. So what they see, and what you then feel about what they see, becomes the picture of yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“And so, who here has the power to change that picture?”

“I do.”

“But it’s hard for you.”

“Yeah,” he nods. His face is reddening and his eyes are filled and watery.

“Rio, you feel like no one sees what you do?”

He nods.

“No one knows what you really care about.”

“Yeah.”

“Who is responsible for them understanding and seeing you.”

“I am.”

“But you feel like some kids in class are mostly just giving you shit without really caring about you. Without really knowing anything about you?”

He is nodding.

“So when DO you work, when are you all out?”

“At hockey.”

“Why?”

“Because I really care about it.”

“Did you set a goal about hockey.”

“Yeah.”

“What is it?”

“I want to make it to the NHL.”

I look at the class. “Do ya’ll understand that it doesn’t matter if he does or doesn’t make it to the NHL, but that he has a goal. Did you write it down?”

“Yeah.”

“So now when you go to hockey practice you’re thinking about that goal?”

“Yeah.”

“And when you are at practice what are you doing consciously?”

“When the coach says to do laps for conditioning I always work the hardest so I am first.”

“That means you are going to get better. If you do that every time you will be come better than others over time. If you keep doing that you will be great.”

He nods.

“But no one here sees that. It’s not present. And so your story keeps having the same conclusion. Rio is quiet. HE seems passive. He seems to “not care”—he seems like your average 15 year boy, sleepy and catatonic in the morning, distractible during the day, at his absolute fluent freest being with a ball at his feet or a chasing after a puck or ball.”

I look a round, trying to figure out how to get to whatever is in there and bring it out.

“Hey. Someone go get that poster in there.” It’s Rios’ poster. I had been looking at it the other day. It seemed extraordinarily detailed. Filled with ten quotes about freedom and revolution, and each quote cut out into the separate words and arrange in jagged, downward falling zig-zags. One of his quotes was from Rousseau: “Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains.”

But in the rush of the day I have not had time to really look into the poster. To understand what it is saying, in its layers of collage, in the various images. If there is intention embedded in Rio’s work, neither I nor anyone in the class has really looked at it. We have all unwittingly participated in the the situation in which Rio feels invisible, even though his work is hanging on the wall and he is sitting at the table in front of of us.

“The poster there, it’s above the printer.” Rider scampers to get it.

“Rio, tell me what you were thinking when you made this. What all is here?”

“Well, the eye-shaped thing, that’s an eye. It’s what I see. See how the eye is split and there is that whirlpool is going down through it, that’s how I sometimes feel, water going down or draining out.”

I hold the poster up so everyone can see it. “Tell me more about it. What about this?”

“There is the cut out face of a man, the size of a passport photo. That’s James Van Reims Dyk, of the Flyers.” The Flyers re Rio’s favorite hockey team.

“Van Ram’s Dick?” I shout.

“Tal, shut up. That’s so dumb!” someone complains.

“Oh I get it.”

“Tal! He’s telling a story.”

“Okay, Rio, tell us about the guy. Why is he on there?”

“Well, He was really poor when he was growing up. He never had much money and he couldn’t afford new sticks, and when he broke one he would use duct tape so he could keep using it. And he built his own rink behind his house so he could play all the time.”

“And you admire him.”

“I feel like him sometimes.”

“Even though he is not the best player.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell us more.”

“Well, the guy in the corner is me.” In the corner is a nine-year old’s drawing of a USA hockey player holding up a champion’s trophy.

“We got it. What else?”

“Well the arrow sing pointing down says ‘one way,’ because there is only one way to go.

And the poems and quotes?

Well I arranged them like water dripping down, going from cup to cup, and they are all ending up at the bottom, where I put that part that looks like waters made out of words.”

“What else?”

“Well, that shoe, it’s kind of corny looking, but what it says: ‘Looks good…feels good.’ That’s sort of how I feel, like people see me on the outside, but what’s on the inside is much different.”

“What else?”

“That ice climber.”

“The dude in the crevasse?”

“Yeah, that’s me trying to climb up.”

The class has been listening the whole time, and I have been showing them the poster as Rio tells us everything.

“Y’all, this whole thing is conscious. His poster is the map of him. There’s a whole story here. None of us have been able to read it, or taken the time. That’s not really our fault, but it tells us that what we see is not really what is actually there. Or what is actually there is much greater than what we see.”

To listen to Rio talk, the afternoon before our trip to Montreal, is to see a the miraculous consellation that makes each of us up. I’ve made time for us to look long enough to see him. It is true, in the first half of the conversation, I was doing the work. I was saying for him what he had not yet been able to say. When I held his poster up, he had a picture of himself, an artifact that was wholly his. When he looked at that self-made reflection of himself, he could begin to tell us what he was made of, of the materials and images he’d used to make himself. He is all hope and intention, a boy creating himself. When he could see it the words came easy, already formed, as they must have been, since, in the poster, he’d already said them. We just hadn’t seen it or heard it yet. We needed to listen and look. And he had to talk, to say it, so he could see it again, too.