May 12, 2011 1
Love as Art in One Man’s Schizophrenia
Around 5:00 a.m. on a cold Northern California morning in 2005, Aaron Fielding of Los Altos, artist, poet, and musician, 27, entered his mother’s bedroom and told her that he may have to castrate himself. Caroline Fielding expressed concern for her son while Aaron lay down beside her on her bed. Aaron saw before him an hourglass full of sand as real as Macbeth’s dagger. He knew that the hourglass was illusory, but he also saw that it was about to run out. Its purpose was to communicate a message from God: You’re running out of time and you’re going to go to Hell if you don’t castrate yourself, Aaron.
There is an old joke about easing yourself into a conversation in a party: all you have to do is walk up and say “Yes, but where do you draw the line?” and you will immediately find yourself right at the heart of the discussion. The reason this is funny, and the reason it works, is that most everything worth discussing is a continuum phenomenon. Issues are rarely a matter of ‘black and white,’ yet everyone seems to have an opinion about where one thing ends and another begins. Yet in today’s politics, we are quick to throw out a final answer and call it a day. Issues like gay marriage and abortion pose difficult questions characteristically because there is no simple answer. We should approach these dilemmas with sensitivity befitting of their difficulty.