Experiment in the Essay #13-- What is it to be a person?: #52essays2017

What does it mean to be a person?

What is a person?

I swim laps past the stooped old lady-- I think she's part Jellyfish on Valium-- doing her ghostly butterfly stroke, legs moving in the slowest circles, her skin lagging behind her.  I am swimming with questions the way some people swim with dolphins. 

What is it to be a person? 

You could say this question is keeping time with me. It is stroke for stroke pacing me to the shallow end and back to the deep, where I see a band-aid that's come loose from a swimmer slowly, spirally sink.   

What is a person?  Once you are one, you forget to ask. You just strip off your suit, and wonder if you'll get fungus in your feet for lack of flipflops, from all that shared water on the only-sometimes-bleached tiles. 

Is it a different question if I write it slightly differently? Yes, technically; maybe, entirely. Depends if you hear it differently or how closely you read.  

Depends on what you think a sentence does.

Even the tiniest parts of words can make a world of difference, say,"I do" vs. "I don't." Two persons becoming, in effect, one thing; one person, in effect, denying the whole thing. 

What is a person? It's the kind of question a three year-old asks you that you're never ready for.  It exposes the edges of your resourcefulness.  You point and grunt. Hand the kid a pancake and say, "I don't know." or "Let me just write some things down." My son is  nearly two.  He's content to know whatever he assumes, but somewhere in the next year doubt creeps in and he'll have to check.

Maya Angelou: We don't tell you enough how special you are. She said this to young people, as a general message: you are all we've got and we should tell you so everyday.

I trust my wise poet elder. OK, so a person is something special, who should be told that when young, but then weaned off that belief before it becomes narcissism later.

John, my husband, not poet laureate, but with a world-view that makes human self-importance seem as appealing as winters-old-summers-melted cherry chapstick: we (humans) are not special, but we are especially good at trying to convince ourselves of our specialness.

He favors animals. They greet you on...simple terms? I try to see through his eyes. But when I look at the African Grey parrots he keeps, half the time I see only animals who want to peck my hand and crap on the coffee table.

Maybe we spend our whole lives trying to sort out whether we are special or not in the eyes of the universe.

Some of us think the universe has eyes, anyway, or are willing to uptick the final judgment: what is a person?

It always seems weird to me that we stand around naked in locker rooms. A bunch of strangers naked as the day they were born rifling through bags and combing wet hair. Everything is about context. If I took off all my clothes on the subway and stood there texting/writing, as I am doing now, I would be arrested. Even if I tried to look like I belonged, like I was not special.

If I stood thigh-deep in a pool of water and jesuschristmaryfucker screamed birthfuckingbabywater you would call the police, eventually. But If I told you I was in labor, you'd cover your head with a pillow and wait it out. The fucking miracle of life.

Labor is a special moment. It's a wrecking ball to your body, to your sense of being inside skin, to the fiction of a person as a singular thing.

All life is transformation. To accept that is a kind of death. To reject that is a worse death. I take the first.

I think.

As I was swimming, circling in the water, going nowhere, going whaledolphinfishanythingbutperson, I was thinking --what makes writing and do we write to figure out what a person is? We must be naked in art. We must birth a definition. Those who have been there (birthed babies) warn you that you will also shit a bit on the delivery "table." At one birth I attended the mama's shit was so tiny, like a polite pebble, like it didn't want to outclass the baby or particularly stick out in the memory of that special day (The thing you want to brag about is not: "My partner took the most giant shit ever, they weighed it!"). The mother won't know she's shit unless someone tells her. What is a person.

I remember shitting in my bathing suit in the pool in a retirement village (somewhere, you don't have to know where you are when you're that young) when I was still little enough to have what parents call "accidents."  It felt heavy. I don't remember if I reported it or it was found by adults. 

My mother rinsing the suit and shit out in the sink in a big public bathroom. My nose could reach the white sink basin. I don't remember shame or embarrassment or my exact age. Just my suit insideout and the white nylon streaked crotch and one of those dumb faucets you have to keep holding down or it will shut off. Very hard to clean soiled things under that.

Sometimes sentences need a tap with consistent unrelenting pressure too. Clear away the muddy brown accident parts to find out what a person is.

After you grow a person inside you and all your muscles cells bones hormones nerves numbstruckdumb collaborate to get it out, you are changed.

But, why?

I think birth is a clobbernumber on the baby. It is sad to think you will never have it better than in the womb and the rest of life is a downhill tutorial in separation.

I think birth is this ordeal, right, at the end of which you get the deal. You didn't ask to be a person. It is probably the biggest decision of your life and you didn't make it.

As I stand here naked, I am trying to get pregnant again. Well, not right this minute in the locker room, but generally. As a practice that makes my animal husband animal us happy. A newborn is an animal dressed up and treated specially. That's it. As close to the kingdom as we get, but then we walk away backward with blindfold on tripping over our own feet. We sense we are losing something primary but we don't know what. We wreck our posture by not standing around naked enough.

We spend the rest of our lives trying to get back into the pair of arms that will help us know why we were here in the first place.

Real arms work best. It's because there is blood in them and we who are held feel it run warm beneath the fiction of skin. The bloodstream is comforting to us, as our blood once made an infinity sign with our mother's. Even if she was unable to mother, if she could not transform, still, the blood precedes the personality.

What, then, how, when--is a person?