Merle Shain - Hearts That We Broke Long Ago (excerpts)

Merle Shain

The legacy of a beautiful woman, to all of us who struggle with who we are, who we want to become, and how we want to love and be loved.

Merle Shain published four books before her untimely death in 1989: Some Men Are More Perfect Than Others; When Lovers Are Friends; Hearts That We Broke Long Ago; and Courage My Love. All of her books are currently out of print, but you can still find them from used book sellers.

The following excerpts are taken from Hearts That We Broke Long Ago, which I would have to say is my favorite of the four (though it is a difficult choice!) I will add more excerpts in the future!

NOTE: Since this book is out of print, and since I am not profiting financially from sharing her words with you, I trust that I am not violating any copyright laws! I feel very strongly that Ms Shain's writings should be available to the public at large, and hope to persuade the publishers, Bantam Books, to consider reissuing them.

If you feel so inclined, write to Bantam Books yourself and urge them to reissue Ms Shain's 4 books!

Bantam Books, Inc.
666 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10103

PLEASE -- if you copy this text, do so only for your own personal use.

Hearts That We Broke Long Ago

I would start at the beginning if I knew where the beginning was, but I do not know for sure. I only suspect that it all starts with the first deep wound, and after that, like a person who limps or cradles their withered arm close to their side, we favor the place where the knife went in.

Each of us carries with us an inner knowledge about the way we have been and will be betrayed; so there are those who believe we make it happen out of our unrest. But maybe it is simply that great needs cause great fears, and great fears keep us needful long into the night. I do not know the answers, I only know it happens far more than one would wish and that many people remain pilgrims and never come to peace.

Perhaps it is that the first big hurt is like a Trojan horse deep within the person injured, emitting tiny poisons in the form of fears, so that after that we opt for the pulsation of perhaps rather than trust in what might be just another emotional trompe l’œil.

Or maybe it’s that the frisson which we associate with love is that shudder we experienced as a child, so if we once loved someone who rejected us, or slipped the rug out one day, when we choose to experience love again we seek out the same old thrill, someone who will do with us that minuet we once did.

I only know that in time many of us list to starboard, our needs growing greater but unmet, and whenever the gods conspire to give us a chance to make ourselves whole, we close the doors fast because the needs which are threatened are too great.

“April is the cruelest month,” T. S. Eliot said, because it involves rebirth, and most of us would rather lie dormant yet and not quite come to life. But just as we have to walk with love we have to walk toward fear, and we must know what hurts a lot and look it in the teeth.

They are singing songs of love, but not for me, you say. But why not, I ask, and you must too. “The girl who can’t dance says the band can’t play” is what a Yiddish proverb hints, and that’s what I suspect. The older I get, the clearer it becomes to me that no one is cheated in this world, unless it’s by himself.

“An unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said, so maybe all we can do is ask the right question and walk fast when the light at the end of the tunnel beckons to us. And choosing to be free is a step in the right direction. In fact, it is the first act in taking responsibility for your own life.

A cat that sits down on a hot stove never sits on a stove again, but some of the stoves he doesn’t sit on are not hot but cool. And it’s equally true that where the tooth hurts the tongue always goes, and goes and goes again, until we stop the hurt.

Most of us can make jokes about the things that frightened us when we were small, raised as we all were in a Freudian world, in a world where people regularly brush their teeth in Narcissus’ pool. But hurts once hurt do not get laughed away, and even those who laugh behind their hand when others acknowledge their deep fears, are often the killers of their own best dreams, and do not know they are.

I will acknowledge a kind of impatience myself, a wish to stop all this self-obsessing and get on with life. But I know no one goes forward who hasn’t finished with the past, and those who try to, keep coming out the same door they went in.

Fears don’t go away when they are ignored or dismissed; they just go underground and fight a guerrilla war deep inside our breasts, and we don’t know we are possessed; we just go on dancing faster to contain our fright.

“A man is lonely till he finds himself,” Ben Gurion once said, but where does one look? Ah, that’s the rub. How does one find the place the knife went in?

I think one asks oneself what hurts, and when a new wound makes all the old ones ache, one asks if this is a movie one has already seen and if one really wants to keep on seeing it over and over again.

At some point we decide how conscious we want to be, how much truth we can take. And after that we chuck overboard the part of our subconscious that doesn’t agree. Get rid of it, throw it into the sea. But because despair is anger with no place to go, pain that has gone inside and dug in deep, and because the body and the mind are not two separate things but only one, the mind’s pain usually shows up somewhere else, so the search for self is a search for health.

Deep-seated fears go through several stages — anxiety is the first, then despair, and after that, denial or I don’t care. But “I don’t care” does not mean the fear is gone, only that the scar tissue has covered it up, and we can’t see it anymore. Which is not to say we don’t feel it anymore, but only when we do, we do not know what it is that hurts.

Denial of pain takes a lot of energy and requires the person to bankrupt himself mortgaging his fears. And when you divert energies to do the devil’s work, you don’t have it where you need it — you might not have much of it at all. Which means many of us spend our lives shunting back and forth between our pain and our defenses, pivoting on the promontory of our lives while we gaslight our dreams.

Many people push a burden of inexplicable sadness through a lifetime never gaining an understanding of the promptings of their hearts. They are always somehow still in transit, on the way but not knowing where they’re going, only that they are as far as fulfillment is from longing and they have a long way yet to go.

“They can’t scare me with their empty spaces,” Robert Frost wrote. “I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.”

Emotions rule all of us, even those who think they don’t and the most ruled are those who’ve had to develop a large rational scaffolding to support their fears. Fears fight wars, and conquer worlds, build temples and bank accounts, get married and raise kids, but those who fear are always planning their defenses and their retreat, never living life, just escaping, never loving, only weeping.

We all carry the cross-hatching of a thousand wounds. The wounds of childhood, still bleeding like the signs of the stigmata. The wounds of adolescence, still stinging with remembered pain. The bitter wounds of adult failures, or soured loves and lost dreams.

How to make them all go away? How to become brave and young again? How to wipe the slate clean and reenter the world like a tabula rasa [a blank slate], trusting and trustworthy again? I wish I knew.

I only know the answer doesn’t lie in learning how to protect yourself from life. It lies in learning how to strengthen yourself so you can let a bit more of it in.

“Why am I afraid to dance, I who love music and rhythm and grace and song and laughter?“ Eugene O’Neill wrote in The Great God Brown. ”Why am I afraid to live, I who love life and the beauty of flesh and the living colors of earth and sky and sea? Why am I afraid to love, I who love love? Why am I afraid, I who am not afraid? Why must I pretend to scorn in order to pity? Why must I hide myself in self-contempt in order to understand? Why must I be so ashamed of my strength, so proud of my weakness? Why must I live in a cage like a criminal, defying and hating, I who love peace and friendship? Why was I born without a skin? O God, that I must wear armor in order to touch or be touched.“

“Love looks forward; hate looks back, and anxiety has eyes all over its head,” or so Mignon McLaughlin wrote. And while one can never be very sure why someone might solicit and then reject that which they want most, sometimes when a child doesn’t get what he needs when he is small, an anger develops deep within him because he feels unsupported, and hence frightened and alone. And because the road between fear and hate is such a short one, many people travel over it without ever leaving home.

One could make a pretty good case for most angers resulting from unmet needs to be parented, which is why so many lives become addenda to their own first years. And why so many people use themselves up playing picador or bullfighter still smarting from the love that went undelivered. And others put themselves under house arrest and spend their days dimming their lights for someone who didn’t manage to love them enough.

Dependency always makes you feel angry, whether it is physical, financial, or emotional, because dependency makes you feel vulnerable, and vulnerability makes us feel afraid. And few of us seem to have the personal ballast not to fear we will be fumbled, not to need to armor ourselves against the terrors and anxieties that bind us to our past.

Some people who are angry turn their anger on themselves, and some project it outward on whoever’s going by, and some find a cause for it, a vehicle that makes it safe, and some banish those who are loved, or torture those whose vulnerability reminds them of their own.

Guilt is anger at oneself, and masochism is anger turned against oneself because to express it directly carries too many risks. And passive hostility is sniping from behind a tree and looking the other way. There are many kinds of anger, expressed many kinds of ways, from envy to resentment to jealousy to blame — all ways we have invented to hide from ourselves our lack of courage to grieve.

Psychiatrists would say that anger is preferable to sadness because it gets the pain moving, gets it stirring about. And I suppose that is true. But nothing much is accomplished if we stay angry all of our lives, and if anger becomes a snare in which we lay caught, or if our hatred makes us an occupied country, a fortress we’ve built ourselves and from which we can’t get out, and if we quiver there recounting everyone’s misdeeds, never getting a purchase on our life, a victim of another victim, a continuum into time.

So, many of us sit about the rubble, picking shards from broken lives out from under our skin, talking wretchedly of famine, vexed and chafing with our own abandonment, counting the many treasons and deceptions while we tie ourselves tighter to the tether and turn the winch ourselves.

Some say we read the world wrong and say it deceives us, and others that anger is the hate that bruises, even though the heart is braced. And both of them are right. Mistrust becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, and until you let it go, you can’t go anywhere yourself.

As long as you blame someone it makes the problem not yours but theirs, and allows you to keep it without taking responsibility for anything but pointing the finger. Which means you give them responsibility for your life and paralyze yourself forever in a place you don’t want to be. And there you sit — waiting for justice, waiting for someone to save you, waiting for your mother to kiss it and make it all better, waiting for Godot. And you continue to feel powerless, and helpless, and frightened and angry, and things remain just as they were.

More will follow later! Write me at
jeanmarc69@yahoo.com
if you have any comments or questions!

Last update: 8 March 2003

The Healing Power of Love

Until I can add more excerpts from Hearts That We Broke Long Ago, you may CLICK HERE to read some excerpts from Merle Shain's last book, Courage My Love.