I don't quite know how to categorize this post. Is it a "diary entry"? Kind of. Is it about politics? No, not really. Do I think you want to hear it? Maybe—it's certainly crazy enough to be funny, if you have the right sense of humor.
Is there any kind of important moral in it? I keep thinking there must be, but I haven't found it yet. So let's go with "crazy" for now.
Marie was here visiting for a few days, and we started talking about politics. In one sense this is not surprising: Marie has strong political convictions, and considers herself active in their defense.
But in another sense it was unusual, because normally I try to avoid discussing politics with her at all. The subject usually makes her angry, and she already spends too much time angry. When I introduced her to meditation in a simple way, the point was to cool the fires of her anger. So in general I don't think there's a lot to gain from re-stoking those fires.
The consequence, in turn, is that there are a lot of topics we can't discuss. I tend to think about politics intellectually (shocker, that), which means I am open to rethinking my positions and changing my mind when appropriate. And as it stands I can't really discuss those things with Marie, much as I would like to.
So as an experiment, I tried to ask her what she thinks about the Ukraine War, because I thought that would be the simplest and least problematic topic we could find in contemporary politics. I didn't necessarily think she would agree with my thoughts on it. But I did want to hear what picture she used to frame her thoughts, and I figured that we could discuss the war pretty dispassionately because it's not related to any domestic or intramural political dispute (such as abortion rights or Black Lives Matter).
Years ago I wrote a post on "The future of marriage" where I argued (among other things) that marriage does not have to be restricted to dyadic pairs—and, indeed, that "raising children is so much work that there is a good argument for spreading the burden among more than two people."
Well, I just saw the same suggestion in a recent webcomic, which makes me wonder if the idea is seeping out into the larger culture? Am I going to become—ever so improbably—a cultural prophet in my own time? Wow, who knew?
Several times in the last year, most recently in my post last night, I have described my marriage as a "punishment for my sins." (See also here and here. I use the phrase in another context here.)
But there is another possible explanation for my marriage besides this one. I'm reluctant to explain what I mean, because I find it embarrassing. But surely the time is long past when I should worry about anything like that, right? We're all friends here. Besides, none of you knows who I am in real life.
This afternoon I ran across an article someone posted on Substack, … umm … two days ago, called, "My 8 Best Techniques for Evaluating Character." You can find it here.
Self-understanding. Well, there is that.
And that's what I want to use this article for: to see how I answer its questions when I'm talking about myself. To see what the article says about me.
In what follows, I'll quote from the article, and then intersperse my own comments (indented). (In many cases the author introduces paragraph breaks that I ignore for simplicity.)
Five years ago, or a little more, Marie and I spent a little over a week vacationing in Greece. I meant to write about it at the time, but things got away from me. So I wrote two posts about it tonight.
I've posted them back in 2017 where they belong for the sake of continuity, so you can find them here:
I have a note here from … gosh, it looks like last summer. And it pulls together a number of related points. Some of these are things I have griped about here before; others, probably not. But they are all related in an interesting way.
Much of the time, I have trouble understanding what I need.
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As you know, Wife was diagnosed years ago with systemic lupus. Lupus is an autoimmune disorder where the body's immune system overreacts to simple, normal stimuli and ends up attacking healthy tissue. But think for a minute how exactly this description mirrors Wife's temperament, as she chronically overreacts to minor setbacks or random bad luck with outrage and fury, as if the Universe were out to get her, personally. There were years where I thought, "If only we could document this correlation and submit it to a journal somewhere, Wife could be immortalized by having the syndrome named after her!"
Turns out other people have had the idea that there might be a connection between personality and disease. In a recent blog post, John Michael Greer explains that Eliphas Lévi wrote "Most physical maladies derive from moral maladies, according to the unique and universal magical doctrine and due to the law of analogies." (The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic, chapter 20) And on his other blog, Greer has written that when he worked in nursing homes, experienced aides could identify what disease a patient suffered from simply by the patient's personality type, without ever looking at the chart:
One of the advantages … well, let me say one of the features … of writing the same blog for fifteen years is that I can revisit old topics when I have something new to say about them. Of course you've seen me discuss things that even predate the blog, events that happened between Wife and me thirty or forty years ago (or almost). But I had a thought tonight that picks up a question I asked you all back when Debbie left me: you remember that I asked, "But why?"
Tonight in Sangha we were studying, … well, some dharma teaching or other. But during the discussion period, Debbie started talking about "habit-energy." As an example, she told a story.
Back when she was in high school, sometimes her father would get very drunk and start assaulting her mother. She would see that the house was an unsafe place to be, and so she would just leave. She'd slide out her window (or I guess even walk out the front door) and walk a mile to a friend's house; then she'd spend the night there sleeping on the sofa, and go to school the next day wearing the same clothes and with or without her books.
In my last post, I talked about a conversation I had (if you can call it that) with the goddess Cerridwen speaking through the mouth and body of Wife during a Full Moon ritual.* If you aren't familiar with this kind of experience, it can be easy to wonder whether it's real or a put-on? Maybe Wife was just saying portentous things in a funny voice? There have been religious frauds before now; maybe this was one of them. Or if not, how can I tell?
One is that the whole atmosphere simply felt different. You know how it feels when you are talking with another person, someone you know well. This was different. Before the Aspect and after, it felt like Wife; during, it didn't. I try to explain that a little bit in this post.
A second is that whenever we discussed the ritual afterwards, Wife's memory of what happened was regularly different from mine. Sometimes she remembered nothing at all. Other times she remembered pictures, and when I told her what words she spoke we would put those together with the images to try to make sense of them. (In principle—if I were trying to channel James Randi—I suppose she might have faked this part; but over the years I had a lot of experience with Wife lying to me, and this never felt like that.)
And a third is that the Lady often said things that Wife didn't like. Surely if Wife had been faking, she would have concocted messages that suited her; but very often they didn't.
Let me tell you about one of these times.
Last spring I wrote you about the time before we were married, when Wife (then a Dedicant in her coven) promised to Cerridwen that "I will bear a daughter and raise her to be a priestess for you." It didn't work out, although at least once Wife tried to bear this daughter and bore Son 2 instead. Because of the circumstances around Son 2's conception and birth, which seemed to suggest some divine intervention, we both wondered whether that let Wife off the hook as far as her promise was concerned.
Well, this afternoon I was looking through an old notebook of mine, and I found the answer.
This will be very short.
In the past I talked a lot about goals, and the trouble I had setting them. But then a couple years ago I realized that I really had had a set of goals all along … only they weren't the ones I thought I'd had. I talk about that here.
Last night I had one small, additional thought. There are (at least) two different kinds of goals. You can have a goal to do something. Or you can have a goal to be something.
For the most part, the goals I identified in that post I linked above were goals to be something: a friend, a lover, a husband, a father. It's true I've also pursued at least one long-term goal to do something: namely, to separate from Wife. But I wasn't very good at it, and it took a long time.
That's it. That's the post—just recognizing that difference and naming it. I have no grand insights. I just wanted to record it in writing.