Pandora’s litter-box

Epigraph: “Let not that devil, which undoes your sex,

That cursed curiosity, seduce you

To hunt for needless secrets; which neglected

Shall never hurt your quiet, but once known

Shall sit upon your heart!” –Rowe

Eleven p.m. last Friday night, a diesel generator’s slowly going
crazy somewhere outside, and I’m wondering, do these construction
geniuses ever quit? When I open my front door to suss out the situation,
I see that someone, an apparent stranger, has left a cardboard box on my
steps. This box, the medium size of the cake-boxes I’ve heard they used
to display dead babies in South Philadelphia picture windows, is
enshrouded by a woman’s black cotton cardigan sweater, to protect it
from view from the street — so no one would steal it. How bizarre.

Doesn’t seem like a gift from one of my erstwhile suitors, does it?
No, it’s not ticking.

Taped to the top of the box is a long white envelope containing a
letter addressed to me from someone who has misspelled my last name —
therefore, I deduce, it must be someone who doesn’t know me, someone
whose name I don’t recognize let’s call “Patricia.” Written in
deteriorated block letters with black ink on lined copy-book paper, the
letter, with neither return address nor phone number, is almost
illegible, like one of those attempts to inscribe the Lord’s Prayer on
the head of a pin.

Whoever this “Patricia” is, what she wrote to me essentially was that
nothing mattered any more, everyone’s against her, it’s a hopeless
conspiracy, that she met me once in 1996, we briefly chatted about
Ulysses and I was the last — and ONLY — person who was nice to her
before it all turned to hate, before her life became a total Kafkaesque
nightmare. I could barely bear to read on. Her pain, darkness, and
self-dramatization, were palpable. So, in desperation, she was sending
me … this box, hoping I might sort out the disastrous events that have
befallen her, she wrote, perhaps even use her story for a novel,
fictionalize the details of her betrayal since no one would believe the
degree of persecution and torture she has experienced. And if not, she
wrote, don’t discard this, but save it “until the political dust
settles.” Already, one set of these files, she wrote, had fallen into
the wrong hands, those who seek to destroy her.

I tore the tape off, and opened the box. It didn’t explode.

Inside, an array of compulsively neat colored folders contained
meticulously compiled files of dental records, mental health records,
medical records, rental records of landlord-tenant dealings, divorce
records, work records — what her letter portrayed as a catalog of
abuse. Creepy, how well-organized it all was. Why, I wondered, would
any sane person dump these things on a stranger’s doorstep?

They wouldn’t.

Obviously, this woman was, if not an outright lunatic, then certainly
unstable, whacked-out, a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Convinced
possibly at that very instant she might be doing away with herself, I
left the files unopened and hastily dialed 911.

“I’m calling because a stranger left a box on my doorstep,” I began,
feeling a bit foolish.

“DON’T OPEN IT!” the cop cautions me.

“I already did,” I admitted, getting more alarmed by the minute,
“but, don’t worry, it wasn’t a bomb. Look, officer, I’m concerned this
person might be going to kill herself. And I don’t want this stuff in my
house. Can you please send a patrolman over to get it? And maybe relay
it to a detective?”

“We’ll send a car by,” he said, “at the end of the shift.”

It was now 11:15 p.m. Having phoned the police, I awaited their
arrival. And waited. And waited.

Yes, I could have tracked this person down myself, found her
telephone number, called her, listened to her litany of betrayal,
humiliation, degradation, persecution. And then what? Shared her story
with the world?

Displayed her coming unglued? Disseminated a bunch of libelous
rantings? Deconstructed her psychological meanderings? Probably not. The
shards of personal dissociation are not fit matter for public
consumption. Was I a social worker? A therapist? A law enforcement
professional? No, and no, and no. Yes, I could have navigated her
nightmare. I chose not to. I simply did not want to enter a nut-case
stranger’s drama, midnight on a Friday. Doing that again and again
eventually becomes an emotional extravagance one can ill afford.

Frequently, folks will try to involve you that way. They think any
trashy tale they have to tell is a story you crave. Because you’re a
“writer,” a “journalist,” a “newspaper person.” They might think
because you’re a journalist that you have no boundaries, no barriers
between yourself and others. That you’re waiting for everyone’s
confession. That everyone else is guilty, or damaged, and only you, the
journalist, can rectify a situation. Yes, journalism can be like that.
Journalism legitimizes the desire to pry, to reveal, to uncover, to
explore, to unravel, to watch. To BE rather than DO. To observe rather
than participate. A kind of voyeuristic fetishizing of Curiosity, in
pursuit of “the truth.” But sometimes, there is no truth, and you merely
end up embroidering the fraudulent scenarios of unreliable narrators.

One hour passes, then two. For some reason, having this box in my
possession is an unpleasant responsibility which has left me shaky. I
keep imagining “Patricia’s” suicide, replaying this horror in my mind,
as the police response time gets longer and longer. I realize she might
have been the anonymous caller I had several times this past week, or
the person who knocked on my door earlier that day, at 8:43 a.m. Was
she stalking me? I’d experienced my share of such unpleasantries, and
did not want a replay.

To distract myself, I considered
Curiosity — encounters with
the unsavory, the unwise, the unorthodox, the unusual — how it has,
throughout mythology, been women’s undoing, this desire to know
something concealed so strongly that it is experienced as a drive,
sometimes leading to the transgression of a prohibition. I realize
I have been presented with an archetypal situation with the box on my
doorstep. Naturally I think of Pandora, who went and made herself into a
myth, a fairy story, a cautionary tale, trapped and preserved like an
insect in amber or a frozen pose in a scene from Keat’s “Ode on a
Grecian Urn,” but she yearned to break free of her bonds, and that was
her undoing.

To the ancients,
Pandora
was a living trick: artifact and artifice, delight and deception, a
heat-seeking missile, in her quest for fire, another Trojan Horse of a
different color. But there is, of course, more to her than trompe l’oeil
— how Pandora was entranced with an esthetics to Curiosity. And didn’t
Outside and Inside, just as Gaston Bachelard writes, form a dialectics
of division, the dialectics of yes and no, which blinds us instantly,
upon opening, which decides everything. “Shroedinger’s
Cat”
— a physics paradox positing a box which either contains a dead cat
and/or a live cat while opening the box itself may kill the cat —
hadn’t been devised yet, but the mind spans time and leaps into the void
of Quantum Mechanics, the rebus of secrets.

Why else would
Bachelard write that
chests, especially small caskets, “over which we have more complete
mastery,” are objects which may be opened. And so, the philosopher
elaborates, however obliquely, from the moment a box is opened, the
dialectics of Inside and Outside no longer exist. To Pandora, this
philosopher’s prating would have been a puzzle, not heady stuff at all,
but trash, litter. Until she understands, first she must acknowledge her
pride, her polarity, before she finds, through a painful process, her
cat, her penitence. The logic of Curiosity tells us that an enclosed
space always arouses the spectator’s desire to see inside; every cat
knows that.

Though the desire to see may be connected to the desire to know, that
may not lead to Enlightenment. Let’s rediscover Bluebeard’s Castle: how
his latest wife, a young girl, was given free rein of his vast palace,
except for one room, which her husband forbade her to enter, and its key
began to excite her curiosity, until she ignored the luxury that
surrounded her, a spy in a house of spies. Disguised by her beauty, she
made love for the secrets she got, promiscuously curious, thinking of
nothing else.

Until one day, when Bluebeard’s wife assumed he was away, she opened
the door, and finds what she finds: all the bodies of all his former
wives, still bleeding magically from all their terrible wounds and
scourges. Instantly,
Bluebeard sees the
indelibly bloodstained key and knows she has betrayed him, proclaims her
punishment for Curiosity, for breaking his prohibition; she must share
the fate of her predecessors, who had also been drawn irresistibly to
the little room, the riddle of enigma, the drive to decipherment,
despoiling the topography of concealment and disguise, at their bloody
peril, action and fearful consequences, mystery and threat, to penetrate
the sacred space of secrets.

While Curiosity is a compulsive desire to see and to know, to unveil,
to investigate what is secret and reveal the contents of a concealed
space, what if Pandora’s curiosity about the contents of the box was
really a curiosity about the mystery she herself personifies?

Oh, wait: another mythological interlude. Nice tale! But beware,
danger right ahead. Remember the legend of Psyche and Eros? Eros begins
their relationship by rescuing
Psyche from a fate
named Death and then whisking her off to his kingdom where all her needs
are met. Eros, sometimes called Cupid, tells Psyche, Don’t concern
yourself, my darling, about where we will live or how we will eat. I
will take care of everything. Additionally, Eros warns Psyche to not
look at him at night or ask him where he spends his days! (Sounds like
a cross between a Mafia wife and a mushroom — keep ’em in the dark;
feed them horse-manure!)

Nevertheless, urged on by her sisters — they convince Psyche that
Eros is a monster — Psyche defies his orders. She cannot accept that
she may not question, that she may not have a “real” relationship with
him, that she is completely subject to his hidden domination. Like
Pandora and Bluebeard’s wife, Psyche is also consumed by Curiosity,
riddled by the desperate desire to KNOW!!! And so she lights her lamp,
or her candle, depending on what version of the legend you find, to look
at Eros as he sleeps besides her at night. Alas, she spills some oil, or
hot wax on him and he awakens, at the precise moment Psyche has pricked
herself with one of his arrows, making her fall instantly in love with
him. When she recognizes Eros’ true Divinity, she tries to cling to him,
but it is too late; he flees.

Again, like Pandora and Bluebeard’s wife, Psyche has disobeyed
orders. She, too, is punished. Her punishment is the loss of her lover,
temporary but painful, a loss which leads to her own magical, difficult
journey, performing labors, overcoming obstacles, completing tasks, and
finally becoming a goddess herself. Yes, Psyche and Eros eventually
reunite, and have a daughter named Pleasure.

And so, let us bid farewell to Pandora, the first Greek woman —
another Eve — sent by the gods to seduce and destroy Prometheus, who
has stolen fire from the gods. Pandora, who instead gets distracted from
her mission, ends up sabotaging herself, giving in to her curiosity, and
unleashing all those troubles on an unsuspecting world: The way Eve bit
into the apple of knowledge, and found fear of it forever. The way
Bluebeard’s wives met a redundant dead-end. The way Psyche trashed a
perfectly fine set-up.

Shall we thank them? Blame them? Pity them? Forgive them? Free them
from the bonds of a sexist mythology, a twisted consciousness that has
stalked women from the first moment of Creation? Or is it that until now
men have made the myths, while women live them out?

No, this is not just about women’s compulsion to uncover, and the
terrible cost to us, because of this drive. Yes, it’s a powerful
warning, though some feminists want to remake it into an inner quest for
women’s self-scrutiny. Pandora knew this. Then why, why is it, the more
Pandora learned, the more horrible it felt to her — this so-called
compulsion to know? All that new knowledge brought Pandora no pleasure.
Surely, by now she would have another boyfriend. But she wouldn’t think
he needed to see this. It would be too private. Besides, it might just
be … Pandora, hidden behind still another mask!!!

Sometimes — Pandora might have speculated — a box is nothing more
than a litter-box, and we know what to do with that. Poor “Patricia,”
whoever she was, brought this box of her life to my doorstep, which was
so crazy, since I don’t know her, felt she was unstable, maybe
dangerously so. I still wonder why a stranger would send this stuff. It
was a burden I didn’t want. It was like a Pandora’s Box of someone
else’s life. And sometimes I feel I can barely handle the Pandora’s Box
of my own life.

Finally, at 1:15 a.m., after I’ve called 911 a second time, a police
officer comes by to relieve me of “Patricia’s” effects. “I want this
stuff to be on record, and in your possession, in case her body turns up
in the river,” I say. He nods. “I’m innocent,” I declare, “innocent.”

But of course.