On Stockholm Syndrome

From having read and svenjoyed many of the writings of Your Charles heretofore, it should be evident, undoubtedly, that Charles has a firm enough grasp on reality to skew it, splice it, and magnify it for your righteous edification. Because the present reality is where Charles reigns, where he can digest and negotiate the moment to moment barrage of stimuli into a coherent and dominant persona. That is why you watch him without knowing why. He is a measure of grace and swagger, of high reason and firm moral principle (with the sideorder of buckwild wardrobe and/or drunken ballyhoo). However, it is the past that haunts Charles because it is the ever-executor of his future. Charles's memory is broke and he is reaching out because he believes your memory may be broken too.

To the un-encyclopedic Bronson, the Stockholm Syndrome according to wikipedia.org is defined as "a psychological response sometimes seen in an abducted hostage, in which the hostage shows signs of loyalty to the hostage-taker, regardless of the danger (or at least risk) in which the hostage has been placed." I mention this perverse majormalfunction because there is an element of it in Your Charles. See, Charles was a threeyear sixthgrade teacher in the South Bronx, beginning as an idealistic young Ivy League can-do-it-all and ending as a poured-out, nihilistic bender rocker. That evolution no doubt was necessary - Charles grew up in mounds of privilege and needed to test himself against the rigors of hardcore experience and fulfill his promise as talented teacher - however, that experience, which is the watershed experience of Your Charles's as yet young life, is skewed and distorted in his memory.

On his Bronx teaching journey, Charles met rancorous and incompetent administrators. too many twelve year olds without manners or couth or knowledge of the times tables, a daily teaching schedule as unrelenting from 7am to 5pm as is humanly possible. Add obligatory and irrelevant graduate school courses and little-to-no classroom training, and the daily stresses began to grip at the Young Bronson's core. Manage the class. Teach the curriculum. Keep your gradebook up to date. Quell constant disruptions. Do your grad school projectwork. Ward off the random incompetency accusations of the AP. Plan nine engaging lessons each day without basic materials. Those daily stresses accumulated and as the mind eventually learns to routinize your schedule and compartmentalize your disparate problems, it also subverts the truly irrational/horrific moments to a place hidden away, very deep.

On the plus side, what you read right now is a result of that experience. You get the incisive wit, the propulsive stories, the dancing dialectic between the meaningful and the absurd. So now that Your Charles is in a "holding pattern," away from the classroom Bronx, living alone in an unknown city with a mundane job, he believes he is recharging his batteries for another tour amongst the nation's most difficult teaching classrooms. He believes he can further file down all the bs and teach those who truly need it, and in his incumbent despair over the circumstances of that mission, will feel vindicated when he saunters into Friday barrooms and declares himself a teacherpoet with whom everyone should revel.

Consequently, Your Charles is forgetting the circumstances that made him quit the Bronx. He is reminded now watching "Half Nelson" and feeling ripples of wretched pain in his chest. He is reminded now during phone interviews when the question is "what was it like teaching the first year?" and Charles remains silent for minutes, trying to quell the echoes of student screams and insults and lesson failures and administrative acts of conspiracy against him. He is reminded now when he returns to his old apt at 97th street to reminisce with his two best teaching friends and he demands the paperbag beer and chugs it for fear of vomiting from sudden distress and memory overload.

This proves that the stresses presently exist in Your Charles's subconscious. Yet, he wants to go teach again! He believes it will again define him like the last three years!. He remembers the Friday night boozefests, the bedpost notches, the streethoop glory, the triumphant lessons, the student and parent gratitude! But that is because good memories never fade, they are forever. But, what Charles remembers of the bad is only partial, the rest being somewhere beneath the veneer of his consciousness.

So Charles weighs the good vs. the bad, but he can't do so accurately, because the bad he remembers is only the tip of the iceberg, while the good he remembers exists in full bloom. So he is only weighing the totality of the good vs. a small portion of the bad. And when he does so, Charles believes another teaching go-round would be logical ("it wasn't that bad" "it would be so much easier this time"), maybe even necessary! Charles has succumbed to an emotional and fake reality; he is a fool.

This is why Charles suffers from a mild form (or maybe major, Dr. Freud) of Stockholm Syndrome. This is why he wants to call up ex-"girlfriends" who were annoying and immature and completely not right for him. Charles is at the height of boredom here in DC and frequently indulges in the nostalgia of loves and experiences past, wondering where things that were so right went wrong. But, nostalgia is all distortion: feeding off the good and suppressing the bad. He fails to recognize that his present situation is a result of the bad stuff that all his relationships and experiences have accrued Giving in to nostalgia is to give into weakness or temptation. It can lead to the snake eating its tail, the captives running back into their captor's arms, and Your Charles finding himself in a classroom of screaming children alone in a broken city, nauseous.