Political unreliability

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).

Ella and Anna

Dearest Marie,

What ever happens to Ella Price and Anna Giardino after their books end? [That's Ella Price's Journal and Anna Giardino, respectively, both by Dorothy Bryant.]

Of course in one sense they just cease to exist. But we are supposed to imagine them as real people, and the endings of the books seem right. So what is next?

Do they live lives very different from what went before? Or do they settle into routines that are almost the same, because habit is so powerful or because their resources and therefore their options aren't infinite after all?

Look at me. I've had my end-of-the-book moment, but I'm still working at the same place doing the same thing. For a little while I was avidly going out to museums and shows; now I still do from time to time but not as often. And in some ways I've become less productive than I was, because back then I wrote all this cool stuff I've been sending you ... maybe in order to get away from the day-to-day, or for whatever reason. But I've been burning through a lot of accumulated capital in all this stuff I've been sending you to read. And even when there's the chance of having my job yanked out from under me, my response is to try to find more of the same.

Of course real life isn't a novel; to think that it is risks encouraging foolish decisions because they make dramatic sense. All that is surely true.

Still ... where do you suppose Ella and Anna ended up?

All my love, now and ever,
Your Hosea

Sent from my iPhone

Writing Marie, 2

Here is the letter I wrote Marie today. One thing I learned from my Working Out Loud circle is to start with some kind of contribution, something of value to the other person. I hope this counts.

Dear Marie:

Schmidt tells me you got my last letter, so I guess this address must be valid. Can you stand one more?

Thank you for introducing me to the writing of Dorothy Bryant. I don't think I ever said that before, which makes it long overdue as she has become -- belatedly -- one of my favorite authors. Part of what I love about her writing is that her stories are so hopeful, in a way that has nothing at all to do with the events of the plot. Anna Giardino is mugged; Booker Henderson flees into hiding; Mei-Li Murrow is trapped in a madhouse; India Wonder dies of cyanide poisoning; Ella Price abandons home and family on Christmas Eve and is last seen on the operating table; the Unnamed Narrator is sentenced to death. And yet, ... it's OK. For all of them, what happens is, in the end, somehow right and good. I'm not sure I know another writer of fiction who can stare so bravely into the face of desolation and misery, and find hope and value inside. Even her villains aren't exactly "villains" -- they're men like Willie Fortuna, who make stupid, destructive choices because they just don't get it; but the evil they do is almost a form of clumsiness rather than real malice.

I should qualify all that a little: it's hard to find anything hopeful in A Day in San Francisco. But even there she plays absolutely fair with her characters: Frank makes arguments that sound every bit as strong as Clara's. The only way to know that her arguments are better is to see it ... somehow. But at the same time it is easy to understand Frank thinking as he does.

Of course it is partly a matter of taste. I gave Son 2 a copy of Miss Giardino for Christmas last year, telling him it's one of my favorite books, and I don't think he saw much in it. Maybe he'll come back to it when he's older (he was 16 at the time) ... or maybe not.

In any event -- as I said -- I have to thank you for introducing me to her writing.

I've been hesitant to write you because I've been afraid you won't want to hear from me. Our correspondence has broken off several times in the past [once she wrote me to say flatly that she never wanted to hear from me again], and by now it has been years since we wrote each other. It's easy to imagine you looking at my last letter and this one in puzzlement, wondering "What the hell? After all this time? Aren't we done?"

And if that's your reaction, I wouldn't blame you. At the same time, from my side, I hope to hear back. One of the benefits (if you can call it that) of separating from Wife has been that I am able to see how thoroughly I abandoned my circle of friends. I'd like to repair some of the damage, if possible. And if you do write back, I promise to talk about more than just books.

At the same time, I don't want to be a pest. So let me offer you a deal. After sending you this letter (which, as noted, I have reason to think will arrive safely) I won't bother you again unless and until I hear back from you first. That way if I am being a pest, all you have to do to shut me up is fail to reply.

But if you are interested in renewing the conversation, I would love to hear from you. It doesn't have to be volumes: even a post card is enough to transmit what is (after all) one bit of information -- "Yes, keep writing" or "No, go away." As you can see from the envelope, my street address is: .... If surface mail doesn't appeal to you, my home e-mail address is: .... And my phone number is: .... That number accepts text messages as well as phone calls, but ASCII text only. My phone is too primitive to accept photos or colorful formatting.

I hope to hear a "ping" back from you, and I look forward to it eagerly. 

All the best, now, ever and always,
Hosea 

 

"Oh, Clara, interrupt me"

Clara nodded. “It seems incredible. A man of such talent. How could anyone so well-endowed be so self-destructive? It’s hard to believe.”

 

“Nonsense. You know better.” Arthur’s eyes were dry now, and his voice had regained its crisp, thrusting tone. “It’s the rule, not the exception. Thoreau was right – all men’s lives are failures. Oh, not yours. Maybe not mine. You do honest work. You serve life. But look at all the brilliant talents who’ve drunk themselves to death, or thrown away the work they were best at doing, or thrown away their energy on false crusades and called their means of self-destruction a sign of superiority. Larry did, almost to the end. Or how many take the opposite way out, like your parents, shut down and closed up, cringing to death? Why? Are they too afraid to live? Or too proud? Who knows? But it’s the rule, not the exception. Larry’s suicide was only more dramatic than most. Of all the seed, of all the fetuses, of all the infants, all the children, all the men and women … how few survive each stage and grow to the next, and how few of that few survive. Only a few, a tiny few beneficiaries of the right combination of genes and circumstances and decisions survive to become human beings. And of those few – oh, Clara, interrupt me, don’t let me go on ranting.”

 

Clara took his hand. “You need to grieve.”

 

“Not now. Enough for now. Don’t let me keep up this self-pitying, maundering – talk about something else. How’s your love life? Are you going to marry that nice boy, what’s his name? And is he old enough to vote yet?”

 

-– from Dorothy Bryant, A Day in San Francisco, pp. 70-71.

__________

 

Leo Strauss always used to insist that we mustn’t confuse the opinions of a character for the opinions of the author. So maybe Dorothy Bryant herself doesn’t believe this. More importantly, maybe it’s not true. Maybe.

 

 

Miss Giardino

For Christmas I gave Son 2 a copy of Dorothy Bryant's novel Miss Giardino.  When he unwrapped it and looked quizzically at me, I told him it was one of my favorite novels by one of my favorite authors.

Well, last night he told me "I finished Miss Giardino, but I'm not sure I really got the main point it was trying to make."  And I found myself trying to think, … Is there a point that it is trying to make?  Does the book have a moral, like Aesop's fables?  Or an underlying message about good and evil, like The Power and the Glory?  Why do I even like it so much?

I had thought about this a little off and on since giving it to him, because I figured the question might come up, but I didn't really have an answer.  I tried to improvise one now.

So in the first place, I said, I liked the main character, Anna Giardino herself.  Son 2 mentioned that in some ways she resembles Wife (though not in others) and I strongly agreed.  I explained that I had first read the book shortly after I met Wife, and that for many years I had seen Wife through the lens of Anna Giardino.  "Of course maybe that just means I was looking through rose-colored glasses," I went on, and we both laughed.  But then I clarified that it's true that the young Anna Giardino and the young Wife really did have a lot in common: a fierce dedication to teaching, a deep belief that only the best is really good enough, and a difficult relationship with their fathers.  Wife's father even died of emphysema, much as Signor Giardino died of a lung ailment from his work in the mines.  The differences between them (Wife and Miss Giardino) became strikingly apparent only in greater age.  But I went on to add that while you can usually look backwards and see that the features of one's mature character were present even at the beginning (as I noted in an earlier post, "You Can Kind of Tell These Things"), you can't read them forward.  The difference is that while those features are present early on, so are many others, all jumbled up in an inchoate mess.  It is only in the act of growing older that we each of us make hundreds of decisions over the years which end in strengthening some features of our personalities and weakening others.  You can't tell ahead of time which ones will win out.

But this was a digression.  I also like the story.  I like that there are no real villains – well, except maybe Willie Ventura.  But the mugger who attacked Anna turns out to have done her a great service by it; and she – in turn – helped him just as much.  (I won't explain how, so as not to spoil it if you want to read it.)  Some of the characters are funny – I instanced Arno Steadman.  ("I thought he was just a self-centered ass," said Son 2.  "Yes, but he is so totally a self-centered ass that there is really something comical about him.")  Indeed, the near-absence of villains is something I see in a lot of Dorothy Bryant's fiction: the characters may do stupid or destructive things, but rarely because they are villains; more often it is just that they are trying to do the only thing they can understand but their understanding is limited.

I like her relation with Stephen Tatarin.  Son 2 asked, "You mean her kind-of lover-boy-ish sort of thing?"  And I tried to explain that at its best the teacher-student relationship really is intense and deeply personal … usually not erotic per se (though there is a kind of quasi-erotic energy about it – I didn't tell him that!) but powerful all the same.  I added that if he hasn't experienced that yet, he probably will some time before (say) he graduates from college.  At any rate, I hope so.

And I like the ending – that after so many things go so sourly in her life, Anna Giardino can pick herself up, turn away from the past (rather than being weighed down by it), and move forward bravely into an uncharted future.  Though I didn't say so, I sometimes see this phase of my own life in the light of that last chapter, as a new turning of my own.  And while I'm not willing to be as unencumbered as Anna, I keep her in mind as a model.

I saw an article somewhere that claimed the defining feature of this whole book is its anger – the anger that builds up in Anna over so many years, the anger that finally comes spilling out at the climax of the dramatic action.  I never saw the book in those terms.  Anger?  Yes, I suppose so, now that I think about it.  But it's as if I never thought about it before.  I wonder why not?  Am I simply blind to the anger?  Or is it because Anna's anger is so much like what I have experienced over so many years that I just never noticed it?  A fish reading Moby-Dick probably wouldn't think to comment on the sea, either.  Maybe that's it.  But if so, the redemption in the last chapter is just that much more hopeful.

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.
 

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.

Why did I marry Wife?

I've been reading Ella Price's Journal (OK, yes, I'm kind of bingeing on Dorothy Bryant) and just finished it last night.  If you know the book you may remember that at the end what finally drives Ella over the edge is that she realizes that Joe (her husband) needs her to be weak and sick so that he can fill the role of caretaker for her.  She comes to understand that this is the nature of the (implicit) bargain they struck when they married: she would feel emotions for him (so he didn't have to) and he would take care of her (because she was a neurotic mess).

I got to that part and I had a hard time going forward to finish the last couple of pages.

Because of course that's Wife and me: not 100% exactly, but in large part.  Why would I ever have married someone that I already knew was a neurotic mess?  What did I get out of it?  Well, looking at us as we were back then through the lenses of Ella Price, I can see I got several things:

• From very young, I had always felt weak and shy.  I was terrified to assert myself.  But Wife's illnesses -- physical and mental -- allowed me to be strong. 
  
  I found I could be as strong as I had to be ... really, no matter how much that was ... if I was supporting Wife because she had collapsed. 
  
  I had no time for shyness when I was calling doctor's offices to insist that she had to be seen, or when I was calling insurance companies to demand that they honor the terms of our policy. 
  
  I had no trouble asserting myself when I was telling pharmacies that I didn't care if they were about to close and there were six people ahead of me in line, but by God they were going to fill this scrip for morphine (even though it's a controlled substance that generates a lot of paperwork) because my wife was back home in agonizing pain; or when I was calling hospitals to tell them that yes, I was aware we owed them a gazillion dollars, and yes, I was aware they could take us to court over it, but they were going to have to settle for a payment plan and going to court wouldn't get them their money any faster because you can't squeeze blood from a stone. 
    
• There is also something in that other point too, but it's more subtle -- I mean, the point that Joe married Ella so she could feel for him and he wouldn't have to.  It wasn't exactly like that: I had plenty of deep feelings, and they ranged from exuberant highs to pitch-dark lows.  What I had trouble with was allowing myself to express those feelings.  I think that's why I was attracted to dramatic, flamboyant, "high-maintenance" women ... even in college, to say nothing of Wife and D.  Being with them allowed me to express my feelings, to admit to them.  Maybe, finally, it might even have taught me how to talk about them, though I won't place a lot of money on that last.  (It's possible that I learned whatever I know about it by writing for you.)

I know there were other reasons too.  At one point I made a list of about eight of them.  I don't have it with me now, but I'll find it one day and I can use it to flesh out this post with a Part Two.  And like with any big decision, the reasons span the whole range from subconscious psychological motivations to grand romantic ones.  There was romance there, too.  Once upon a time.  So this post is to be continued.  Still, I was struck hard by those last few pages, and wanted to record them before I forgot.
 

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 ....

Non, je ne regrette rien

I finished Confessions of Madame Psyche this morning.  Like all of Dorothy Bryant's fiction it is detailed, intelligent, ... and a kind of spiritual education without the pretension to call itself that.  On the last page, the main character reflects on all she has been through, with a calm and a self-possession that I would love -- some day -- to be able to imitate or approach:

A woman comes to sit by Lower Lake every day at exactly three o'clock.  She carries an old-fashioned windup record player and one record, Edith Piaf singing Non, je ne regrette rien....

I regret nothing.  It is a brave, wise song which I can now sing by heart and which I try to think of whenever I remember any part of my life as an injury or a deprivation.  I regret nothing.  Especially not the injuries, errors, and accidents which drove me to despair.

If I had not been pushed to the end of my rope, I don't know that I would have fallen, ever, into the reality that has given my life form and meaning....  If I had been rescued from even a little bit of that suffering, I might have been able to go on without changing, like a sleep-walker in a nightmare, wandering blindly, flailing in all directions with yearning and pain and fear.  I was saved from that life, but at a price.  The price was everything, and worth everything.

No, I regret nothing. 

 

"That thing"

As I mentioned in a couple of previous posts, I'm currently reading Dorothy Bryant's Confessions of Madame Psyche, a novel set largely in the San Francisco area in the first half of the twentieth century about a young girl who stumbles into an early career as a fraudulent psychic but who then runs away from that life and ... things happen to her.  I suppose in a sense it is a modern Bildungsroman, except it covers her whole life and not just her childhood.  But hey – education (Bildung) is supposed to be lifelong if you do it right, isn't it?

Anyway, one of the things that happens to Mei-Li Murrow, the half-Chinese protagonist, is a totally unexpected mystical experience as she sits on the beach one day, an experience in which the daylight suddenly seems to shoot through her and suffuse her in orgasmic waves of energy, and in which everything she sees on the beach – the dog playing in the surf and then shaking his fur dry when he comes back to the shore, the fisherman standing there casting and reeling and casting and reeling over and over, the children intently building a sand castle – all suddenly appear intensely beautiful and deeply meaningful.  And then it passes, of course, and the world goes back to being the world.  Except it doesn't, quite, because the memory of that event sticks with her ever after, and starts affecting everything else she does (such as prompting her to bail out of the psychic racket even though she has just then reached the point where she is about to make serious money at it).

If you know any of Dorothy Bryant's other work, this scene won't surprise you.  I think she has used that kind of experience in only one other book – The Kin of Ata Are Waiting For You – but if you know any of Dorothy Bryant's work you probably know Kin of Ata.  And if you know Kin of Ata it will be no surprise to you that this experience doesn't suddenly make everything in Mei-Li's life all better.  She sees it, she knows it is there, she knows it is possible ... and she goes right on making the same ham-fisted choices in her life that she made before, with the same kinds of unexpected (and mostly unwelcome) consequences.  She even needles herself about it – "Why did I do or say this or that mean / petty / bitter / spiteful thing, when I should know better ... when I should remember that there is a glory in the world that makes all meanness and pettiness unnecessary?"  But knowing better doesn't stop her.

The same way it doesn't for most of us, come to that.

It's an interesting idea to see pursued in a story: How does this kind of experience (which any number of people must have had from time to time) get incorporated into one's life?  And it is refreshing to see Bryant not handle it simplistically, as if having the heavens open for you suddenly makes all your problems go away.  Because I assume that it never does, at any rate outside of didactic propaganda or moralizing hagiography.  So, ... what then?  Does it help you to live any better at all, or does it just help you to be dissatisfied with yourself without helping you to change?

I haven't finished the book, so I don't know Mei-Li's answer.  (Well, I've skimmed ahead the way I do impatiently in all books; but I won't say anything here because I'm sure I haven't picked up the whole picture.)  And I've never had that kind of mystical revelation myself, so I can't speak from personal experience.  I suppose the closest I've come to experiencing "that thing" (Mei-Li's name for it) is maybe two different things.  One is what I called "the Voice" in a post a couple years ago, when I talked about the quiet that I would hear in my head after I had finished shouting at God for Wife's most recent damned-foolish short-sighted betrayal (whatever it was that time), and the quiet would almost be shaped like words, or like an answer.  The other is the experience I used to have in Full Moon circles, back when Wife was a practising Wiccan priestess, when the officiating priest would call a god or goddess (usually goddess) into her body and she would go around the circle speaking to each of us in turn ... only it was plainly not Wife looking out through her eyes or speaking with her voice.  Other than those two experiences, I think my life has been pretty mundane – certainly I've felt nothing like Mei-Li's orgasmic waves of light – but it's true that those have been enough for me to trust that there's Something More to the world than it looks like at first.

In fairness, I should add also that I would never have listened for the first of those if I hadn't already experienced the second.  That is, I would never have thought to yell at God over Wife's latest outrage – much less listen to the silence that came afterwards, when I finally stopped yelling – had I not earlier had the experience of speaking viva voce to Demeter or Hestia or Cerridwen (usually Cerridwen) in my living room or back yard, through the mechanism of the Wiccan ritual that allowed Her to use Wife's body.  In that respect, I owe to Wife my knowledge that the world is larger than it looks.  Like Sara Teasdale says in the poem on my sidebar, for some things you should "count many a year of strife well-lost."  Teasdale's "white shining hour of peace" is probably closer to Mei-Li's orgasmic waves of light than to anything I've experienced, but I'll take what I can get.  And therefore, for all my snotty-nosed whining, my marriage to Wife may still turn out – in a very odd calculation – to have been a net positive.  Sorry, this whole paragraph has been one long parenthesis.  Where was I?

I was saying that I haven't experienced the kind of vision Mei-Li say, but I've seen something; and I was about to ask if it made any difference in my life.  The short answer is: not enough, but maybe some.  By "not enough" I mean mostly that I'm still far from wise; and wouldn't it be nice if the awareness of a reality beyond surface appearances made us all wise?  On the other hand, for one example, I think I owe to this awareness my comparative nonchalance over the concept of failure.  I wasn't always able to be relaxed about failure.  You can read plenty of posts in this blog where I've whined about failure of one kind or another.  But finally I began to think about it differently.  After all, if there is a whole layer of reality behind the one that we see every day, and if there's anything valuable about that layer (which I can tell that there is just by feeling it, when I see it), then at any rate that means that the ordinary scale of values that we are used to in the workaday world isn't the only scale.  It also makes it look a little bit more like the things we do every day are a kind of game, or a play, in which I just happen to have been assigned this role and you just happen to have been assigned that one.  Well OK then, if there are multiple scales of value I don't have to feel too bad when I get my high school alumni bulletin and hear that guys I went to school with – guys I thought I was smarter than – have just been appointed to the state superior court after many years as partner in a firm that does extensive pro bono work for the poor, or own a technology startup whose market capitalization just hit forty-nine gazillion dollars, or just sailed alone around the world.  (I made up that last one, but not the other two.)  Yes, these achievements demonstrate virtues it would be nice to have; no, I don't begrudge them their congratulations.  But one way or another it just so happens that I was dealt one hand and they were dealt others.  I got one role and they got others.  It happens.

Sorry, I realize on re-reading that last paragraph that it drips with envy.  That wasn't how I meant to write it.  That it came out so makes me think there is still a level in which my emotions haven't moved beyond envying my classmates, beyond thinking that I "really shoulda done something better with my life."  Fair enough, but my emotions can be stupid.  My mind understands that my classmates and I really were carrying around different virtues from the get-go.  I got a lot of praise in high school for being smart and doing well in my classes.  But success in the real world requires other virtues far more than it requires intelligence – virtues like energy, determination, vision, and a knack for making good decisions.  Me?  Sure, I'm smart.  But depression saps my energy (even when the depression is medicated, which it long wasn't), I dither over things, and I have (like one of our ex-Presidents) trouble with "the vision thing".  As for good decisions, ... well, I married Wife didn't I?  You tell me.

This post has evolved in a direction totally different from anywhere I thought it was going to go when I started writing it.  And actually, it is starting to bleed into another one that I got the idea for Friday night, as I read the latest Atlantic Monthly over dinner.  So maybe it's time to end this one and start that one.  Then I'd better get dinner going, if I expect to eat it tonight, because it's going to take a couple of hours.  Either that or go do my laundry ....

Happy Easter!

It's been a beautiful Sunday of doing very little.  The day has been clear and blue and warm, and I was careful to get all my bill-paying and apartment-cleaning and grocery-shopping done yesterday – didn't get to the laundry, but that can wait.  So this morning I got up, put together an Easter pie for breakfast, popped it in the overn to bake, meditated for half an hour or so, made some coffee, ... and then ate pie and drank coffee in a lazy way while reading and watching the sun and breeze play with the trees outside my window. 

After a couple of hours I changed books, picked up a hat and a walking stick, and ventured out.  A short walk brought me to a little blink-and-you-miss-it enclave of urban woodland, an enclave I discovered only within the last year on one of my walks around my new neighborhood.  The spot is so well hidden that I never knew it before, even though for the first four years we lived in this city Wife and I had an apartment no more than a mile away.  But we never had any idea.

So I sat reading in the shade of a couple large trees, for – oh gosh, I suppose it must have been another couple of hours – feeling the breeze and waving once when a young family strolled past.  When I came to the end of a major section in my book – I'm reading Dorothy Bryant's Confessions of Madame Psyche and just got to the point in 1930 where she is evicted from the campground in the woods where she had tried to establish a commune – I picked up my book and my stick and went walking some more, down past some of the better-known scenic spots in town where I sat and contentedly watched the day go past.  Then I strolled back to my apartment, rested some more, and finally decided it was time to write a couple of posts for the blog.  But I'll break off in another hour and a half or so to make dinner ... I've found a recipie that looks tasty on the page so I want to see how it comes off in reality.  

Actually after a few weeks of eating very simply – I was trying to savce money in the aftermath of my trip to Peru – I've been cooking a lot lately.  I probably could have gotten by this week on leftovers and salad without needing to cook still more.  But hell – it's Easter, right?  I'll cook some more, for the sheer fun of it as much as for the food, and then I'll have lots to hold me for the week without having to allocate time in the evenings to do anything more than re-heat.  It would be nice to have somebody to cook for, but even if it's just me I'd rather cook than not cook.  Not every night, perhaps, because my love of cooking vies with my laziness or poor planning to see who will win out on any given night.  But it's a gift I give myself on hplidays.

Happy Easter, all.

Hosea meets Ella Price

A week ago I griped about how I don't like work, and about how updating this blog looks and feels like work.  Sounds like the logical place to go from there would be to stop updating, wouldn't it?

But maybe I need to think about it a little longer before I let myself do that.

A couple weeks ago, ... or something like that, I don't quite remember when ... I went on-line impulsively and ordered a bunch of books by Dorothy Bryant. (Incidentally, if you don't recognize the name you should run, not walk, to your favorite place for ordering books -- be it an on-line site or a real-live store -- and get anything you can find by her.)  For years I had read only two of her books: Miss Giardino and The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You.  I kept telling myself that "some day" I would buy some of the others, and so a couple weeks ago I ordered a bunch of them.  They have started dribbling in, and while I am well into one of the novels (Confessions of Madame Psyche) I have been riffling through the other books as they arrive.

One of these is her very first book, Ella Price's Journal.  It purports to be the daily journal of a middle-aged woman who goes back to school and takes a writing class which requires that the students write something every day.  She does it because she is supposed to, and of course the journal records how she changes as she pursues her education.

But the whole point of keeping the journal, in the context of the story, is that it's a vehicle to help you think.  By writing down whatever happens to be going through your head, you unfold it and see things in it you didn't see before.

This is hardly a surprise.  In some ways it is just what I said when I first started this blog back in December of 2007.  It is similar to the explanation I have often heard for why to meditate, viz., that just by sitting still and being quiet you allow yourself to hear the ranting going on in your head that you'd been ignoring up till now.  And it's borne out by an exercise my current therapist had me try recently, in response to a good-bye letter I got from Debbie.  (More on that in my next post, I guess.)

The only thing is that these reflections make my whining about "work" sound a little childish.  If the whole point is to help you think, then choosing not to write means ... what, choosing not to think?  Sure, I can do that.  Booze would help too, come to that.  Only somehow I have to wonder if that's really the direction I want to go.  Have I done all the thinking I need to do these days?  Do I understand everything I need to understand?  Well, I don't so much care about understanding my relationship with Wife any more, because I don't really have one (or not much of one).  That's why I started writing in the first place.  But I do have to admit there are things I don't understand yet.  I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, for one.  And the prospect of never knowing is kind of unattractive.  My father has never figured out what he wants to be, and he's 78.  He has spent the last two or three decades dithering unproductively, and at this time he spends most of his time either trading jokes online with his old Army buddies or attending seminars on how to get rich quick by selling insurance.  It's a little pathetic.  So maybe that's not where I want to end up.

And this leaves me with the thought that maybe, just maybe, I should get my ass back in gear and start posting regularly.  Not necessarily about this or that -- not necessarily about anything -- but just forcing my mind to push my thoughts through my fingertips and out onto the screen. 

It would be a lot more restful to kick back and forget it all, but it's probably not a good idea.  Well, hell.  

And so to bed

It’s hard to believe it has been only a week and a half since Debbie and I got naked together.  So much has changed, so fast.  There must be something magical about sex.

It was Saturday.  I was over at her place, reading her Dorothy Bryant’s Miss Giardino, a book I really enjoy.  We were sitting on her sofa side by side, taking time out every few paragraphs to kiss. 

After a while the kissing got more heated and more intense.  When we stopped for breath, Debbie said, “Maybe we had better go for a walk” … but neither of us made the slightest move to get up.  I asked her when she would feel comfortable about going farther – about fucking, except I didn’t put it that way to her.  After all, I don’t expect to be legally divorced.  And I have no idea when Wife and I will live under separate roofs.  As a practising lay Buddhist, Debbie is bound by rules prohibiting sexual immorality; but she understands those rules to mean "Do no harm," and it's not like she could possibly be responsible for breaking up Wife and me.  Debbie said that if it’s going to be only a little while till I moved out, she’d rather wait; but if it will be a long while, then no.

At this point I got a text from Son 1 telling me he had just finished taking the SAT.  Debbie suggested I call him.  I didn’t really want to let go of her, so I said he could wait a minute.

She thought some more.

Then finally, slowly, she said, “I think … I think I’d like us to move into the bedroom. But first I’d like you to call Son 1.”

Hallelujah.

I called Son 1.  He hadn’t really expected me to call, but we chit-chatted for a minute before he wanted to go off and do something else anyway.  So Debbie and I moved into her bedroom.

Is it just my experience, or is there always something a little awkward about that moment when the two of you have first decided that you are going to fuck, but you haven’t yet and you face each other alone and fully dressed?  Admittedly my experience isn’t very wide (you can cross-reference here), but it seems that way.  So we stood there for what was probably half a second (but felt like a couple of minutes) figuring out, What now?

Debbie asked, “Shall we undress each other?”  Yes.  Let’s do that.  And let me add that Debbie has a lovely body.

Yes, she’s fifty-eight; and yes, you can see it in her face and hands.  Age wrinkles all of us there.  Even D, you will recall, had deep wrinkles in her face.

But the skin beneath her clothing is smooth and soft and creamy; her breasts are surprisingly firm (much firmer than D’s); her nipples are small, light pink, and seem always at attention; her pubic hair is light golden brown with not a streak of grey.  Could it be this way with all women in their late fifties – I mean, that they look older on the outside but have the bodies of women twenty years younger?  Or have I just been incredibly lucky with D and Debbie?  Either way, I’m not going to analyze it too much.  Nor complain.

But I couldn’t get hard.  Not at all.  Not that day, and not the next when I came back and we spent a few more hours in bed.  Oh, I think I got a little hard at one point but it lasted only a few minutes.  But other than that, … nothing.  I tried not to be embarrassed.  I told Debbie it was probably just shyness … that I had reason to think this was normal when I was with someone new for the first time.  (I wasn’t sure how much to tell her about my time with D, although as the days have passed we have both shared stories about prior lovers so it turned out to be OK.)  Debbie worried that she was doing something wrong, that she was not giving me the cues I needed somehow.  (Apparently this was a big problem with her second husband: that he consistently misread her sexual cues and gave her none of his own.)  But no, it wasn’t that.  My dick just refused to engage.

For her part, I’m not sure that Debbie ever came, either.  She breathed heavily but there was none of the volcanic convulsion that I learned to expect from D’s orgasms.  Debbie told me she was already pleased she could respond as far as she did – that she had feared she wouldn’t respond at all because it had been so long since she had fucked anyone.  (I still don’t know how long “so long” is, but apparently her sex life with her second husband came to an end not long after their daughter was born. And the daughter is now in graduate school.)  And she was full of praise for how skilled she thought I was.  I can’t think of anything I did that exhibited any great skill; just used my tongue and fingers in ways I learned from my time with D.  But Debbie was very happy.  And after a couple of hours, she told me she had memorized a poem for me, and recited it:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice --
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do --
determined to save
the only life you could save.

If you measure sex by an orgasm count, the weekend wasn’t much.  But it was our first time lying together, skin to skin, and starting to explore each other’s bodies.  And by that measure it was perfect heaven.