matthew

I once took care of Matthew's trees.
I was asked to do this not because of my efficiency in trimming and tending (though i possessed those skills).
I was asked to do this because of the gentle, non-invasiveness of my spirit.
A skill perhaps as rare as any you've ever considered.
Even non-overtly aggressive people inject their psyches into their social environments with no small amount of insistence, because we live in a society in which individualism is glorified, and the price of being overlooked is steep. If we want love or physical security, we must be ever-willing to display our worthiness. Which is not the same thing as always trying to please everyone (although for many it manifests that way). In an individualistic society, what matters above all is that we make an impression. Even if it's a bad one. It's far easier to navigate being disliked than being a cypher. Being disliked has its rewards...if nothing else, you're always part of the conversation. If a boor ends up in a bad way, a part of us waits for redemption. If a cypher ends up in a bad way, we wait for nothing.
When i was an actor/director in southwest Florida, my chief supplemental income was freelance tree trimming. I traveled around by bike, with saws in my backpack. I loved it...the meditative quality of the labor, and the physical challenges of the climbing.
My time with Matthew came about through Kandi, his yoga/massage therapist (and one of only two or three humans on Earth allowed to enter his home). Kandi thought i might be capable of not damaging Matthew's wounded psyche, by my mere presence. In the year or two i worked for him, we only had interactions a handful of times. At first, he would leave a check for me on the porch. Eventually he was able to hand them to me in person, as we exchanged brief hellos. Perhaps sometimes i just smiled. You'll never in your life meet a gentler person than the Matthew i knew.
He was not always so.
In his youth (and he was not old), he had been one of humanity's sharks. A Wall Street mover and shaker, he had risen in a cutthroat world on the heads of those less lucky or talented.
And then something in him died. A mental breakdown left him unable to function, and barely able to talk. There was no event that preciptated his destruction - no love gone bad, no drug addiction, no sudden trauma...
It seemed that his life had killed him, plain and simple. The fact that he was still breathing was almost an afterthought.
The people upon whom it fell to care for him (or manage his estate), set him up in a modest house in Florida. He never went out, and all interactions with the world were kept to a bare minimum. There was Candi, plus a psychotherapist. His meals were delivered to his porch.
And a tree trimmer.
Meter readings, i'm sure, were experiences it took him days to recover from.
The secret to being non-aggressive psycho-spiritually is the ability to be present in the moment. To be serene, focused, and clear of mind. No peripheral thoughts about the past or the future. Matthew's sensitivity was so profound, he needed this quality from me even when we had no direct contact. Had i been anything less than a manifestation of self-contained, gentle one-mindedness, it would have upset him, even from within the closed confines of his home.
Hollywood could make a movie of Matthew's life, of course. If they did it well, we might ooh and cry and argue over which deserves best picture, that or PEARL HARBOR 2: SINK OR SWIM.
But it's really not like that.
If you search for a weakness that brought Matthew down, all you'll find is a human being. There's no morality tale. It wasn't ego that killed him. Or greed. It certainly wasn't hyper-sensitivity. Our myths, our movies, inherently make people one-dimensional. We flatten them, so we can judge them. But life isn't like that. Our lives are just one tiny, unimportant decision at a time. There's no single choice that Macbeth or Ted Kaczynski ever made that you wouldn't make as well, under the circumstances.
All that happened with Matthew is that his coping mechanisms failed. We all employ coping mechanisms. Living in this world requires a complex, staggering web of them. Matthew entered a profession where he needed extra psychological protection from aggressive callousness and resentment. Above that, he needed psychological shelter from the knowledge that billions of people who are just as capable and deserving as he, live every day in miserable, fatal poverty. Capitalism gave him extraordinary material comfort, but that was just one link in the chain of comforts he needed to sustain himself. Nothing in this world is given for free...try to wrap your mind around how many coping mechanisms we all need to deal with that. Simple love and human affection - not free. They must be bought, and won, then re-won again. What other coping mechanisms did Matthew employ? Three-martini lunches? Adrenaline highs? God? An hour of music each day, followed by an hour of programmed communal laughter (or sitcoms, as we call them)? Did he buy lots of touch - massages, prostitutes, lovers? Maybe his morality precluded some of those outlets. Each one of us is a fascinating study in survival...the things we will or won't do, to get what we need.
And let's not forget the two very greatest coping mechanisms...rationalization and denial. I didn't get love today, or i treated someone badly, but it's okay...others are worse off, there's always tomorrow, blah blah blah.
Most of us only barely get what we need. You can see it in our faces and deeds. We hurt each other. We hurt ourselves. And we keep on. Mostly, we keep on because we must.
We keep on...but not all of us.
In some, the balance snaps. Coping mechanisms fail (suicide, nervous breakdown, "mental illness"), or our mechanisms sometimes overwhelm us (cirrhosis, overdoses, a bullet in the head from jealous lover or wronged bookie).
I write about Matthew today because, lo these years later, i understand him more intimately than i ever could have then.
I understand his breakdown.
I understand it, from the inside.
I know what it means to witness your coping mechanisms deteriorate. In seeking to understand human suffering, i've intentionally broken down so many of the walls we protect ourselves with. In doing so, i've laid myself open to feeling more directly all of the sadness and anger and pain that surrounds us. On top of that, i'm dealing with the loneliness of a lifetime's accumulation of being unloved or poorly-loved...something we all experience in this society. How many days in your life did you receive as much unconditional love as you could want? How many nights did you fall asleep knowing that, no matter what happened, you were going to be loved and held tomorrow?
I've become so sensitive to any kind of aggression, there are even times when i don't have the strength to bring myself to this computer to write...too wounded to open myself to the pain of this life, and the weight of fighting for humanity's soul. It's not so hard to imagine never again having the aggression required to enter into this world of ours. I know what it means to avoid human contact...to be in a place where even "friendly" voices are demons to be shunned.
These vulnerabilities, i feel them in the very bowels of my physical being...a sickened stomach, a hurting head.
I know Matthew, for i am becoming him.
Whether i am able to pull myself back from my own destruction, by force of will (or with the right kind of love from the outside)...isn't really the point.
The point is understanding what we've come to, as a society.
It's not about me.
It's not about Matthew.
It's about finding a voice inside you, and lifting it up. A voice to say "no". No, this is not the life we have to live. We can live in whatever world we choose. We are humans. Humans, on a planet dominated by...humans.
Whatever way we choose to live, we can.
Each and every one of us is on Matthew's path. Whether or not you or i go where he led, is a matter of chance.
Whether or not we expose our children to Matthew's path, is entirely up to us.