Line Three

Heartbeat(s)

I've read that ancient greeks considered the "guts" of a person to be the emotional epicenter of love and emotion, and that the heart only took this position in western culture some time later.  I had a disturbing experience with the heart when this drawing was made, and I've been thinking about it since.  During the first few weeks of working the door, I turned many men and women away back into the cold winter night.  I turned away old people just out of the hospital, I turned away friends I had made in previous nights, I turned away people shivering from the cold, the snow piled on their bare heads and slouching shoulders.  I turned them away when I knew what their possibilities were for the night; none of them good.  I turned them away because we didn't have room at the cafe.  Or rather, the number of people we were allowed to admit for the night had been reached.  

I talked to a friend who had worked the same position before, and she described a time when she turned someone out that had later died in the cold.  I've wondered if I've already done the same thing and not yet heard about it.  We talked about breaking rules, about ignoring the limits set in place and bringing people that needed to be inside through the doors, regardless of consequences or reprimands.  We decided following the rules was the best thing to do.  This was heartbreaking.  

Since then, I've turned away many people.

I rarely feel a thing anymore.

  

What is this heart? It can be so upset in the presence of hurt, injustice, loss.  It can make you feel alive.  But it can also quietly beat along, completely indifferent to the exact same experiences it encounters just weeks before.  Isn't this true of love as well as sadness?  Can't we be so desperately in love, and yet feel nothing years, even months later?  What has changed?  

The heart seems stupid.  

An old woman came in the other night.  After taking a few steps into the building, she fell down the three stairs leading into the main room landing flat on her face.  She didn't move, she didn't make any noise.  She just laid there, blood pooling on the carpet and spreading away from her body.  The stupid heart pumps blood out through our wounds with as much gusto as it pumps it through our veins in order to keep us alive.  What does it mean that we rely on such an untrustworthy thing for our moral direction?  For choosing our mates and our friends?  The things we believe, and the places we put our hope?  I'm not sure what to make of this drawing anymore.