Friday, Nov. 15th at 6:30pm
Host: at Mitch's apartment
The topic began as a suggestion for a shame performance night, and then settled into simply shame (or possibly shame vs. guilt); do feel welcome to perform your shame if you'd like though, amid the varied threads of discussion.
Here are some tidbits to get us started:
Shame Culture vs. Guilt Culture: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/opinion/the-shame-culture.html
Brene Brown on shame; TED talk
Materials from members of the group will be forthcoming and posted below the week before we meet.
From Sabine:
I'm interested in so many angles from which we might look at the idea and feelings of shame. I hope some of the others of you will pull in collective/societal shame, psychology of shame, etc. What I'll focus on is the way we work out our societal and individual shame via the arts. Sometimes the only thing to ease the absolute, oppressive, crushing nature of shame in the body and psyche is to stop holding it in, give it voice. Whether as a writer, a visual artist, a performance artist, or the reader/audience taking it in so much shame has been aired out and the awful, lonely, scary feelings of shame validated, and perhaps made less crushing by the arts. How lucky are we to have these platforms as humans to deal with ourselves and all we are capable of feeling and making others feel.
Read this first: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/08/top-10-books-about-guilt
Then read this, which was first experienced, then drowned under, then penned into a book of rough-hewn poems as a method of survival, some of which have been performed on a stage in front of several hundred via theatrical monologue, which completed the cycle of this shame (along with beginning tentative healing), and some of which are still in draft form (with associated shame awaiting its turn for revision too):
Poem for the
Bunnies (draft iii)
for Naya
by Sabine
Brigette (orig. April 27, 2016, audio)
I.
There is a
scene in The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies where
Mr. MacGregor scoops in his palm each of the flopsy bunnies out of the hay
pile, or grass clippings pile, rather.
And he does it so gently.
II.
There’s this
tender tenderness to the scooping. But,
of course, his intentions are not kind.
The tenderness of scooping a sleeping, cozy, sure little rabbit out of
one area and tucking it into another area safely—well, in this case, it is not
safe, it is a sack, and the sack is headed to his kitchen; the threat was real
for us too—I suppose that’s my interest in the scene.
III.
I wish I
could remember scooping you from the walled in scene we found ourselves. My hands cupped so you would have slept
through his scary + my mute, and through my collapse after. Oh that I could have sheltered more, carried the
darkened wholly myself, and delivered you safely from it to soft-hued light and
a bird song ending.
IV.
You and your
sister and me, we are safe now. We
delivered ourselves, though you remember all of it, and she, none of it. And so, for you + me, the lingering hollow still
follows from that chapter.
There were two objects that I actually could have scooped to safety in my
two cupped hands, but they were the very things that I absolutely did not, and
that I personally delivered to harm, the bunnies.
In this case, not the sweetly drawn flopsy bunnies held in a book for
the first time by your chubby 3-year old hands on an airplane back from
Bangkok, but our Mr. MacGregor and our Strawberry, our own wee flopsy bunnies. The Holland lop-eared rabbits you showed at
the fair when you were eleven.
V.
Elder
daughter, whose arms got bruised, who I left alone in all that heat, builder of
ladders, if I could, believe me, I would reach back—like added pages of
drawings to a children’s story—my two hands into that chapter that runs my
blood cold. The very first thing I would scoop are your bunnies, right out of
the forest. Let them have one hour there
for a few glorious leaps of joy, then reach down, scoop, and deliver them
safely to our yard to you. Wake you now,
soon to leave, and tell you the good news of who came home before you go.
VI.
But the
bunnies are the ones that got left behind. It is an unscoopable thing that I
carry like a burden sack. Yet,
childlike, when I hike in those woods with the dogs, I look for them
still. Then on the way back across the
river where we dug their carrot-lined warren I try to set the shame down before
I return home. I remind myself of all
the times he said how they’d taste for dinner, and how he sounded when he said he could do what he wanted with any of us. Like you, I know what he is
capable of. I often thought we would all
get left behind, not just them strewn with weasel-punctured necks in a forest. When I grow brave and visit the empty warren,
agitated by my own hope, I recall your shriek and my firm voice for you not to
look, not to look, and hugging you and hugging you. Maybe it was another rabbit who lay lifeless
in leaves, I had said. Your faith in me
heart-breakingly unshaken, you did not look.
Fact is we both know for certain that one of the bunnies did not make it
past a full day. Other fact is I felt
safer in the woods that day, despite your sorrow in my arms at what I’d done,
than I had or would for years.
VII.
I had been
trying to build us all a safe warren to huddle in together, away from
predators, as I scooped out the dirt by hand in their warren to reveal a
beautiful tree-root ceiling the week before.
The boards I placed at their entryway were with loving hands that had only
ever held them gently. The moss and
straw I laid inside, winter coming, I imagined keeping us warm too from the
cold our life had become. The carrots
and rabbit pellets I heaped in their imagined kitchen, their own start to Watership Down, more chance than we
would have for a good life when we had to leave the quiet of the woods beside trickling stream, where water would be plentiful for
them, even if they woke in winter. I was
in a sack and could see very little in the dark of it. But for keeping hold of
your hand and hers, I lost hold of everything else.
VIII.
They were
deeply loved.
IX.
You were so
little and had no say. I am so very sorry.
X.
Remember
“happy baby,” the way they leaped the first time we let them into our backyard
as babies? I do. And when I can’t, I try
to.
Mitch's Contribution:
This is a heavy topic so I looked for something short and funny.
Apologies that it's an advertisement.
Public humiliation is different than shame, but there is nothing more cringe worthy for me to see. When I speak or perform and it doesn't go well, it leads to incredible, lifelong personal feelings of shame for me...I have terrible stage fright for that reason. That said, I guess inducing shame (humorously) for a good cause (the environment) can be beneficial...at least I thought this ad was a form of 'positive shaming', if there is such a thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll22B4VcGPQ
