Carole Maso - Break Every Rule - Essays on Language, Longing, & Moments of Desire

Born in Paterson, New Jersey.

The oldest of five children.

Educated…

Have I mentioned my penchant for privacy, for solitude? To be left alone .

Who is that woman standing off to the side, so detached, so removed from herself, narrating the events of her life as if recounting another life altogether? Why is she so filled with caution, with reservation?

I was struggling against every stricture — it exhausts me now to think of. But it was more than that — it had always been more than that. Impossible to describe. Did I actually think that this very pleasant woman was ever going to be able to help me with any of this? Of course not.

That white world where I yearned to go forever. Never come back.

Why is she there at all?

The problem was I was hurting those around me including those I loved — there was the real problem. Was I hurting myself — not really — no, not intentionally. To break out of the habitual, the deadening — in expectation, in habit, in pattern, it seemed necessary to cause some violence, some harm to oneself. But not to others. I had been asked to go because of the damage I had done to others, and I went because I recognized that damage — and desired not to do that anymore. I wanted to be free, but not at any cost — to lose those I loved would be impossible — my last connections to this world. And of course, as it is now all too clear, I was not free in the least.

I go I suppose because I am unwell mentally, I do not say it, but dying in fact, I feel myself at twenty-six to be dying. In a stupor much of the time, with an impossible sadness — the grotesque, thudding afternoons, slow and dull, how to make them pass? Unable to speak, to rise, to move. For weeks and weeks sometimes.

And on other days, without middle ground, turned on a dime, without a break, I am so manic, so hyperactive and sick with it, so unable to focus, to sleep, to eat, filled with every delusion and plan; I am genius, utterly estranged, outside, writing such astounding work and so quickly, works of art , only when I look back at them to find page after page of virtually straight lines. Impossible, obviously, to even decipher. Let alone genius.

I seduce everyone in sight. Without much feeling. Going to the next adventure in search of someone or something to hold back the dead feeling. And it works. At least for awhile.

And the raining — what’s that raining sound? Then snow. Don’t go . Last bit of world. Last blue shadow.

Week after week I wrestled with it — if I could only describe to you, dear woman show you the contours of that world — drained of all color where I lay entombed, Dr.E. I can’t breath or move .

Most people live lives of desperate accommodation I find. Overloved as a child I did not have the need to be loved or to please. I just wanted to live on my own terms.

Just.

Even the book is a box in this world.

First inklings of the box — of the dimensions of the thing — its shallow sides, its heavy lid makes a horrifying sound — and the early attempts to resist — there were signs early on — trouble early on in the refusal to assume the ordinary way of things: the prom, the driver’s license, the National Honor Society — teenage rebellion? Yes, at the time it certainly looked that way. All the small refusals, the casual, seemingly casual, sloughing off of the prescribed identities, of the ways to behave.

Oldest sibling — but no role model, my sisters and brothers watched me in dismay. And entering the working world — appalled by the tedium and the language — that bantering all day long — that horrendous small talk — the clichés, the hundred abuses. I sat in mortal misery, suffering it — incapable of entering their various pacts.

Is she making sense? Is she making any sense?

The original self slowly usurped. Without exactly noticing at first. It was just a hollow feeling, a feeling of something being taken slowly away, pulled gently from you as you watched, half-cognizant but helpless. The wild self being normalized. How difficult to retrieve a life, once it is relinquished. One felt someone somewhere getting a sinister pleasure from this. She is paranoid . The more you balked, the more exhausted you became. All part of the plan.

My parents next to me — people I desperately loved — and yet could not follow. Their dreams and ambitions seemed to me not their own but something they had borrowed, a weird loan that they had accepted without much question. I loved them but could not love their assumptions. I would have to break their cherished, their given — not because I wanted to — but in order to survive. It sounds perhaps melodramatic, but it was the terms of the struggle then.

The struggle against those forces was the fight literally for one’s life. I sat across from her. You are up to it , she seemed to be saying. She gave me a taste for it. Don’t give up .

And to not somehow fill that vacuum, that loss of coordinates with cynicism, disengagement, withdrawal, self-protection, guilt. Somehow.

We sat there together and circled it week after week, year after year. Through the thousand retreats and reversals and dismissals and setbacks.

As I walked yet again into another darkened bedroom, another alleyway— begin again . Back to my white world. Begin again . Back into the silence.

The struggle to freedom.

The struggle not to emerge already constructed.

To walk away from all oppression in full knowledge of the consequences. To live outside the usual tyrannies, conventions. To separate finally not from those one despises or is indifferent to — that is easy enough — but from the ones one most deeply loves — so as to be autonomous. To walk out of every enclosure. Fluent at last in your own language. One felt often in that room the strictures of language, the strictures of all existing forms: literary, emotional, social, political. The limits.

Put something down .

Put something down some day .

Put something down some day in my .

In my hand .

In my hand right .

In my hand writing .

Put something down some day in my hand writing .

Those lovely lines of Gertrude Stein.

I was unable to live within the expected perimeters, tired of the usual assignments. I am more lucid about this now than I was then; forgive me, I do not mean to reduce or trivialize, and I do wonder whether it is therapy after all that has made it possible to say these things: facile, useful, but perhaps not entirely true.

I have been uneasy from the start about writing this piece. I am not a procrastinator and yet have put it off countless times. It troubles me. The danger of this kind of writing and of all writing to some degree is all too evident, all too present at every turn. And it in some ways resembles the dangers of therapy. What is this desire to become comprehensible to one’s self? To net the escaping one, haul her in to dissect and understand and to finally display. The temptation, the risk is to assign meaning, motive, cause, in an attempt to feel a little bit better . Not so amorphous, not so out there. To fix the elusive self. To invent a character — and a role to play. The “I” stabilized, fixed on the page now, feigning illumination — What violence do I do to myself and to language, and to the magic of those afternoons with her? What did I learn there? What happened in that room? Well one can well understand the trepidation in writing any of it — What do I change or give up or alter in ways I may not even be aware of — what will I say here in the attempt to communicate something?

How improbable that she met me in snow offering a bouquet of brilliant reds and greens and gold — an offer to return—