Canary in a Cold Mind
The Hazards of Awareness and the Spaces in Between
Warning Systems
Canaries are especially sensitive to the gases methane and carbon monoxide. So miners used to carry them down into the coal mines, as early warning systems: if the canary was singing, the air was safe; but if the caged bird went quiet, if its yellow body went stiff and still, it meant immediate evacuation.
For a long time I thought that the expression “canary in a coal mine” was actually “canary in a cold mind.” One of the many expressions for which I had alternative understandings. Devil make hair. For all intensive purposes. My grandmother is famous for saying “grapevines think alike,” so perhaps it’s an inherited trait. At any rate, when my mother told me that I was like the “canary in a coal mine,” which she did with some frequency, I had no idea what she meant. Whose mind was I in? Why was it cold?
No one actually carried me around as an early warning system, but they could have. I was often busy sussing out the dangers of my small world — tensions between my friends’ parents, the personal stress of a teacher, the way the whole house seemed to sigh and settle after the grownups had their nightly gin and tonics. I guarded myself against the minor perils of suburban childhood with undue alertness.
Hypervigilance is included in the DSM as a symptom of PTSD, and it’s also a common trait for children who grow up in alcoholic homes. The dictionary defines it as “the condition of maintaining an abnormal awareness of environmental stimuli.” From the Latin stem vigilāns, present participle of vigilāre, to be watchful.
Being watchful is hard work. My friend Alice, whose mother was a falldown drunk, describes herself as having an outward focused energy — “I am always searching the faces and body language in a room for signs of dis-ease, shifts in mood,” she says. “I am always outside myself.” And this is true even now, forty years later, long after Alice’s mother has passed away. We hang on to the tools that were useful back then, even after they’re no longer needed. And what’s no longer needed weighs us down and gets in the way. Obsolescence to obstacle.
Hazards
Being outside myself means I’m never where I am. Last week, when there was a lot going on, my fiancé came home to find the stove burner still on and the refrigerator door open. This is how I am when I’m outside my body, when I’m not where I am. I run into table legs and get bruises on my shins. Hypervigilance is self-defeating: always on the lookout for threat, running into doors and burning the house down.
It’s a familiar joke — the women in horror movies who freeze or run up the stairs when the killer is at the door. But for all my emergency plans and imagined escape routes, I’m not sure I would be any better. I’ve never been reassured by my reactions to unimagined threat.
Several years ago, I ran a campaign office in Northern Virginia during a presidential election. It was a little office, the bottom floor of an old house right in the center of town, decorated with campaign signs, homemade posters, and red, white, and blue banners. I worked with another organizer, Sully. Sully and I were very close. I loved her in a way that long nights and stressful situations make you love people. Family instead of friends. We were both in our early twenties, so even though we were working hard, we also ate pizza and smoked cigarettes and talked about boys. Sully’s parents were Ethiopian, and her skin seemed to carry twenty tones of depth to my single, see-through shade. We were sleep-deprived and giddy with idealism.
One day as I stood in the front doorway of the office, which immediately abutted the busy sidewalk, a man started yelling at me about Barack Obama. I don’t remember what he said, only that he was angry and that he looked liked a tourist — vaguely sunburned, white sneakers, and pink polo tucked into his shorts. Instead of ignoring him, I told him to move along, which made him angrier. He got close, yelling about his right to stand on the sidewalk, his right to say what he wanted. I could see the veins in his face and smell the stale beer on his breath. As his wife stood silently behind him, a few paces back, he put his finger in my face and told me to “watch out,” because he’d be back later.
But I didn’t think much of it. Campaigns attract the best and worst. And the 2008 election, in particular, incited a new kind of fury and fear. Just another red-faced man yelling about his rights. I forgot all about him.
Until he did come back. Later that night, Sully and I were entering data and sending emails, as we often did together after all the volunteers went home, when there was sudden, ferocious banging at the front door. The man’s face came back like the sudden recollection of a dream, and I knew instantly it was him. I knew because the banging and the yelling echoed with intention. It was the specific noise of someone trying to get in. My mind flashed to the backdoor of the house, to the lock that had been broken for weeks, and the realization of the unlocked door made me drop to the ground, as if something were falling from the sky. I felt frozen. I remember wanting to run upstairs, I remember starting to cry.
Sully picked up her phone and dialed 911. She then called another organizer who worked nearby, Amrit, who said he’d be there as soon as he could. The banging and rattling stopped, but for all we knew, the man was making his way around to the back of the house, so the quiet was just as frightening. Amrit got there at the same time as the police, and the police pulled their guns on him. Brown man at door. I ran outside as Amrit was raising his hands into the air. “This is our friend, this isn’t the guy, this is our friend who came to help us!” I yelled. They dropped their guns and cleared the backyard. Then a few of the officers came in to ask us questions.
After the police took down notes and rode away in their squad cars, Sully asked me if I noticed the way they wouldn’t look at her. The way the officers made eye contact with me, and addressed their questions to only me, even though there were two of us in the room. Even though she had been the one to make the call, to stay calm. I hadn’t noticed, not really. I hadn’t seen it as it was happening, but I knew that she was right. Or maybe I had seen it but I hadn’t understood it. Amrit later told me that he thought he was going to be shot that night.
Vigilare
“Awareness is overrated,” writes the young man for New York Magazine. His tone makes me want to disagree with him, but his expanded argument holds water. Awareness about violence against women or climate change may be a necessary first step, but often it’s the only step. Often it’s as far as we get. Being aware of an issue and “spreading awareness” make you feel like you’re doing something, without doing anything more. I am aware of the issue, I care deeply about this issue, now I’ll have a tuna sandwich.
Awareness can also backfire. In a study released over the summer, Stanford social scientists found that when white people were aware of the serious racial imbalances in the prison system they were more likely to support harsh sentencing policies. But when they thought there were as many white people in prison as black people, they were more willing to sign a petition to reform harsh policies. In a press release, one of the scientists explained: “Reducing inequality takes more than simply presenting people with evidence of extreme inequality.”
Before Sully and I were close, before the night with the police and Amrit almost getting shot, I hadn’t gazed into the chasm between awareness and experience. The gap between hearing stories and living stories is deep and dark. It was that night that I understood, because Sully showed me, how much I didn’t see because I didn’t have to. Awareness didn’t keep me from trading in the currency of privilege.
And vigilance doesn’t keep you safe. Guarding myself from imagined danger doesn’t help when danger comes knocking. Vacating my body leaves me bruised, or running up the stairs. My lessons continue to be in the spaces between: the path between vigilance, on one side, and presence on the other; between awareness, on one side, and seeing clearly, with eyes and mind and heart, on the other. The key is in the willingness to walk the distance.
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