Compassion and Tiny Num Nums

On Tues­day night I babysat, then drove across town to cat­sit for the week. Being in these homes is a lot like walk­ing in a for­eign mar­ket with­out a guide, using my hands and mouth to guess at the value and ori­gin of every object. I feel drained. I feel a ter­ri­ble short­ness: of life, of reach, of under­stand­ing. And there are pho­tos every­where to dra­ma­tize this feel­ing. I also feel how much my body needs to be touched.

The two year-old I watched the other night kept wak­ing up scared. I think I messed up her night­time rou­tine and when she went to sleep things just weren’t right. Sev­eral times I heard her cry­ing out and had to go hold her.

The first time I read her a story (actu­ally it was just a series of words that started with the let­ters I and J).

The sec­ond time she kept point­ing to her par­ents’ bed­room. When I car­ried her in there she showed me their baby mon­i­tor, which was unlike any I’ve seen before. It had a screen stream­ing video from a cam­era fixed directly above her crib. The image was black and white and grainy, like look­ing at a sono­gram, or night vision sur­veil­lance tape, which I guess it basi­cally is. She held the mon­i­tor, turn­ing it off and on and say­ing, ‘Baby.’

The third time, I car­ried her to a soft chair that was wide enough for me to lie on with my knees bent and she slept on my chest. Her weight made my ribs feel weak. Her weight made it like I had very thick skin, or blub­ber. Like I could, with extra effort, breathe under water. Her weight was per­fect and I scratched her back.

After I put her back in her crib, I didn’t know what to do with my time. I had the urge to eat myself sick. I checked the baby mon­i­tor fre­quently and watched her chest rise and fall. I stood in the kitchen and felt very depressed by their pantries full of noth­ing but CoCo Puffs and Crys­tal Lite and the freezer full of Jenny Craig meals.

Taped to the refrig­er­a­tor were two com­puter gen­er­ated graphs with num­bers on the y axis and dates on the x axis. Every two days they were graph­ing points in pen­cil: their weight. A bold, red hor­i­zon­tal line indi­cated their ‘goal weight,’ where they hoped to soon pencil-in a point. His graph was blue, hers was pink.

Do peo­ple really do this? Do they really mean it? Can you live with a two year old body of such per­fect weight and really take his-and-hers com­pet­i­tive weight loss graphs seri­ously? How can you have a grow­ing lit­tle sack of body in your house and fill your shelves with noth­ing but shit? This upsets me. People’s homes do not elicit my com­pas­sion, only the peo­ple in the homes. I can imag­ine a day when a baby will be very nec­es­sary to my well being and capac­ity for compassion.

Speak­ing of com­pas­sion, I don’t really under­stand what it is any­more, but I miss it. I think I used to have a lot more of it.

A Poem Found Here and Here.

I can imag­ine a day when a baby,

also called the gift of mercy,
will feel the desire

to relieve it. Doc­tor, who is moved
by the uncon­di­tional wish?

Sen­tient beings? A per­son?
A peo­ple known as the Remote?

Beings be freed by nov­els based
upon the fur free message!

By the suf­fer­ing! By under­stand­ing
of the British science!

My fash­ion is a need dis­cov­ered,
a splin­ter group is my mind,

abover our own is the inter­ces­sory
prayer. Abover Our Own is the title of

my novel on the fur free mes­sage,
and com­pas­sion was originally

from a peo­ple who were orig­i­nally
from feel­ings and the desire to relieve it.

In this other house where I am cat-sitting (by the way, Emily, what’s the name of your cat?) I have not been dis­gusted by the liv­ing space. It is lovely. But I still feel lonely and like I wish there weren’t any pho­tos on the dresser. I watched the end-half of Love Story and the name­less, senile cat curled up on my lap and I cried.

I did not like this movie because it was, in my opin­ion, entirely inhu­man. Every­thing hap­pened on a slick tra­jec­tory. The fact that she dies in the end does not make it any bet­ter. It made me think of all the ‘tru­isms’ that I no longer take for granted as tru­isms. I don’t know how to explain this more specif­i­cally except that it made me think about phrases like ‘the human fam­ily’ and ‘the his­tory of man’ and ‘live life to the fullest’ and wish that they indi­cated some­thing that is real.

I started to read a book on the his­tory of lan­guage and I felt bet­ter. Lan­guage grew out of some­thing and goes on chang­ing and chang­ing and break­ing apart and respond­ing to our alien­ation. Lan­guage is of and for and because of alien­ation. Last night I became obsessed with the phrase ‘tiny num nums’ like it per­fectly described some­thing I was look­ing for. This phrase will grow into some­thing sat­is­fy­ing just for me.

What I am say­ing is that a stranger’s home will take on the fea­tures of the thoughts you bring into it–much like we project things onto for­eign cul­tures. Lately I am always in a state of mind where I won­der about life and feel some­thing between ter­ror and a blank wall in my mind. Being in these homes makes me feel like I am walk­ing around in a phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of that state of mind. Most of the arti­facts are mute to me, some things offer a sense of inter­ac­tion, and then there is one small, roam­ing body that makes noise to get my atten­tion and wants to fit its whole self against my warmth. Where, I won­der, is that body roam­ing in my mind?

if some­thing is too much i can’t look at it if it’s too much i can’t have any of it if there is too much there i have nowhere to look

i like things that are like tiny num nums i need things to come to me in tiny num num size i have a fil­ter that lets only tiny num nums through