They say, she said

I’m a sensitive person. A lot of people are, I know that, but I tend to wear my feelings more. They crawl up and down my arms, slither along my back, force me to hang my head and look away, tears in my eyes, a red apology on my lips. I’m sorry, so sorry, never meant to do it. I’m such a bad person. My grandmother used to say “I’m going to go sit in a corner eat worms and die.” Maybe she was kidding, but I’ve thought it myself, only I’d eat centipedes or scorpions instead. Worms are disgusting.

What hurts me aren’t comments like ‘your hair looks kinda funny today’ or ‘that outfit you’re wearing really sucks’ or ‘this dish you made tastes like warmed over cockroaches’. None of that bothers me because they’re all superficial stuff, they just point out things about my appearance and those can be changed easily enough. I can use a better shampoo or get a haircut, or change my clothes. Next time I can try a different recipe. I do admit that having someone tell me my house is messy is painful, but that’s related to religion, because somewhere in the Bible (I’ve heard) it says “cleanliness is next to godliness.” That brings me to my point about rumors.

What tears me apart most of all, though, are comments about my being stupid, mentally missing something (having a screw loose), or anything concerning my moral makeup. Maybe it’s my Protestant upbringing? If you refer to my way of thinking with the judgment that something that has gone wrong, that I’ve done a bad thing, I just fall apart; little pieces of me end up scattered all around and it’s impossible to put me back together. A human Humpty Dumpty, and tragic. I start to drown in despair. Either that, or I start trying to squash myself into the cracks, melting into the shadows. Pick me up off the ground or drag me out of the crevices I’ve seeped into: in either case, I’m lost.

It doesn’t matter if the judgment that’s passed is wrong or undeserved. It’s the fact that somebody has said it.

It’s not a fun feeling, believe me, but there’s a reason. Let me explain.

Nobody gets off easy with a childhood like mine. Just ask the main character in The Damnation of Theron Ware, that horrid novel from 1896. A true nightmare, never over, even more than a century later. Oh, the guilt, the uncertainty, the tears portrayed by the author, Harold Frederic. So painful was Theron’s story that ninety years later James Blish would give his name to the main character of Black Easter. Before that, Samuel Butler had written The Way of All Flesh and Sinclair Lewis had given us Elmer Gantry. Oh how we readers knew: sins were forever, if they were the sort that went against religion. And these were men who sinned; women were just vaporized, wiped off the face of the earth after the most intense scorning imaginable. Either that, or they might be saved by becoming the carrier of a lithopedion, but that’s too long a story to go into here. Just read Canal Town by Samuel Hopkins Adams. The weight of guilt is worse than having a stone in the gut.

[Note: Despite these literary cases, there’s something comforting in all of them. What could that possibly be, you ask? Easy enough, for someone like me. My sort, perhaps a dying breed, kind of misses that moral rigidity these days, when holocausts, genocides and massacres are so common. When masses of populations are eliminated and nobody even flinches. Nobody remembers morality any more, but once it was real. I long for the good old days.]

After all this, a poem by Rosalía de Castro is going to seem rather mild as far as the ostracism society directs toward the speaker. Read it first, then see if it’s harsh. The original is in Spanish, then my translation follows for those who aren’t fluent in that language:

Dicen que no hablan las plantas, ni las fuentes, ni los pájaros,

ni el onda con sus rumores, ni con su brillo los astros,

lo dicen, pero no es cierto, pues siempre cuando yo paso

de mí murmuran y exclaman:

Ahí va la loca soñando

con la eterna primavera de la vida y de los campos,

y ya bien pronto, bien pronto, tendrá los cabellos canos,

y ve temblando, aterida, que cubre la escarcha el prado.

Hay canas en mi cabeza, hay en los prados escarcha,

mas yo prosigo soñando, pobre, incurable sonámbula,

con la eterna primavera de mi vida que se apaga

y la perenne frescura de los campos y las almas,

aunque los unos se agostan y aunque las otras se abrasan.

Astros y fuentes y flores, no murmuréis de mis sueños,

sin ellos, ¿cómo admiraros ni cómo vivir sin ellos?

And the English:

They say neither plants nor fountains nor birds can talk,

nor can the whispering wave or the stars that shine,

they say that, but it’s not true, because whenever I go by

they whisper and say things about me:

There goes the madwoman who dreams of

life’s and the meadows’ eternal spring,

yet soon, very soon her hair will turn gray

and she’ll begin to see, shaking and shivering, that the field’s covered with frost.

My hair’s turning white, the fields are full of frost,

but I keep dreaming, poor me, the incurable sleepwalker,

with my waning eternal spring

and the everlastingly fresh fields and souls,

even though the first are parched and the second are burning.

All you stars and fountains and blossoms, don’t spread tales about my dreams.

How could I love you without them, nor how could I ever survive?

What’s so horrible about these lines? Well, madness may be a problem, even painful. Sanity - the ability to understand what is growing around us - is a knife in the heart. When mislabeled, it is something nobody can survive, a death sentence.

Unless, of course, one is a poet.

Which one are you? The rumor-maker or the writer of verses that tell the truth about who is insane and who is not?