There is the sense of the word shy that also holds the meaning coming up short. Just a little shy of the sublime here. Yet another sense of the word is one that is often applied to horses, or small birds. To recoil, to shrink. There is an excess of spirit, and this is what causes the animal to skitter or flit, its path diverging in a sudden and dramatic shift. When you’re riding a horse that has shied, the natural reaction is to right the course, return to the prior, usually beaten, path. What happens when you let the horse have its head? What happens when you give free rein to this excess spirit?
Flamingos, I learn reading an entry from the seventeenth century, are extremely shy and therefore difficult to shoot.
One of the last citations in the OED for the word shy, under combinations, is Joyce’s use of the word shybrightly.
The world is at odds with the shy person. The world shies from the shy, and maybe this is proper. Do we want to read the world as a text? Misinterpretation is part of every reading, and the shy person must take some joy in confounding the wordless, curtained message.
Not everyone undervalues or fails to recognize shyness, but commonly the shy are thought to be aloof, brooding, sullen, self-superior, stuck up, and, often, stupid beyond words. They are indeed quite difficult to shoot.
“To speak falsely, even with a false cadence, is to betray oneself,” says Susan Griffin, in The Eros of Everyday Life. When I first read this several years ago, I made a difficult pact with myself—to not betray myself. But I have already broken the pact too many times to count. It’s easier to keep the pact in the refuge of writing, in the refuge of ink and paper. I can best translate the skittish cadences of my breathing when I am silent.
How to keep the pact? How to live behind the clear drapery of days? Poetry is one way, though its fit with the world is uneasy, awkward, and at times skittish. There is no possibility of putting bread on the table with poetry, and so the poet needs to walk through the curtain. The pact will be tested. One is called upon to speak, the utterance comes up short, shy. One breathes into and draws from that space—that insane gap between what was meant or hoped for and what was. These uneven, sweet, swallowing breaths.
In a book called Hermits, Peter France talks about the practice of hiring ornamental hermits in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the gardens of the English gentry it became all the rage to house a hermit in the requisite grotto. France says that it was fashionable to be thought a man of sensibility, but that the belief was “there is no point in doing anything for yourself if you can pay somebody to do it for you,” and so these sensible gentlemen “employed people to be melancholy on their behalf.” It was more appropriate to hire your hermit by reading the advertisements than to take one out yourself, since a self-respecting hermit wouldn’t be reading the newspaper in the first place. One such ad reads, “A young man, who wishes to retire from the world and live as an hermit in some convenient spot in England, is willing to engage with any nobleman or gentleman who may be desirous of having one.”
The falseness in this enterprise is readily evident. The scene is comic and sad. But I’m interested in the tensions and transferences, in the falseness intermingled with the real desire to retire from the world. The ornamental hermit position usually came with meals brought down by servants from the house. When guests came, the hermit might be expected to sit at the entrance of the grotto gazing at a human skull, and let loose long, whickering sighs. What psychic pain would this cause the poor reclusive soul? This was the cost of retirement, to act the part of the hermit, to engage in these temporary lapses of one’s true self. To shy away from the truth enfolded into one’s being.
I don’t know how to live in the world. It’s the question on so many people’s minds these days. I’d like, some days, to be a convenient hermit, paid to be melancholy and shy on someone else’s behalf. Even if I did, at long last, find such a job in the want ads, I don’t think my family would be too glad about the position, and then too, I never can remain melancholy for long. So, as much as I like the idea, it’s not possible, or even really desirable, for me to retreat from, to shy away from, the world. The question then, is how to live shyly in the world, and fearlessly.
What is this desire to be known and yet not known, invisible and solid at once? What is accomplished by attending to the breathing patterns of the shy? Nothing, maybe. I don’t know. “The wind is said to be shy” (and again this is the OED), “when it will barely allow a vessel to sail on her course.” How to be the shy wind to the vessel of the self? How to live in the world? One of the infinite possible answers: shybrightly, shield and buckler in hand. Shyfearlessly.
Stage Fright
CASSY WELBURN
My face is an egg I take,
step onto the bare stage
and hold up
blind in the spotlight,
unable to stay intact
my first day of theatre class.
“Speak,” he calls. “Move.”
I carry my body like a tub of blood,
carefully, so as not to spill anything,
even my lines, onto the scene.
His orders—“Stage left” and “Stage right”—
slosh in my head, tremble my thighs,
drain from memory.
“Well,” he yells, “what have you got to say for yourself?”
A squeal from my throat—“Lend a hand”—
cracks open my voice like the unscrewing of a jar.
It startles the student before me,
who drops her script.
“Will you lend a hand—to lift the dead?” I struggle,
the desperate shriek of Antigone growing inside me.
“Or will I go alone to heap earth on the brother we love?”
She backs away. “No, I cannot,” she whispers.
“It’s forbidden.”
I am alone now under the great proscenium arch,
staring into the darkness.
My knees begin to move by themselves,
I do not recognize the head that is twisting,
or my lunge toward her.
“Go to Creon then,” I spit out.
“He is your care and protector.”
“No, sister.” I hear her protest. See her hands raised,
but I cannot stop myself.
Words break from me in disbelief.
“When you speak with him so loudly of the law,” I cry,
reeling stage front at the commander marching toward me,
“Remember, God hates utterly the bray of bragging tongues!”
As I Stand Up Here Reading, Fear Holds My Hånd
CAROL L. MACKAY
Everything is accent aigu, cédille, circonflexe, umlaut
This is an audience I can’t pronounce.
And yet, I am in front with him.
He says I’m becoming less than less,
He points out my poems have been infiltrated by sunsets and fireflies.
He says the sun is a hankie, bleached and oyster-stitched,
something to dab the eyes with.
Fireflies are, well, fireflies.
He tells me they know I am Loki,
That I brought down Asgård because they cast my fate.
He says predestination must always be fought. I have to agree.
But I smell aquavit, and I know, that last reference was way out there.
Fear is a lush.
It will take 16 lines and six schnapps to write him out,
to loosen the s’s.
Eventually he sways. “Ja, Ja, you can do it. It’s ease-y, my friend.”
Are You an Introvert? Take This Simple Quiz
JANIS BUTLER HOLM
1. Your private life is
a. rich and rewarding.
b. an absolute hoot—especially the time you had sex with so-and-so.
c. no one else’s business, thank you very much.
2. A party is
a. an opportunity for networking and career advanceme
nt.
b. an excuse for drinking and bad behaviour.
c. the smell and weight of strangers breathing your air.
3. In a crowd, you
a. look for people you know.
b. pinch bottoms with impunity.
c. struggle not to scream, run, implode as though you were a dying star.
4. Sports and other arena events are
a. safe outlets for human aggression.
b. excuses for drinking and bad behaviour.
c. best viewed on the television screen, where pugnacity and violence are tiny and contained.
5. Your local pub
a. is your home away from home.
b. has barred you from the premises.
c. repeatedly offers the anguished re-enactment of human tragedy, which you prefer to avoid.
6. Your boss thinks you are
a. personable and outgoing.
b. fun on business trips (wink, wink).
c. sensitive and strange but reliable enough to do most of his work.
7. At the grocer’s, you
a. chat amiably with neighbours.
b. cruise the aisles for sexual conquests.
c. shop quickly and efficiently, pausing only to admire rainbow stacks of fruit quiet in its skin.
8. Your cell phone is
a. ringing constantly because you have so many friends.
b. equipped with funny, clamorous ring tones.
c. reserved for safety uses on the road, where there are always too many cars, too sudden dangers.
9. Your best friend is
a. planning your surprise birthday party.
b. sleeping with your lover.
c. in fact your lover, who, miracle of miracles, seems to need no one but you.
10.You and your lover
a. are thinking of buying a flat together.
b. have noisy, boisterous fights followed by noisy, boisterous sex.
c. read a lot, share hopes and dreams, make very witty comments about others’ boisterous ways.
11. On the topic of introversion, you write
a. a brief personal essay on what distinguishes you from the crowd.
b. nothing at all. Who gives a damn about introverts?
c. a mildly amusing magazine quiz that doesn’t expose your private life (which is no one else’s business, thank you very much).
a more blissful orbit
STUART IAN MCKAY
because my hostas
gift me with flowers
the day before my birthday.
because the begonia i
stake this morning has
shed its crimson on the
stones of my garden path.
because the idealised
seven apricots i buy
from the blonde woman
in the market, the perfect
fiction of a smile between us
Women Friends
BRIAN CAMPBELL
Today all my women friends
visit me, one by one,
to lament on my shoulder.
“Men are such liars,” they tell me.
“All they want is sex, sex, sex.”
“…and would you believe
after all these months
he phones me back and says
he loves me, he wants to
win me again, of course
it’s all such bullshit.”
I, of course,
must admit, agree.
Men are lechers, I tell them
—and most, unscrupulous liars.
Ninety percent don’t make love to their women:
they masturbate
inside them.
Maybe a hundred percent.
Women to these men
are tough planks or spreading trees
to be chopped and burned to feed
a white-hot, dying
flame,
an ocean repository
into which their milky rivers
of orgasm
must exhaust.
Of course
my women friends agree.
They say things like, “Exactly.”
They are charmed
by my perceptivity.
But me—I’m different.
Honest, they tell me.
Sensitive.
Friendship, we agree, that’s
the important thing.
Friendship.
And these lips that ache so much to kiss,
this body, to merely hold and be held,
this prick,
this hard, throbbing
prick
will simply
go on aching
indefinitely,
with these, my
women
friends—
because I’m different, they tell me.
Honest.
Sensitive.
Because I never lie with them.
Because I never lie with them.
Shy—10 Ways
RUSSELL WANGERSKY
HER CATS WON’T LEAVE THE DOORMAT, and I know they’re afraid she isn’t coming back.
I know because I’m afraid of exactly the same thing.
The hallway glows with the incandescent light on the yellow paint, and the cats lie on their stomachs, front paws outstretched, still like statues, except for the occasional flicking ear.
Tonight, supper is tomato and red-pepper soup poured straight from a carton into a pot. The carton boasts the soup is made with real cream. “Stir on low heat—don’t allow to boil.”
The box goes on to suggest serving the soup with “a grilled vegetable, pesto, and goat cheese sandwich,” or else “a tuna salad wrap with lemon-dill mayonnaise, cucumbers, and sprouts.” I imagine, stirring, that if I had either of those choices, I wouldn’t really need the soup.
One: I always buy a twelve-inch ham sub, extra cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, no sauce—the same order every time. My office at the newspaper is in a mall, so I’m downstairs a couple of times a week, and the regular sandwich makers in the food court storefront all know me. They like to tell me my order before I can say it, and when there’s someone new on the cash register, one of the regulars always says, “He gets the discount—he works in the mall.” It’s a buck or so off, and all you have to do is say you work there. “I work in the mall”—simple enough, right? But I never have. Not even once. I can read from my books to a couple of hundred strangers, stand up at the front of an auditorium and read the dangerous personal pieces, the sharp and wounding parts about my sex life, but I can’t tell someone I legitimately deserve the discount.
November now, and the house is dark too early in the evening. The big window in the kitchen is like a drab, flat painting, lost without daytime’s depth: orange sky from the streetlights, the matte black cutout shapes of the houses hulking out past the backyard. Bare black tree branches reach in from the edge of the frame. The leaves are all down from the maples, and I walk from room to room as if jumping from puddle to puddle in the yellow pools spilled from each individual light fixture. There is no one in any of the rooms, no one except for me, but I enter each one cautiously anyway, wary just in case.
Like travelling the sharp and sudden revelations of a train passing through a string of new subway stops, except I’m the entire wandering train, shuffling along there in my sock feet. White athletic socks, always.
It is a big house, bigger when you’re alone, two storeys and a full basement down beneath, a house knuckled in close to a street that seems all the busier because cars come by so near to the front windows. The kind of place where you need curtains, even in the daytime, because the narrow strip of sidewalk is right on the other side of the glass. Lying on the couch, you can catch snatches of people’s lives as they walk by, people talking openly and carelessly, sure no one could possibly hear them. Fugitive sentence fragments, harvested and saved as carefully as if they were beach-shells.
“If your mother says that one more tim
e, I promise I’ll…”
“I can’t imagine why she thinks that’s unreasonable, taking out…”
“You just don’t listen.”
Not paying attention at the crucial time, I let the soup boil.
The pot, left alone in the kitchen, has come to its own angry conclusion without any input from me.
Outside, wind cuts corners, and the leaves, yellow and brown, hiss and rattle across and down the sidewalk. They dance on their drying tips so they skitter like dried-up spiders or hard-shelled beached crabs. The cats don’t like the sound, and they rush up anxious from the mat and onto the hillside of the sofa, nosing their way through the curtains to see what’s making the noise, their tails big and alarmed. When they calm, they head back to their mat.
She brought the cats down here first by air, even before she moved, cat-carrier travel aided by veterinary drugs. One is small and ginger-coloured, the other larger, orange and white, and given to ceaseless meowing. Sometimes, the little one attacks the big one for no discernible reason, as if intent on solving some small frustration by lashing out indiscriminately.
At the Toronto airport, she says, she let them out of the cat carrier, and the big one’s eyes were rolled right up in its head from the drugs, and it dragged its back legs around like it was paralyzed. Once they got here, the smaller one wedged itself tight behind the furnace and wouldn’t shift, not even for tuna right out of the can. Then the larger one hunkered down behind the dryer, fixed in place big and round like the Cheshire Cat, but nowhere near as jolly.
There’s laundry in that dryer right now, our laundry all tangling together, and I can hear the snaps and buttons sliding and clanking off the enamel.
Shy Page 10
