Crime, revisited

The more that I read John Michael Greer, the more that I find myself in worlds of thought that are different from the ones I used to frequent. And so an idea occurred to me earlier this week — a silly one, trivial really, but I figured I'd record it here because why not?

For years I'd joked to myself that I'd married Wife deliberately, knowing it was going to be a painful slog, "as punishment for my sins." I'd say this, knowing that consciously I didn't believe in any metaphysics that could make sense of it, knowing that consciously it had to be a joke, and yet feeling that at the level of some subterranean emotion there was something to it. A few years ago I even tried to think my way through this paradox, in a pair of linked posts here and here. And maybe that explanation is the true one.

But Greer is a magician and an occultist. So he takes ideas like reincarnation and karma absolutely seriously, and talks about things like "the work you have to do in this life." And so it occurred to me, ... did I deliberately choose a life where I'd marry Wife, in order to burn off some karmic debt acquired earlier?

More generally, I thought about the affection I have always felt for narcissists and crazy people: people I've known personally, like Wife, Scarlett, D, and even Tartuffe back when I was a little kid; but also authors, like William Blake, or Julie Powell, or Robert Pirsig. (See also this movie review.) And all of a sudden I wondered, "Might it be that some of the work I have to do in this life has to do with dealing with crazy people? This could explain the inexplicable attraction" I feel towards them. In other words, if that were defined up front — before my birth — as a boundary condition, it wouldn't have to make sense to me in-universe (as indeed it doesn't) so long as it was a fact (which it is). 

I don't know what to think of the doctrine of reincarnation itself. In fact, I wrote out my thoughts on it earlier this evening and posted them here, on the Patio. But the idea did cross my mind.

        

The lunatic and the mystic

Towards the end of Dorothy Bryant's Confessions of Madame Psyche, the narrator says she has come across "a psychologist named Boisson, who has spent much time in asylums, both as a patient and as a minister.  Boisson writes of the similarity between the mystic and the lunatic ....  The revelation, the crack in the walls of the mind is the same, he thinks.  The difference between the mystic and the lunatic is pride.  The lunatic refuses to 'walk humbly with thy God.'"

I don't know if there ever really was a psychologist named Boisson who wrote these things.  I spent five minutes on Google looking fruitlessly for him, but that proves nothing.  But the line made me wonder about my own attraction to crazy people.  Now, "attraction" may be a little too strong a word most of the time, and I'm skittish enough of danger that I prefer to meet my crazy people between the covers of a book.  But I know it's true.  Recently I even tried to come up with a list of crazy people that I find interesting -- that I come back to again and again.  My list was pretty short, but I think that's because I'm forgetting somebody, not because there isn't anybody there.

• Robert Pirsig
• William Blake
• Julie Powell (see also this post here)
• Wife

You didn't think I was going to forget that last one, did you?  Honestly I think the early traces of her mental illness may well have been part of what attracted me to her in the first place.  Be careful what you wish for.

There's probably more to flesh out here, but I'm not sure where to take it at the moment, so I'll leave this as a promissory note for later ....

Cleaving

A while ago I wrote about seeing the movie "Julie & Julia." In the comments, L and I talked briefly about Julie Powell's follow-up book (if you can call it that), Cleaving. At the time I hadn't read it yet, but I have to admit my curiosity was provoked by the vitriolic reviews on Amazon. (Honestly, most of the reviewers gave it a 1.) So last Wednesday, I checked it out of the library; and this evening, as I sat around handing out candy to the trick-or-treaters, I finished it.

The ultra-brief summary is this: over several years, Julie Powell had been having an affair with a guy she met in college before she was ever married. But she was not very good at hiding it. Her husband Eric found out, and it caused a lot of turmoil in her marriage. After she published Julie & Julia, she spent six months apprenticing as a butcher while trying to sort out her life. After that six months she was still an emotional mess, so she travelled some. And after a while she got better. Julie Powell shows herself to be obsessive, to have poor impulse control, to be capable of over-the-top emotional tantrums, to be alcoholic. She does not paint a flattering picture of herself. The critics on Amazon panned her writing en route to panning her personality. They said she's a mess and the whole book is Too Much Information and why do we have to read it anyway?

Me, I loved it. OK, I'm not going to get in the ring fighting for my life over whether her prose will echo down through the ages; but shit, she never claimed to be writing Madame Bovary or Othello. She learned to write by blogging, which means that whatever is on her mind goes onto the page; the virtue of blogging is that its very immediacy should make it a more honest medium for us to reveal our faults in. God knows I reveal too many of my faults here. And she certainly reveals plenty of hers. Of course it is possible that all this proves is that I love crazy women: that would certainly explain my taste for "high-maintenance" women like Wife and D, to say nothing of bloggers like Violent Acres. (Naturally none of my invited readers counts as "crazy," though I'm fond of you all anyway.)

What I found uncanny, quite apart from her ability to map her own obsessions so exactly, were the moments that sounded like they had been lifted directly from my marriage to Wife. Right up front, on page 4, she writes:

The nagging voice I've all my life heard in my head, the one people might call addiction or restlessness or waywardness, but which is to me almost an embodiment, something outside of myself, impish, far from benign, but also inspiring and not entirely unconcerned with my self-interest -- Eric believed in it. He feared it sometimes, but he believed in it.

That was us, too. I would never have thought to put it like that, would never have thought to remember that as one of the telling details of our early years together, Wife and me. But she too had the obsessive restlessness that would come on her unawares, as if it were outside herself, pointing her in directions unimagined. And I, too, believed in it. Even when it was scary.

How did Julie Powell manage to write so exactly about my marriage?

I won't say that the rest of it proves to be a carbon copy. No two marriages are ever exactly alike. But there are moments that I recognize. Yes, there are. The one thing I could have wished out of the book is that she had come to more of an understanding of what drove her -- her, and her husband and her lover. She gets to a stable point where things are better and the future looks more hopeful, but she never quite reaches one of those "sweet mystery of life at last I've found you" moments. And it would have been nice if she had. But after all, the main reason I wish she had come to that profound understanding is so that I could appropriate it for my own situation. And if I haven't reached a point of enlightened understanding about my own marriage yet, how can I criticize Julie for failing to do it for me?

Don't read the book if you are squeamish: there are a lot of technical details about the art of butchery that tender minds won't want to know. Don't read the book if you think that the first-person narrator should be a moral exemplar, or even an especially admirable human being. Julie admits in an interview I found somewhere that she is glad her mother has refused to read the book. I don't know what she ever told her mother when she was writing it, but the stories she tells in the book are ones no mother would want to read about her daughter.

But if you are interested in scrutinizing the dynamics of infidelity, to see what makes it tick -- or if you just love crazy women -- it's worth a look.