Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 12 – 1735 words
Columns :: “Hi, My name’s Cliff; drop over sometime”

MOSCOW, Oct. 12, 2003 -- Comments:   Ratings:
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Vanya and Ann Landers
My problem: I’m a biophile
How not to step over a cliff – time to reconsider



MOSCOW, Oct. 12, 2003 -- Everybody needs an Ann Landers in their life.

After six years of exile in Moscow, I wonder if she’s even still around. I used to read her addictively in the Washington Post, just before I did the crossword puzzle. She would cut through the bullshit and make sage pronouncements, like “don't let your past dictate who you are, but let it be part of who you will become,” which Fatoula’s brother Niko quoted in “My Big, Fat Greek Wedding.”

Only I found out it was actually Ann Landers’ twin sister, Dear Abby. But who’s counting?

Anyway, she’d deftly and articulately point out what idiots they were being. “Wake up and smell the coffee,” she’d advise.

You’d take a sniff of your own coffee and wonder why they hadn’t figured out by now that darting furtively and breathlessly after whatever organ of procreation they were endowed with would inevitably lead them into some dark, sticky recesses.

How could these people screw up their lives so mindlessly?

Actually, it’s quite easy, I’m discovering. I should say discovering again, since I’ve screwed it up so many times before.

How many times have I screwed it up before? Let me count the ways!

Anyway, my Ann Landers is Vanya, the Nizhny Novgorod boyfriend whom I’ve been putting through the university there for four years. He was 19 and beautiful when we first met and I fell in love with him. He’s still beautiful, and we still love each other deeply, though we see each only once a month or so. He’s never been my main squeeze.

Vanya has his own problems: He sometimes drinks too much vodka, gets in fights, and loses things like mobile phones; he can’t decide if he’s gay or straight, and he’s afraid to commit himself in a love relationship; he’s rather thoughtless and self-centered, but he’s an astute observer and wiser in many respects than a 23-year-old has any right to be.

He’s never pulled any punches with me. He’s always been brutally frank and matter-of-factly, uncomfortably honest, as he was in his e-mail this morning:

It doesn’t seem right to me that you’ve turned your apartment into a dormitory.

How can you live normally with so many people in your apartment? I don’t understand why you enjoy it. When I come to visit I feel very uncomfortable. Yes, I understand that it suits you.

It’s okay to have a lot of friends, but must they all live with you? It won’t work, you know. You have to get rid of them.

They all came to Moscow to live because they didn’t want to continue life where they were. Before they met you, they were living some place. Now they have found a place with you. They are using you as a free hotel. Sasha thinks so too.

Why do they need you? To use you. Do you really have so few friends without this?

You don’t have a lot of money. Why are you supporting so many people? Why don’t you take care of yourself? I don’t understand you.

I can understand why Misha created a scene. He was right to do that. First the guy (Anton) needs you, and then you can’t get rid of him.

You asked my opinion of Yegor – I don’t like him as a person. He can cause you trouble.

But the main thing is you have brought into your home these unknown people. Aren’t you afraid of contracting venereal diseases? I don’t see that you are concerned about this. And you must be.

Do you really want to infect us all? You know it’s quite possible, and I don’t want it.

Vanya.


Ouch!

Wake up and smell the coffee!

Okay, how did I get into this?


My first problem is that I’m a biophile

And what the hell is a biophile? It’s kind of like a polyanna do-gooder only worse.

I discovered the term in a passage in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, a brilliant work by Erich Fromm, one of the towering minds of 20th century psychiatry, which I unearthed in a used book shop in Seattle.



Biophilia is the passionate love of life and all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group. The biophilous person prefers to construct rather than to retain. He wants to be more rather than to have more. He is capable of wondering, and he prefers to see something new rather than to find confirmation of the old. He loves the adventure of living more than he does certainty. He sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations. He wants to mold and to influence by love, reason, and example; not by force, by cutting things apart, by the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things….”


Biophilous ethics, says Fromm, “have their own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life…Good is reverence for life. All that enhances life, growth, unfolding. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it into pieces.”

We biophiles feel we are so out of synch with most of the rest of our fellow earthlings, that what makes sense for the average person doesn’t necessarily make sense for us.

“These rules do not apply to me.”

I like helping people grow and succeed; I like making others’ lives better and more rewarding; I truly revel in enhancing other people’s lives.

I am also an active gay man who loves sex and intimate relationships. These two – in themselves positive, or at least harmless – ingredients can be an incendiary explosive when mixed. In a chemical lab, you’d be advised to take full safety precautions – protective gloves, safety goggles.

So I have the three people who have been my most loyal, most steadfast, truest friends over the past four-five years all warning me to handle with care. The rules do apply to me. Gravity hasn’t been suspended.

And there is no such thing as a perfect human being.

I’ve already begun to find crevices and cracks in faultless Yegor’s marble base. And the pearl of compassion which I was sure I caught a glimpse of may have been only a nacreous reflection.

For instance, when he came back from visiting his mother in Tajikistan after an automobile accident had put her in a coma –fortunately a short-lived one – he told me of the difficult life she continued to lead: working six hours a day in a weaving factory for a month.

“My god,” I said, “we could squeeze out a month to send her; it wouldn’t be much for us, but it would be a godsend to her.” He shrugged his shoulders and expressed more concern in having enough money to go to Prague for Christmas and to enter the university next fall.

And I’m getting mixed signals about the love he professes for me. At first I could really feel it. Now it seems more perfunctory. After a month he doesn’t seem as devoted to me as he does to discoing to Whitney Houston and rousting about with Anton.

He waves off sex, saying he doesn’t like to have sex very often, and never in the morning. And – after at first telling me how much he loves to snuggle, he now says he’d rather sleep alone. “It’s too crowded.” So we don’t have sex at night.

Time to get out my magnifying glass, adjust my spectacles, and take another look.


My old friend Blair Heywood in Wash., DC, cut through all the psychobabble when he observed one time that “I like people who like me.” I tend to subscribe to that, and to its corollary:

I love people who love me. And Vanya, Sasha, and Misha have repeatedly demonstrated that they love me and have my best interests at heart.

A Russian proverb says “one old friend is worth two new ones.”

Maybe these old folk sayings became folk sayings because there’s some truth in them? Whaddayuh t’ink?

When I was publishing newsletters in DC in a previous incarnation, I hired a guy named Douglas O. to write one of them. His rather wealthy parents died soon afterward and left him a small fortune. It didn’t take him long to go through it; and he called me one day from somewhere in the west to tell me that he was in love with a woman who said she needed ,000 immediately. Should he give it to her? He didn’t have much more than that left.

“Doug,” I told him, “it’s very noble and generous of you to want to help people. But you can give money away only if you have it. If you give her ,000, you’ll soon be the one doing the begging.

“And how is a beggar going to be generous?”

A tarot reader in Seattle named Albya once told me essentially the same thing: You derive your joy in being generous, she said. But if you keep on giving, giving, giving, without getting something back, your cup will soon be empty. You have to look after yourself first. You have to keep your own cup filled.”


When you realize you’re about to step over a cliff, that’s half the solution. The other half is pulling your foot back.

But how do I do that?

Vanya says simply, “Get rid of them.” But while perhaps insightful, Vanya’s never been exactly the soul of compassion.

So here’s my plan: First, when Misha comes back from spending the night at Dima’s this afternoon, I will show him Vanya’s letter, and we will discuss the possibility that maybe I’ve made a horrible mistake. I will suggest that he go ahead with his month-long trip to Prague – he bought his tickets yesterday – but that he plan to come back here when he returns.

Disposing of Anton is not a major concern for me. He clearly is simply using me as a free hotel with board thrown in. What about Shurik, who is at this moment back in something-or-other-Vodsk getting his passport so we can go to Prague for Christmas? Do you think he really loves me? I still believe in miracles.

And for Yegor I have created very real dreams – a place to live, a university education, citizenship, a life together. How do I pull my foot back without smashing those dreams at what cost to his young, sensitive life.

Who’s plotting this damned book, anyway?

Get me re-write!