The Art of Asking

by Amanda Palmer

Cancer, same thing. I’m growing on the inside. There’s more room. It’s all coming at me. The only way it works is if you act like a sieve, he said.

  A sieve? A kitchen sieve? Like a spaghetti colander?

  Yes, clown. And I’m having to do the same thing with the cancer. More room, bigger space. It’s all the same.

  I’m not following you.

  Everybody keeps talking about “fighting” the cancer, he said, everybody keeps telling me to fight for my life, to fight the disease, and how their uncle won the battle against cancer and their cousin won the fight against cancer and blah blah blah blah.

  Okay…and?

  I’m not fighting, he said. It’s already inside me…and I’m not going to fight. I’m going to be a good host, let it pass through me…resist nothing. Sieve. Let it all pass through.

  I get you. But it’s all a metaphor anyway. Be careful about saying that…you might piss people off. So many people are so proud of their cancer fight. That’s just their way of thinking about it.

  The fight doesn’t work, beauty, he said. It’s like the haters and the Internet shit you deal with. Let them in, love them, let them go. No fight. Like I said. Sieve. Befriend every dragon. You get it.

  Yeah. I get it.

  I’m gettin’ off the phone now. Can’t keep talking. Too tired. Gotta take this cancer-ridden body to slumberland. Say the magic words, my girl.

  I love you.

  As time wore on, the hardest thing was the relentlessness of the fifty-fifty. We hung on every word from the lips of every doctor trying to figure out if Anthony was going to escape the death sentence. I didn’t want to plan anything I couldn’t cancel, so I just stopped thinking about the future altogether. It was late winter in Boston, and the cold and the paralysis of the schedule seemed to be sucking the life force out of everything. I tried to write music, but I failed. I felt empty and lazy and uninspired.

  I was invited to talk at TED, and that gave me something nice and distracting to freak out about.

  There was also a tired smear of hurt left in my heart from the volunteer musician controversy. The worst of it had dialed down, but the wounds were slow to heal, and I found myself occasionally stumbling across Internet lists of how I was one of the Ten Worst People Ever. I took comfort in preparing my TED talk, sitting in Anthony’s study, reading him my talk drafts on his chemo-recovery days and pacing around the basement of our rental house, flailing my hands around to an imaginary TED audience consisting of dirty paint cans and boxes of books.

  After a few months, the fog started to lift, ever so slowly.

  The chemo was working, they said.

  My friend wasn’t dead…yet. He might be okay.

  I did the TED talk, and people liked it. My life was starting to grow back, people on the Internet seemed to be tired of hating me and had moved on to being outraged about Miley Cyrus’s decision to twerk. Spring was coming.

  Neil and I flew home from our week at TED, back to Anthony’s side, and I started feeling better for the first time in months.

  The feeling didn’t last long.

  I was sitting in the café of Porter Square Books in Cambridge, mundanely answering some emails over a coffee and some Vietnamese soft rolls, when several people suddenly twittered at me to say that there had been unexplained explosions at the Boston Marathon, at the finish line, which was only about eight blocks from the Cloud Club.

  It’s bad—it’s real—bomb went off. Here at marathon.

  Within minutes, just how bad became clear. More tweets came in. People had lost limbs.

  I drove home, sat down at my computer, and didn’t get out of the chair. I was glued to my Twitter feed, sharing every piece of relevant information coming from the news, every update from my virtual community on the ground, and every outpouring of concern and love from the rest of the world. People who were at the marathon site shared their shock and fear and sadness, and told us what they were seeing. Everybody wanted to help one another.

  I twittered over five hundred times that day.

  Neil was out of town.

  I called Anthony. Laura had been near the finish line, cheering on a friend. She was safe. He was tired.

  As evening closed in and I was still in the chair, a painfully graphic photo of one of the victims was uploaded, and I shared it, with a warning. There was a collective outpouring of grief and anger and confusion—people commenting in real time about how it made them feel.

  At that moment, I found myself thinking that I wanted to be in a space where people were physically all together, communing, stilling themselves and feeling the massive disruption in our city and the impact of all the blood, debris, and senseless loss of life. I felt alone. Sitting at home alone on the Internet just wasn’t doing it for me. People sent tweets asking if I could get everybody together at a park, or in a square, but there was a police mandate against any public gatherings, because the bombers were at large.

  I typed a message to Twitter:

  We can’t gather. Illegal. But how about a few moments of silence. I need it. Does anyone want to join me?

  My feed exploded with a rousing “YES, please.” It was 8:55 p.m., so I set the minute of silence for nine o’clock exactly, and asked people to find a good spot, and do whatever they needed to do to get ready. I lit a few candles, counted down with the Twitter feed, set my iPhone timer, and at nine on the dot, closed my eyes.

  Seconds later, Neil’s visiting cousin Judith came through the back kitchen door, looking as emotionally exhausted as I felt. We hugged. I gestured at the laptop on the kitchen table and said:

  Hey…it may sound a little weird but…I’m holding a moment of silence on the Internet.

  Judith knew me. She got it. I closed my eyes again and sat in silence, with Judith—and with my online community—until the timer went off.

  Everybody sent love and peace back and forth. I sent the people around me in Boston a wish for a safe, unafraid night’s sleep.

  The next days were filled with a steady onslaught of unsettling images and news. The manhunt for the alleged bombers—two young brothers. The city lockdown, during which planes were grounded, trains were canceled. I was supposed to play a show in New York; getting there seemed unlikely. I found myself obsessed by the horror of imagining what makes a person do something so terrible, and imagining the pain of the victims, suddenly legless. I heard about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving alleged bomber, a nineteen-year-old they finally found hiding at the bottom of a boat, and who—I found out through the news on NPR—had been a friend of my friend’s high-school-aged kid. I heard the story about how they hijacked a car and tried to make their way to New York. It was all close to home.

  A few days later, after a yoga class, I went back to the same café I’d been sitting in when the news of the bombing hit, and blogged a stream-of-consciousness mishmash of thoughts about my life, the lives of my friends, and about the teenager at the bottom of the boat, in the form of a free-verse poem.

  You don’t know how to stop picking at your fingers.

  You don’t know how many Vietnamese soft rolls to order.

  You don’t know how things could change so incredibly fast.

  You don’t know how little you’ve been paying attention until you look down at your legs again.

  You don’t know how to drive this car.

  You don’t know how precious your iPhone battery time was until you’re hiding in the bottom of the boat.

  You don’t know how to mourn your dead brother.

  You don’t know how claustrophobic your house is until you can’t leave it.

  You don’t know the way to New York.

  There were thirty-five such lines. I didn’t think it was a great poem. It was just a collection of my own feelings and impressions. The coincidences. The blender. The dots.

  I called the blog “A Poem for Dzhokhar.” The fans read it, and within a few moments sent back tweets and comments of understanding; a lot of them had been online with me the night
of the bombing. But three hours later, the blog post had gotten over a thousand comments, and the poem was being linked to on right-wing news sites as an example of liberal evil. Some critics of the poem (who weren’t all strangers, by the way; some were within the fanbase) asked:

  How could you be so insensitive? How dare you shamelessly promote yourself by writing a poem about this?

  One news website said it was “the worst poem ever written in the English language.” A television news commentator that night called it, “Amanda Palmer’s love poem to a terrorist.”

  There was nothing about loving terrorists in the poem.

  The onslaught continued over the next few days. There were two thousand comments on the blog, almost all of them hate-filled and outraged. Strangers started posting limericks, suggesting with or without humor that I should have my own legs blown off. Blog comments included sarcastic haikus and limericks, some of which were competent parodies of my own poem, and some were more along the lines of:

  Roses are red

  Violets are blue

  Fuck you fuck you

  Fuck you fuck you

  And in response, my own readers posted their own poems about empathy and non-violence. Then someone told me it was national poetry month. Timing is everything.

  My Twitter feed was filling up with angry comments so fast I couldn’t even keep up with it. And I stopped wanting to—it hurt too much. People were calling me a monster.

  In the aftermath of the bombing, one journalist and mother of a son said on the radio that her initial reaction had been motherly worry for the bomber. And another local journalist wrote an op-ed wondering if this trend of empathy had gone too far.

  Wondering if this trend of empathy had gone too far?

  To erase the possibility of empathy is to erase the possibility of understanding.

  To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of art. Theater, fiction, horror stories, love stories. This is what art does. Good or bad, it imagines the insides, the heart of the other, whether that heart is full of light or trapped in darkness.

  Here is one successful recipe I have used to deal with haters, trolling, bullying, and other manifestations of critical voices. We all have them.

  Take the scathing article, hurtful office gossip, or nasty online comment.

  Hold it in your mind.

  Now imagine the scathing article, hurtful office gossip, or nasty online comment being aimed at the Dalai Lama.

  Now imagine the Dalai Lama is reading or hearing the scathing article, hurtful office gossip, or nasty online comment.

  If it helps, you can get specific here and think up something like: HEY DALAI LAMA! UR DUMB AS SHIT & UGLY & BALD & WHO DO U THINK U R TRYING TO FREE PEOPLE?? FUCK U

  Or, if that isn’t working for you, a subtler approach:

  Dear Dalai Lama. With all respect, I find your approach to peace highly problematic. If you would stop narcissistically meditating and pretending to “help” people, perhaps you would actually be a force of good in the world. Sincerely, a former fan.

  Now imagine the Dalai Lama’s reaction. He may smile, frown, or laugh—but he will undoubtedly feel compassion for the author of the scathing article, hurtful office gossip, or nasty online comment.

  You can substitute the compassionate/holy/serene being of your choice. It may work to use Jesus, Joan Baez, Yoda, or your kind-eyed but strong-as-an-ox great-aunt Maggie.

  Rinse and repeat as needed.

  About a week after I wrote the poem, I turned thirty-seven. I was in Seattle to deliver a handful of Kickstarter parties. It was hard to leave Anthony, but I was happy to leave Boston for a few days. Neil came with me for the start of the trip, so we could celebrate my birthday together.

  I was miserable, visibly drained, and verging on a shade of depression that I hadn’t felt since my blackest college years. I was tired of feeling hated. Tired of explaining myself. Tired of thinking about it. Tired of Anthony being sick and not knowing whether he would live or die. I didn’t even want a birthday. It seemed pointless and unnecessary.

  We hadn’t made any plans for the day in Seattle except to not do any work—and to stay away from the Internet, which was still roiling with hateful comments and bomb limericks. Things had gotten bad. Someone had just suggested on Twitter that I should have a bomb shoved up my cunt.

  When we woke up on the morning of my birthday, it was freezing cold, dark, and slashing down rain.

  So what do you want to do today, birthday girl? Neil asked lovingly.

  I dunno, I said. Stay in bed. Vanish. Die.

  Well if you’re going to die, let’s eat first. I’m hungry. Would you like some lunch?

  No.

  We found a quiet little Japanese restaurant, where I sat with my sunglasses on, feeling sorry for myself, and staring into my miso soup.

  Darling, Neil said. It’s going to blow over. Trust me. I’ve never seen you this unhappy.

  Sorry.

  Is there nothing we can do? Let’s do something nice, okay? We could try to find a place to get you a birthday massage. Want a massage?

  I looked up from my soup. Neil. He was trying so hard. He was so kind.

  I’d taken a few flights that week, and my back hurt. And my neck hurt. And my head hurt.

  Yes. I’d love a massage. That’d be wonderful.

  I left to go to the bathroom, and Neil started typing into his phone. When I came back, he said, I found a massage place right near here and booked online, using a little form! Isn’t the Internet amazing?

  Uh-huh.

  Two hours later we showed up at an antique office building, slightly early for our appointment, and rapped lightly on the propped-open door before entering. I dried my eyes and tried to look like not too much of a mess.

  The massage therapist, who was pretty and tattooed, was eating a salad out of a takeout container. We had barely said hello when she took a deep breath, looked me deep in the eye, and said, I have to talk to you.

  Okay… I said, taken aback. With Neil? Without Neil?

  He can wait out here. It’ll just take a second. She pointed to a chair in the hallway outside her office and Neil sat down to wait.

  She led me past her massage table into her back office, where a small recording-studio setup—complete with a digital piano and a microphone—took up one corner of the room.

  Oh my god, I thought. She’s going to play music for me. Oh NO…wait…maybe she’s going to ask me to record backing vocals in exchange for my massage? I don’t know if I can handle this right now.

  We sat down.

  So…hi, she said. How are you?

  I was still trying to hold back tears. I took off my sunglasses.

  Honestly? I’m pretty raw, I said. I’m sorry. It’s…my birthday. And it’s been a really rough week.

  She handed me a tissue.

  Happy birthday, she said. Listen, I couldn’t work on you without talking to you first; it felt unethical. I know who you are. I know who Neil is. And when I got his email a few hours ago saying that it was your birthday and you two wanted to come in for massages, I thought my friends were playing a practical joke on me.

  She wasn’t smiling. She took a deep breath.

  I’m a songwriter, and I was following that whole thing with your volunteer musicians. And I have to tell you…I’ve written some…really, really horrible fucking things about you on the Internet. Like really horrible. Whole long blogs about what a bitch you are and how much I despise you and everything you do. They were so horrible that a few weeks after I posted them, I deleted them because I felt so bad. And if you could read what I’d written, you’d just be…I don’t know.

  I sat there, stunned. This was not a good birthday.

  I’m not proud of what I did, or what I wrote, she said. I’m really not. But I couldn’t have you just come in and lie on my table, without you knowing. And if you want to go ahead and cancel, I totally, totally understand.

  I looked at her.
<
br />   I looked up at the ceiling, thinking:

  Is the universe shitting me?

  I said:

  I’m really, really glad you told me. Honestly…I don’t want anything more in this world than to get on your table.

  Okay, she said. Let’s do this.

  So there I lay, for an hour, letting the tears leak out of my eyes and onto her massage table, while she wordlessly ran her hands gently all over my body. She rubbed my arms, my hands, my back, my feet, my face in a ritual of total forgiveness, at least in my imagination. And I wasn’t even sure who was forgiving whom.

  I felt her elbows dig into my hips. I felt her knuckles separating my ribs. I breathed deeper. I felt her fingers dig into my neck, trying to release all the stuck, metallic tension.

  I closed my eyes.

  Every tweet telling me I was fucking worthless, every blog comment telling me to shove my vain head up my own ass, every piece of blog criticism I’d read that labeled me as a self-serving, greedy, superficial attention whore danced in my mind as her hands swept over my body, slowly and reassuringly. Almost lovingly.

  She was like a saint, this woman, come to absolve me. Forgive me. Forgive herself. Forgive everybody. I didn’t know what she’d written about me. I’m sure it was horrible. I didn’t care. I’d read enough. I’d had enough.

  Not a single word passed between us for the entire session. I didn’t care that she could see me silently crying, soaking the towel under my head.

  After an hour, she leaned over and said quietly,

  We’re finished.

  Then she opened her hand, laid it on my heart, and whispered into my ear,

  Happy birthday.

  Then she left the room.

  I got up and blew my nose. I felt exhausted. But light, like something substantial had been lifted out of my insides. I put my underwear on. Then my shirt. Then my pants. She came back into the room, said nothing, and handed me a cup of water.

  I drank it, and we stood there, looking at each other for a minute.

  She broke the silence.

  You’re really good, she said, looking me right in the eye, at receiving.