Judy Blue Eyes -- posted at last

Recently I came across an e-mail I wrote to D back in 2011, just after coming back from a Judy Collins concert.  I don't know why I didn't post it here then, but I didn't.  Anyway, I've posted it now.  I back-dated the post to the day I wrote the e-mail, but here is a link dated today (when I'm actually doing the work) to send you back to it.

http://hoseasblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/judy-blue-eyes.html

Not everyone is creative

There is a spot in Killing Wonder -- which I left at home, damn it, so I can't quote it directly right now -- where the narrator, Jessamyn Posey, in a burst of "newly-enlightened" feminist enthusiasm, tries to commiserate with her mother for "having" to give up a career and a life of the mind in order to raise children and care for a family.  Jessie doesn't even seem to see how patronizing and insulting this is, though the author (Dorothy Bryant, of course) clearly does.

Her mother replies gently and kindly that Jessie is mistaken to see the path of householding as somehow inferior or degrading.  She points out that not everyone is creative, and indeed not everyone can be creative even given all the necessary support -- education, income, and "a room of one's own".  She adds that she made a conscious decision in her own life not to chase after literary or intellectual pursuits, and instead to devote her energies to what she conceived as the greatest benefit she could bestow on humanity: rearing good human beings as her children.  And she remarks that this is no mean accomplishment, nor a valueless one.  (Of course she says all this far better than I have said it here.)

It's an important point.  And I guess it resonates with me because it is very like the conscious decision that I took, too.  There was a time, early in my marriage to Wife, when I had a clear and simple choice.  We had both been in graduate school together, and she left.  I could stay in graduate school, or I could follow her and stay married.  I chose to follow her, and I have never seen the inside of a university again, or not as anything but a visitor.  I suppose I had a lot of reasons, and some day I will sit down and list them all for you.  But at the heart of it what I saw was a choice between seeing life (watching it, analyzing it, writing about it) and actually living it.  I had spent more or less all my life up till that time inside academic institutions, and I knew it wasn't enough for me.  I was good at playing that game, but it wasn't a game I cared about.  I knew that the other road would be harder, that it would involve a lot more pain and suffering [God, I wish I had made book on that prediction!], but I chose it anyway.  And in the end, while some of my little mini-essays here or elsewhere might interest one or two people, my real contribution to the world will have been Son 1 and Son 2.

I still don't think it was the wrong choice.
 

"Mood 2"

I had an interesting conversation with Son 2 the other day.  He and I were driving back -- a long trip -- from "vacation" last week, during which we had dropped Son 1 off at university.  It was, as I say, a long drive; so we were listening to a lot of music and Son 2 was in charge of the stereo.  So after we had gone through the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Journey, and some others that I forget, Son 2 announced that we were now down to a choice between the last two disks: Jethro Tull or AC-DC.

Hosea:  Well I already know some Jethro Tull and I'm not sure whether I know any AC-DC, so let's go with that.

Son 2:  AC-DC? Really?

Hosea:  Why not?

Son 2:  We can if you want to, but Mom hates it.

Hosea:  OK. I have no idea if I'll hate it or not, so why don't we try it?

And so he put on the AC-DC disk. 

Now in retrospect I'll say that it's probably never going to make my top ten list: too much pointless noise, or at least noise whose point I couldn't see (unlike, say, the just-as-loud noise in the violent spots of a Beethoven symphony); too little melody that I could pick out; too few lyrics I could understand.  But for driving through miles and miles of miles and miles, it was just fine.  I guess I'd say that it's not something I would choose on my own -- at any rate, not most of the time -- but I didn't mind listening to it under the circumstances.  But the way I framed this opinion for Son 2 was slightly different.

Son 2:  [After the disk was finished.]  What did you think?

Hosea:  Let me put it like this. There's a spectrum of moods I might be in. In one mood, way over here on one extreme of the spectrum, it's something I'd probably want to listen to, something I'd seek out.

Son 2:  Like if you're really angry.

Hosea:  Exactly. Then there's a broad sweep in the middle -- including the mood I'm in right now -- where I wouldn't necessarily seek it out but I don't mind listening to it. And finally there are moods way over on the other end of the spectrum where I really couldn't listen to it. One of these is if I have to think hard about something, because it's too loud and too distracting. So if you had put it on while we were in heavy traffic, I would have asked you to turn it off. The other one is when I feel, ... well I don't really know quite what the word should be. Maybe "fragile". But it's a mood where I just can't deal with a lot of heavy input of any kind, and when I'm like that then I probably couldn't listen to it either.

Son 2:  Right. Mood 2.

Hosea:  Excuse me?

Son 2:  I figured this out a long time ago. You've got basically two settings. There's "Mood 1" where you're happy or angry or tired or any of those other normal emotions, and where you do whatever you're going to do: tell jokes if you're happy, shout if you're angry, or whatever. And I know how to deal with all of those: make jokes back to you if you're happy, stay quiet if you're angry, and so on. But then there's "Mood 2" where you're kind of ... "enh - enh - enh" [He made cowering gestures while making these noises.] ... and I have no idea what the hell to do with you then because nothing works. It's really frustrating. So most of the time I just leave you alone, and after a while you come out of it. I guess that's pretty much the only thing to do, really.

Hosea:  [Pauses to think.]  OK, got it. So you know the mood I'm talking about. Well when I'm in that mood I probably couldn't listen to AC-DC.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that he not only recognizes the mood but has even given it a name.  Somebody once wrote that children always know their parents way better than parents know their children, because for children it is a matter of survival to learn how to get what they need while for parents it is only a matter of interest to inquire after their kids when they don't have anything else going on.  That may overstate things, but in essence it's probably right ....
   

Commitment to write, 2

I may as well admit that this month is going to be a bust.

Back at the beginning of the month I talked about reasons I hadn't written.  Since then I finished the project with Hil (which involved working late most nights -- no, not like that!) and then spent a week on the road moving Son 1 into university.  Afterwards, Son 2 and I took a detour to visit a couple of my cousins and their families.  Wife was grumpy that she didn't get to go too, but it was a fun trip.  I'll probably write something about it in a while.

But I was mostly away from the Internet, and there was no way I could keep up a daily writing practice.  So August is a bust.

I'll do better in September.  Really.

Fan letters

Back in March, I wrote Dorothy Bryant a fan letter, partly because her website said (at that time) that the way to order copies of her books was by e-mailing her directly.

Dear Ms. Bryant,

I own two of your books – Miss Giardino and Kin of Ata – and whenever I find myself browsing through either of them I ask myself why I haven’t bought all the others.  (I have given copies of Miss Giardino to several friends, and have never yet made it through a reading without tears.)  But then I go online, find your ordering information, and something distracts me or I decide my budget doesn’t look right … or something.  And a lot of time intervenes before I do it all again.  Pure dithering.

This time I’m actually writing you, which should make it harder for me to lose the thread.  On your website you say to contact you directly to purchase any of five books, and any of the plays.  So let me ask you, please: what do they cost?  What does it take to order them?  I may not actually order one of EVERYthing all at once; but even if I decide to ration myself to ordering only a few now and some more later, I’d be interested (at a minimum) in A Day in San Francisco, Myths to Lie By, and Eros in Love, … probably also Killing Wonder.  That is, I expect that I would enjoy anything you have published but I figure it might also be healthy to pace myself.  :-)

I realize that this e-mail sounds gushing; please forgive me.  But I am trying to write briskly before I get derailed again.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards, Hosea Tanatu

Her reply was friendly but just a little disappointing:

Dear Hosea Tanatu,

I’m no longer filling direct orders. Sorry I haven’t updated the website. Your best bet is to order through your local bookstore. If they are not in touch with a distributor that stocks my books, ask them to try Amazon.com or some other, larger source. (try used book stores too) I no longer provide play scripts, which were never published as bound books. (I xeroxed pages for theater companies who approached me, planning a production.)

Thank you for your interest.

Dorothy Bryant

Well, as you know if you have been following me at all, I've been bingeing on her work since then.  So today I wrote her a slightly different kind of letter, ... not asking her for anything but just to thank her for writing such good books.

Dear Mrs. Bryant,

I did as you suggested last March, and scouted other sources for your books.  As a result, in the ensuing five months I have now read Ella Price, Madame Psyche, Killing Wonder, and most of the pieces in Myths to Lie By; and I have spent several hours thumbing through Writing a Novel.  (This is in addition to Miss Giardino and Kin of Ata, which I first read many years ago.)  More will follow, as I can get them.

 

Killing Wonder was the one I finished most recently (a couple of nights ago), and I have to admit I smiled several times through it … both at the submerged references to your own fiction (Emma Pride, Dream Witch, and others), and at the not-so-submerged echoes of ideas that you worked out also in other ways, in other places.

I regret now that I didn't start my buying spree earlier, so that – back when you were still filling orders directly – I could have bought "all twenty-three, new, in hardback" as Jane put it to Jessamyn.  :-)  I'm sorry.  But I want to thank you for writing so consistently, so thoughtfully, and so well.  This may be one respect in which it is just as well that books are not published anonymously, because at least knowing who you are affords me an address where I can send my thanks.

In the unlikely [highly unlikely!] event that anybody ever asks my advice for devising a syllabus to support a program of spiritual education, my first answer will be, "Read everything by Dorothy Bryant that you can lay your hands on."

Again, thank you.

"The Power and the Glory"

On my trip to Sticksville, I took along Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, at the recommendation of Son 2 who had read it in English class last year.  Of course it's a great book, but I loved the way that Greene shows us what good there is, hidden though it be, in the whiskey priest where many more upright and pious people are missing it.  After I finished the book, Son 2 asked me what I thought of it.  I tried to explain this, and quoted back to him what I thought was one of the most insightful lines of the book:

"What an unbearable creature he must have been in those days--and yet in those days he had been comparatively innocent. That was another mystery: it sometimes seemed to him that venial sins--impatience, an unimportant lie, pride, a neglected opportunity--cut you off from grace more completely than the worst sins of all. Then, in his innocence, he had felt no love for anyone; now in his corruption he had learnt."

Son 2's answer?  "That's the line I wrote my paper on."

Nice to know we are struck by similar things, I guess .... 

County fair

Yesterday I found myself shutting off the energy that I had been putting into my interactions with Hil, as if at a spigot.  I would have to have anyway, sooner or later, so it was only a matter of time.

I knew I would reach this point some day because we never had a lot to talk about besides work.  We'd tell some stories about our kids, but I never felt a clear opening to talk about something else.  Maybe it was partly the language difference: her English is very good, for that of a non-native speaker, but she still stumbles over things that are outside of her normal range of discussion.  Also, ... I don't know, call it a sense.  She loves coming to the United States on business trips because the exchange rate between euro and dollar is so favorable to Europeans, and our sales tax is much lower than in her stores back home, so she goes on shopping binges whenever she is here.  She always visits whatever Disney Store she can find in town and buys it out of anything she doesn't already have ... "to bring home for my girls."  Shopping?  The Disney Store?  Really, this is your idea of recreation?  So yeah, I never really thought it would be a good idea to bring up Plato or Thích Nhất Hạnh.  It did restrict the number of things we had in common to talk about.  (Whatever else can be said about them, D and Debbie conversed with me far more easily. Hell, so did Wife way back in the day before we started hating each other.)

She ran into another of my crotchets Thursday night at dinner, when she suddenly asked "Why did they put salami in this salad?"  It was a cheap Italian restaurant, so hell -- maybe they thought it was antipasto-like.  It's not like Hil is a vegetarian.  So she systematically picked out every single little bitty scrap of salami before continuing.  OK, she's a grown-up and it's her salad -- her division is paying for it -- but it won't surprise you to hear that I looked at her fussiness a little askance.  You have to be that picky?  Really?  [Readers are within their rights to point out that I'm being, in some ways, just as picky -- only at the level of scorning human beings instead of salami. I never promised to be consistent.]

What really struck me, though, was Friday, when we wrapped up early at work and decided to visit the County Fair that was going on in Sticksville at the time.  Parts of it were really interesting: they had a "Village of Yesteryear" area where the local historical society had reconstructed several buildings to resemble how they looked in the nineteenth century.  (It was scary to realize that nearly every building we walked into had "old-time" tools from long ago which exactly resembled stuff of Wife's we had packed out of the garage or the storage unit.)  She was also really interested in the model trailer homes they had on display: they were far larger, far more luxurious, and far cheaper than anything available in Germany.  (I could gladly have skipped checking out the trailer homes, but what the hell -- I went along to be gracious.)  And she nodded seriously when we strolled through the barns, looking at the prize cows and llamas, and then told me about the farm her granparents lived on while adding that there are virtually none of these farms left in Germany any more because they are no longer economically viable.  So far, so good.

Then we turned down the midway, towards the campier parts of the fair.  There was the Mr. Lumberjack competition, where a couple of muscular guys in blue jeans raced around an obstacle course while carrying chain saws and sawing off branches here and there: she explained very seriously that if you want to operate a chain saw in Germany -- at any rate in the public forests (to get firewood for the winter) -- you have to register with the local forest manager and pass a practical test in chain saw safety before you are issued a certificate permitting you to use the damned thing.  There were the food stands selling deep-fried pickles, deep-fried nacho-flavored cheese curds, deep-fried cookies, deep-fried cheesecake.  Other stands sold kettle corn, cotton candy, or "Corn ... dogs? Did I read that right? What's a ... corn ... dog?"  There were stands selling black T-shirts with designs all in glitter, hats advertising beer companies, and elaborate decorative wall hangings celebrating "The Second Amendment: America's FIRST Homeland Security!"  (I don't think she saw the hanging, or understood it. Fortunately I didn't have to explain it. She's already told me plenty about Germany's handgun laws.)*

Probably I was tired.  It had been a long week.  But it felt to me like the look on her face was turning from anthropological curiosity into scorn; and I felt ashamed.  It's not even like it had anything to do with me: county fairs aren't exactly my thing, and I wasn't the one who had suggested we go.  It's just that it's my country, and I felt somehow like we were all found wanting.

In retrospect it's very likely I was reading it all in.  It's very likely that she may have been puzzled but wasn't really scornful.  It's very likely I was just tired and grumpy.  But one way or another I let those feelings turn off the spigot of energy I had been putting into our interactions.  It would have happened anyway.  This was just how it came about.

__________
* I have no intention of entering a discussion about the pros and cons of handguns just now, though long-time readers will remember this is one of Wife's hot buttons.  I mention the topic only to give a sense of what this part of the fair was like as an ambience.    

Eating through the week

Very briefly ... it's late, I'm tired, ... you know the drill.

Of course I chose the title of this post deliberately to echo this one; the week has been similar, but also different.

• As before, it seems to me that I'm eating a lot.
• But -- unlike before -- it feels like I'm actually hungry when mealtimes roll around. I'm not doing anything to burn off the food, so I'm not sure what that's about. Habit, maybe.
• I have no idea what I weigh right now. The hotel might have a scale in the exercise room, but I haven't checked. Meanwhile, my belt is tight after dinner, but not especially tight in the middle of the morning.
• Unlike some weeks that I've felt especially hungry, I haven't really had a chance to drink anything alcoholic (just coffee and water this week) and the absence doesn't bother me. I don't especially crave it ... at least not right now.  If I had it I'd probably drink it, but as much out of boredom as anything else.
• And to tag along with the previous point, I haven't been masturbating either. For all that I think there is an undercurrent of flirting going on between Hil and me, I don't find myself wanting sex. Really not at all, which is kind of strange. Sometimes I feel like I want to want sex (because it's weird to have the desire go missing); other times I feel relieved not to have to deal with it -- free, the way Sophocles described himself in the opening pages of Plato's Republic.
• So it's just eating.

Time's up.  Time for bed.  Nighty-night, all ....

Working with Hil

It's late.  I'm tired.  I should be sleeping.  I'll keep this short.

Hil and I continue to work together on this project.  She goes off one direction, I go off another, then we come back and integrate what we've done.  We laugh together a lot.  She comments about a lot of other projects she has coming up, and wonders out loud if there's some way I could be assigned to help with them ... because, gosh, she needs someone with my expertise who also belongs to the business unit I do, and there ain't many of us.  Over dinner she laughs at my funny stories, and she spends more time than she used to making eye contact while laughing.  We haven't gotten to the point of sitting quietly staring straight at each other like I did during my first lunch with Debbie.  But it's still eye contact.

I sure don't want "a relationship" right now.  I find I can go days or weeks without even wanting sex.  There's no great desire behind me pushing me forward here.  I'm just really interested in watching this dynamic unfold, almost as if under its own power.  Fascinating. 

Happy anniversary?

You remember that I'm two time zones away from home, working on a project (for work, dammit!) with Hil in Sticksville ... right?  So why does Wife text me "Happy thirtieth anniversary"?  Yes, technically she's right ... but, ... huh??

Yes, I've been driving the whole separation.  Yes, she claims she thought we'd always stay together.  (Yes, denial is an amazingly powerful hallucinogen.)  But she has also admitted, in unguarded moments, that this is going to be good for her too.

I don't know.  Probably I shouldn't overthink it.  Probably she doesn't have any terribly deep reasons but just figures it's the thing to do ... out of habit.

Happy anniversary.

Another project with Hil

So here I am in a hotel in Sticksville, preparing to spend another week working on a project with Hil.  I should be in bed, not blogging; I guess since I'm on a roll, I'm trying to make up for going ten days into this month without posting nada.  At least the Benadryl is knocking out my allergy symptoms.  I thought that stuff was supposed to knock you out too.  Why am I still awake?

Of course, my interest in this project -- from a blogging perspective -- has nothing to do with the actual work and everything to do with closely watching how Hil and I interact.  We met at the airport, at Baggage Claim, with a huge firm hug.  We chit-chatted all the way to the hotel, mostly about light-hearted stuff.  She told me all about the shopping she did at the big mall nearby, to bring cool stuff back home to her daughters.  I talked about my flight, and tossed in a few pointless anecdotes.

At the hotel she gave me a present: two jars of home-made jam, made by her, straight from the berry-trees in her backyard.  How sweet!  It left me thinking I should have brought her some jam I made last winter, from a fruit tree in a vacant lot just across the fence from my apartment's parking lot.  And it's a sign that we are inching closer together.

We went out to dinner, talked about work, and then came back to the hotel.  I went upstairs to go to bed and then sat down to write blog posts instead.  We're still not holding hands, but we continue to find socially acceptable reasons to touch each other: I gave her a big hug in thanks for my jam, for instance.  Would we have hugged good-night on our way to our separate hotel rooms?  Or rather, would we have if I hadn't been all sniffly with allergies?  Ummm ... probably not quite yet.  But I'm watching it.  Watching and waiting -- in no hurry, but really interested to see where this goes. 

"Can't"

I thought of something the other day.

Wife spends a lot of time talking about how helpless she is.  Recently I was talking to her about taking Son 1 to college in a couple of weeks and she said she wanted to come too.  I looked for the nicest possible way to say that I really didn't look forward to the four of us being cooped up in the same car for four days, and suggested that she make arrangements to see him at college some other time.  She was very quick to remind me that "of course" she "can't" drive that far.  But she has said this about lots of other things too.  You've heard me complain about it.

What struck me the other day is a possible explanation for Why?  All along I've wondered, "What does she get out of being helpless? This is a woman who used to pride herself on her strength, on being able to take on any challenge and meet it. Why does she now refuse challenges with the words 'I can't' even when it's something she could probably work up to?"

But then the boys and I were sitting around the dinner table one evening, and ...

Son 1:  You know, it only recently occurred to me just how much time the two of us spend -- when we are with Mom -- managing her moods: saying the right things to make sure she stays stable, steering the conversation away from topics that are going to upset her, ...

Son 2:  Yeah, like her parents, or you, or our grade school.

Son 1:  Anyway, I just thought it was kind of amazing.

Hosea:  [slowly and quietly]  I know exactly what you mean.

Son 1:  I'm sure you do.

Son 2:  At least we've gotten her to stop drinking. Now she uses pot to cope with the pain, but that's OK. Pot just makes her a little goofy. But when she drinks ...

Son 1:  Oh yeah, when she drinks it's really bad.  Then she gets morose and weepy, and there's always a risk she'll turn violent.

Hosea:  Against you guys?

Son 1:  Or against herself.  There's no telling.  When she drinks, she's totally unpredictable.

Son 2:  And she's always really weepy.  "Oh, I never lived up to the ideals my parents had for me!"  I want to tell her, "That's OK Mom, because in the first place you hated them, so why should you even care? And in the second place, they're both dead -- so they sure don't care any more."  But there's no calming her ... it's like she wants to be morose.

The conversation went on from there, talking about Wife and how the boys handle living with her.  But a couple days later that sentence came back to me: "I never lived up to the ideals my parents had for me!"  And I thought for a couple of minutes ....

Wife feels a lot of guilt about all the things she wanted to accomplish in her life that she hasn't accomplished ... because life didn't turn out that way, because she made decisions that pulled her in different directions, because she got sick, because she re-acts instead of acting, ... and probably for lots of other reasons.  Guilt is a miserable thing to carry around, but Wife doesn't seem to be able to shrug it off using the kind of reasoning that Son 2 offers.  On the other hand ... supposing none of it were her fault?  Supposing the reason she hasn't done all these things is that she can't?  Supposing that she were just too goddamned sick to be able to lift a hand towards finishing any of these projects?  Wouldn't that absolve her of a lot of guilt?  Wouldn't that be a sweet outcome for her?  Wouldn't that, in fact, be the perfect solution for her, because it would get her out of this net of obligations she feels herself in, without requiring her to stand up and face down her parents' ghosts?

It's perfect.  Simple and easy.  The only thing is ... it relies on the factual claim that she is really helpless: that she can't drive even as far as her doctors in the Big City (let alone to another state); that she can't sleep without Ambien (and conversely that she can't stay awake without Provigil ... wait, how can it be both?); that she can't ... she can't ... she can't.  That she simply can't.

As long as she's helpless, she can be guilt-free.  If she ever reclaims any sense of power for herself, the guilt comes with it.

I may be all off base with this analysis, but it sounds kinda plausible ....

Commitment to write?

What happened to my commitment to write once a day?  In June and July I sloughed off for a few days here and there, but nothing like this: it's ten days into August and this is the first time I have written anything.  What gives?  Sloth?  Boredom?

There's a way of looking at it that makes it not seem so bad, if I look at it narrowly.  August 1 was a Friday, and it so happened that I worked kinda late that evening.  The next week I had the boys with me, and in general my commitment to write has suffered during the weeks I have the boys.  So from one perspective that pretty much accounts for it.

From another perspective, maybe not so much.  I remember back when I first set myself the challenge of writing daily, in … what was it? April? … that one night I was about to go to bed and realized I hadn't written yet, so I dragged my lazy carcase up and sat down for half an hour.  Finished in mid-sentence, too.  Other times I wrote at work – taking time away from my paying job, it's true, but that's not news.

What has changed?  For one thing, I guess the challenge isn't so new any more.  I feel funny writing at home if the boys are there because I don't really want to explain what I'm doing.  There's been a lot to do at work: that is to say, the same long-term tasks were there in the spring, but I figured I had lots of time to tackle them; now it's the end of summer, and – miraculously enough – they haven't gotten themselves done, so I have reluctantly decided it's time to pitch in just a bit.  And my last couple weekends have been really slothful.

Why don't I want to tell the boys that I'm writing a journal?  Because I don't want to enter whatever conversation comes next.  Because I'm afraid that they'll think it's … gosh, I don't know exactly.  The only word I can think of is feminine, but that's kind of a strange word to choose.  Isn't it?  Or maybe self-absorbed.  (No, I don't think those are synonyms!)  I can picture them asking "Why?" and I honestly don't know the answer.  Maybe in order to understand myself better?  If so, how's it working?  I guess I do understand this or that a little better.  Does it help on a macro level?  I don't know.

I started this post on an airplane this afternoon, flying to another city for another week-long project with Hil.  This is a city I've never been to before, so I guess I'll have to think up a new name for it.  It's a small town in farm country with a big factory, so I guess I'll call it Sticksville.  As for the original topic of this post, I have no idea where to take it.  So I'll terminate this one and start another.