So you're miserably lonely and bitter, and you can't even believe this is who you've become—you never meant to end up Ms. Utterly Hurting. You always thought maybe you'd wind up more like Ms. Happily Ever After (post-feminist), some Lisa Simpson-meets-Madonna combination of smart little achiever turned sexy bad girl ruling the world turned married mom of two kids with cool names.
But no, here you are, wounded from disappointments you never imagined. All you know is you can't spend one more Thanksgiving with your fractured family, or one more year in your pressure-cooker cubicle, or one more decade losing people to death, distance, or domestic bliss (theirs, of course). You can't and you won't. You simply refuse to set yourself up for more letdowns, more pain.
So you hunker down tight in your little fortress, like Jodie Foster in Panic Room. You've got your Entire History of the Blues CDs, your two-year-old pile of unread New Yorker magazines, your collection of Thai take-out menus, your new interest in needlepoint—who needs family or friends when you've got all this to keep you happy, right? You put yourself in emotional storage— Rosie O'Donnell calls it “bubble-wrapping” your heart—until it's safe to come out again, if ever.
This is Hiding—when you pull back from the world, almost daring it to find you and hurt you again. You decline invitations, stop calling friends back, do the minimum at work (but always act tremendously busy)—in general, you push every-one away, halfway hoping they'll leave you alone in your misery, and halfway hoping they'll stick with you and somehow break the spell of your unhappiness. You're like the worst kind of adolescent—a sullen, door-slamming creature of darkness who secretly dreams of being Prom Queen.
In “Red Onion, Cherries, Boiling Potatoes, Milk—,” Jane Hirshfield warns us that when you become like this, “a soul, accepting nothing,” you're in real danger of starving yourself. In Hiding we're like stubborn children, refusing everything, the delicious peaches as well as the nasty boiled potatoes and dry toast. We confuse sulking with “holding out for better.” “No,” we say, pursing our lips. No, we won't meet our friend-across-the-hall's-brother for drinks, and No, we won't join the office softball team. Too bad if that means we're saying no to the possibility of love or even just fun. Like the cut flowers that refuse to drink, we'd rather shrivel up and die than expose ourselves to the possibility of pain again.
But the heart sees what's really going on here, says Hirshfield. Even though we do our best to keep it at a great distance, the heart remains alert and tries to keep us from becoming like the speaker in Philip Larkin's “Wants,” who desires only oblivion. Locked away in our safe rooms, we tell ourselves we're not missing a thing out there in the world. It's all a sham—invitation-cards to dull parties and other people's weddings, dinners, meetings, “the artful tensions of the calendar.” Who cares if Christmas is coming and then, relentlessly, New Year's Eve-and-no-date? Even sex seems to lack passion and intimacy; they're all just following “printed directions,” or so you like to think, basing that generalization on your last long-ago experience with the seemingly attractive bicycle messenger. Everyone just pretends to be happy, they fake that pose of contentment in the family “photographed under the flagstaff.” But you see all this for what it is—little activities to distract ourselves from the coming of death. You'd rather face it alone—hiding behind your triple-locked door, watching endless reruns of Seinfeld, teaching your cat to come when you call.
But deep down some part of you is still affected by beauty. You know that you are being childish and stubborn. You know that this lockdown is a conscious choice you are making. As Wang Wei suggests in “Returning to My Cottage,” you still hear the “faraway bells echo in the valley.” When you get up to open the window or change the channel, you hear laughter from your neighbor's dinner party, you hear doors opening and shutting as people come home and go out. The sky and the evening breeze still beckon to you. You consider calling up some friends and going out, but then the fear takes over. Why go out? Why try? You'll only be crushed again. A simple Wednesday evening begins to seem dark and somber, so you give up, “go in and bar the door.”
Instead of being so hard on yourself because you're afraid to venture back into the world, maybe you just have to accept that this is what you feel like doing for the time being. You are like the speaker in Guillaume Apollinaire's “Hotel.” You have checked in to a cage in your own heartbreak hotel, and even though the sun “puts his arm through the window,” begging you to come out and play, you won't budge. In fact, you'll use the heat and warmth of the sun to light your self-destructive cigarette—“I don't want to work I want to smoke.” You are filled with ennui and existential angst. And as the French philosophers suggest, perhaps for a while anyway, you need your cage, your own lonely space, your time to mend.
And as you pull back even further, you may begin to resent and fear the life around you. The sounds of life that penetrate your “shadowy upstairs bedroom” may not be reassuring. In “Summer: 6:00 A.M.,” Jane Kenyon paints a picture of the neighbors that only confirms your decision to hide from the world. The mom next door is trapped by the defiant toddler and the unhappy infant, the older one wailing like a cicada. Meanwhile you hear her husband's footfalls, hard and deliberate, walking away from the house, leaving her with the kids and the beige, brown sameness of the day. So if this is marriage and motherhood, who needs it? you say. You can roll over and go back to sleep on your pristine, 300-thread Egyptian cotton sheets. You don't have to contend with screaming brats or sticky puddles of spilled juice. You belong to no one.
And if you happen to drag yourself out of your fortress and go for a quick walk around the neighborhood, your reflections on the natural world will confirm your decision to stay hidden away. In Larry Velez's “Plainsong,” a large loud raven comes across a sad remnant of human vanity, a discarded brown toupee (must belong to the pathetic bald guy across the street who's always yelling at his kids). You decide you'll be like the raven who “hasn't learned to want/what he doesn't need.” You can stop wanting, you tell yourself. And then you notice the neighbor's unfinished skylight, and you are reminded of the wife's breakdown—she wanted too much (neighborhood gossips suggest that the stepfather was doing more than construction) and she paid for it. Even though it's spring, there's “death in careless abundance” out there in nature—and in human nature. Better to turn away from all of it, to play it safe, ask for less, want less, spend nothing.
Good luck, because guess what? You're doing what you set out not to do—setting yourself up for a big fall. How can you possibly be this superior being you've created in your head? You think you get to scoff at the way everyone else lives because only you know how to distance yourself from the messy spills and sad vanities of real life? Like the speaker in Richard Eberhart's “In a Hard Intellectual Light,” you think you can outsmart life—you can build this citadel, beautiful and austere, that will protect you from the desire for closeness, tenderness, and intimacy. You will not give in to feeling. You will see everything only “in a hard intellectual light.” But it won't work, Eberhart warns us—not only will we all have our fall, but our search for absolute perfection will kill all delight.
At this point, some part of us begins to understand that this hiding out, this “bubble-wrapping” of our hearts isn't working. Hiding is no longer any kind of refuge. You have tried to shut yourself away from pain and sorrow, but in the process you have also shut out joy and pleasure. You can barely taste the fifth or fifteenth Oreo, the air in your apartment is stale, and the Fiona Apple CD that you play over and over sounds like elevator music.
Jane Hirshfield, in “A Room,” and Derek Walcott, in “The Fist,” both show us that we are trying too hard. In “A Room,” Hirshfield tells us that we cannot control what Eberhart calls our “body's soft jails,” the weakness of the flesh. However desperately we want to deny our humanity and especially our feelings, we are still full of anger, grief, and, yes, desire. We do our best to become inanimate matter like the room that imprisons us, instructing our ribs each morning so that we will “neither respond nor draw back in fear,” so that we will desire nothing. But to achieve this nothingness, you must clench yourself too tightly, like the fist that holds on to the heart in Walcott's “The Fist.” Just hold on for one more day, you tell yourself. You try hard to ignore the brightness, the world with its pleasures and dangers. It's like learning to ride a bicycle. If you only concentrate on holding on, of course you'll fall.
The longer we continue to hide, the harder it becomes to ignore all the things we really want, like love and connection with others. We're holding on tightly to our defenses, but at the same time we desperately want to let go—as a result, we begin to develop “the strong/clench of the madman”—we start making ourselves a little crazy. Billy Collins's “Embrace” tells us to relax the grip, drop the pose, stop playing that goofy, seventh-grade parlor trick—the one where you pretend to be making out with someone when really it's just you with your arms wrapped around yourself. Do you really think you're fooling any-one, least of all yourself? You know that with your “crossed elbows and screwy grin” you have never looked so alone. If you don't start looking for a real embrace, if you don't release yourself from this restraint, you are not getting better. Instead, you have become your own straitjacket, locked in fear and bitterness, unable to move in any direction.
So free yourself from that loony bin. Stop hiding from all that's bad—and very good—in the world. Like the speaker in Louise Glück's “Mutable Earth,” learn that you were wrong when you thought “if I had nothing/the world couldn't touch me.” That safe room you created could never protect you anyway, because “the boundary, the wall/around the self erodes.” Ultimately we realize that we weren't really hiding, we were waiting for our numbness to morph into hunger.
In the end, that hunger will drive us back into the world. Like the defiant child in Hirshfield's “Red Onion …” (she was waiting too) you will finally feel appetite. At last, you'll unbar the door, go lie in the new grass that greens the marshes, feel the evening breeze that “bends the water-rushes.” And you'll feed your hungry heart.