The Gift

The thing freely given often isn’t. It’s rare to find a gift giver who doesn’t want to be congratulated for their generosity, which usually includes the generosity of their charm. None of us escapes this impulse–we have all been children and what is a child if not built to seek mother approval–and altruism is often a dream, not a reality. But sometimes we can connect through the truth of those complications, thereby establishing a bond that has something to do with reality and less to do with the theatre of the giver’s “I,” let alone the receiver’s. It’s very odd, but wouldn’t you say that in today’s universe of worked out bodies and worked out minds, that to be receptive is looked upon as being suspect, a “weak” or passive relationship to the self, let alone the world? So, instead of embracing the generosity inherent in being able to receive–to accept—-the receptors among us punish themselves for it, and call themselves “needy.” In fact, being needy is a perversion of their role in the give/receive dynamic, a way of making reception a negative hole. This perversion is acted out in a  number of ways, largely by becoming whiney, unpleasant, a bringer of news, usually of disasters not one’s own. Instead of saying, Oh! I miss you! Give me YOU for however long you can, the perverse receptor–the “needy” one–says: You must see me now! X is being consumed by guilt or cancer and will expire at any moment unless you have lunch with me! Part of Tennessee Williams’ genius was in getting those voices right–the voices of reproach and recrimination–and showing us how the polite victim is in fact a bully, a once generous giver/receiver who didn’t like the vulnerability that went with that and turned it on its dirty ear so it became something else. The something else one is subjected to is the lie of social interaction. Or, more specifically, the dishonesty of the object who “wants to get together” but has to use the excuse of a crisis, or a hunted out, potential “rejection,” to make the evening worth while. What are we supposed to do with this negative hole? Stare down in it? Put flowers in it? Shout down it that there is nothing wrong with SAYING what one wants, including love? I don’t know. Just don’t call me until you’re ready to receive, and I’m ready to give. Still, all of that can happen in a moment’s notice. Yesterday, while walking through a second hand bookstore, I came across a poster I wanted to give my full attention to. I was drawn to the woman’s receptivity. And it took me some moments to realize that the face staring out at me was Tori Vasquez’s, someone I “know”–the aperture in my mind cruises friends, I can’t help it, and then it closes when I realize I know the object “in society”–and she was the face of her husband, Richard Maxwell’s, new show, “Isolde,” and  I was so moved to know that in that hideous country of perverted desire, there was something as pure as her face asking to take me in with no hesitancy of heart, without blinking an eye.