Political failure (conversation in Paris)

[I'm writing this on December 20 and 21, but back-dating it to shortly after my and Marie's return from Paris. I hope this won't be too confusing. But I assume that in reality nobody is reading this blog anyway, so why not?]

Here was another of our rare discussions of politics. Like this one back in January (which might have been the most recent one before this), it was fueled by alcohol. After exploring the heart of Paris during Day 3, Marie and I had dinner in an Italian restaurant near our hotel and split a bottle of wine. Actually we split a bottle of wine most evenings, but somehow this time I let it get the better of me.

[I should add that my notes for the day were jotted down briefly just before we went to bed, so they are rather scattered. I will do my best to draw them into a coherent narrative, but please be charitable.]

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.

        

Love is blind, love is kind

In the course of talking about things, Marie and I have talked about my earlier lovers and I have shown her some of the poems I wrote for D. So naturally enough, at one point Marie said she was feeling wistful that I had so idealized D early in that relationship, whereas Marie didn't feel that I'd ever much idealized her. (Although note this letter here.)

Of course she and I met almost forty years ago. Our honeymoon period was long ago. So we talked some more, and after a while Marie saw it the same way too. And then after a little while she sent me a poem about it. (Among other things in this poem, she picked up on a story I had told her about D: that on our twelfth date, as I was reading her Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I realized that she hadn't heard a single word I'd said for several chapters but was just enjoying the sensuous feel of listening to my voice. In a sense it was flattering, but I was also kind of irked because I had wanted to discuss the ideas.)

She and I have gotten to the point where we can collaborate on poetry: either of us can point to a rough spot in the other's poem and suggest improvements. So we talked about this one, smoothing out this and rewording that, for almost three weeks. And finally came up with a version that I really like. (To be clear, I really liked the very first version. But this one is better.) 

All men assent to this:  that Love is blind;

That lovers can’t discern’s a common jest.

Yet men might better say that Love is kind,

That Love’s eyes open only to the best.

And so a man whose shoulders spoke of strength,

I admir’d as self-disciplined and kind.

So when a woman let you speak at length,

You trusted to have found a fellow mind.

But no; she craved your voice and not your thought.

And no; he trained his body, not his soul.

Though first we saw but virtues, and we fought

‘Gainst seeing flaws, that with strengths make the whole.

Yet we each other’s failings long did know,

Our vision clear though colored by Love’s glow.



  

Being enlightened doesn't make you right

The last few days I've been reading Mark Richardson's Zen and Now, a retrospective and commentary on Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Actually I bought the book a while ago -- I no longer remember quite when -- but never finished it; and lately I've been browsing through it at random in the mornings instead of getting to work on time. Slovenly habit.

 

This morning I lighted on a paragraph where Richardson describes Pirsig's hospitalization for schizophrenia, an episode which Bob Pirsig himself described as "hard enlightenment". His wife Nancy commented that no-one who knew Bob -- besides Bob himself -- confused his mental illness with enlightenment. But she went on to say that she understood why he did. After all, once he had decided that he was enlightened, he no longer had to take seriously anybody else's contrary opinions. If she ever disagreed with him about anything he would no longer argue ... just stare her down and then walk away, because after all he was enlighteed and she wasn't. So of course she couldn't be expected to understand why he was -- inescapably -- right.

 

Yeah, I get it too. It's a great solace to tell yourself that you are deep enough and smart enough to see into the true nature of things, while the trolls around you toil away in muddy confusion. But that's just a story ... one more of the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world, one more of the stories which enchant us and intoxicate us if we take them too seriously. It's just one more form of delusion, subtly masquerading as freedom from delusion.

 

The point is that enlightenment is an experience. It can be a profound experience, like orgasm. But it doesn't make you God. Though you see deeply into the nature of reality, that everything changes, that attachment brings suffering, and all the rest ... none of that helps you remember any more clearly whose turn it is to take out the garbage. None of it helps you know what to say to your kid's teacher, who has called a conference because your kid is acting up in class. None of it makes you a better husband, or father, or employee, or friend. None of it makes you right. It's just an experience.

 

There are ways to build on it, of course. There are ways to build on all our experiences. If you wake up one morning to find yourself enlightened, there are libraries full of advice on how to live now: how to be compassionate, how to tell the truth, how to pick your way through the day without stumbling or falling back asleep. But, like anything, it takes practice.

 

That part is less exciting, of course. But without it, enlightenment is just another intoxicant.

 

 

 

 

Comfort

Some time last week, before he went back to Wife's, Son 2 and I had a conversation about "comfort".  Specifically, he expressed some puzzlement that it is so terribly important to Wife to be comfortable.  She spends a large part of many days trying to get warm or to get cool, trying to palliate a headache or soothe a sore throat, ... trying to do anything to make herself more comfortable.  Son 2 says that he has asked her why, because he figures on his side that comfort is no big deal.  Sure, it's nice and all ... but it's way down there on his list of priorities.  I don't know how directly he challenges her on this point, but my own recollection is that trying to explain any other point of view to her is like speaking Chinese: it is so impossible for her to understand it that either she doesn't hear the question at all or she assumes you mean something else.

But yesterday while I was lolling around poking through books and wasting time, I ran across the following quote:  "Physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten onto whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much."  (Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, p. 27)

So is that the point?  That Wife's quest for comfort is really just a symptom of her chronic unhappiness?  It seems very likely ....

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 ....

I want my medal

Walking along with this [doll] Phaedrus felt as if the two of them were sharing this experience, as though he were back in childhood again and this were some imaginary companion. Little children talk to dolls and grown-up adults talk to idols. He supposed that a doll allows a child to pretend he's a parent while an idol allows a parent to pretend he's a child.

He reflected on this for a while and then his mind framed a question: ... he asked the idol [doll], "... What would you say to all this [everything that has happened in the story up till then]?"

He listened for a long time .... Then after a while into his thoughts came a voice that did not seem to be his own.

"All this is a happy ending." ....

"Then why do I feel so bad about it?" Phaedrus asked.

"You're just waiting for your medal," the idol [doll] answered. "You think maybe they're going to turn around and come back and hand you a citation for merit."

Excerpted from Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, by Robert M. Pirsig, pp. 402-403
__________

This passage popped into my head while I was fixing dinner tonight. I was thinking about all the craziness I have endured from Wife over the years -- some stories I have told you, and many stories I have never gotten around to telling. I was thinking about the turns my life has made because I was married to her, and how it could have gone in such very different directions if I hadn't been. And I reminded myself that I made all these decisions on purpose: marrying her because I sensed there was something I needed in my life that maybe I could get from her, and because she so plainly needed the love and stability I thought I could give her; and then sticking with her because it was the right thing to do, because in marrying her I had made a moral commitment. Did I know that choosing this meant giving up that? ... in this case, that choosing to stay with her meant giving up a career where I know I could have shone (scholarship) and (maybe, just maybe) a more invigorating, more mobile life? Sure I did; to a greater or lesser extent, at any rate. But that's what a moral commitment means, isn't it? If something is right, then you give up other things to stick to it and count yourself lucky to do so. After all, the things you are giving up are less important, less valuable, than doing what's right. Isn't that how it is supposed to be? Isn't that what we always hear?

And I suppose in a sense it is even true. Spend long enough at any hard job, and you will get something out of it through the sheer discipline of coming back again day after day and working at it. My marriage has been no different. Sure, I have learned things I wouldn't have learned otherwise. Sure it has shaped me ... "built character" as the saying has it.

Only, sometimes I wish someone were going to come along and give me a medal for it. Because there are these moments of doubt, when I think, "Throwing your life away on something worthless may build character, but in the end the struggle is still worthless. Is this what you have done?" If God were watching, and if I could be sure that in the end He was going to give me a medal for hanging in there all those years, it would make it easier to be calm about it all in retrospect.

Of course, I know this is absolutely the wrong attitude to take. In the first place there is nothing I can do about the past anyway, so fretting over what might have been is a complete waste of time. In the second place, I know that the healthiest thing for the soul is to cultivate an entirely different sort of attitude. Whatever comes next -- whether that means tomorrow (in this world), or a lifetime from now (in the next) -- the best way to face it is with a soul that is free, calm, attentive, and curious, one that looks forward with hope and not backward with despair. Disappointment, anger, bitterness over the past, ... all of these things are snares. They weaken the soul, make it less healthy and less able to deal with new situations when they arise. So whether there is another life or world beyond this one -- or not! -- it is completely counterproductive to obsess over what happened back then that I cannot change. Better far to shake free of all that baggage and look ahead. That's the real reason forgiveness is so important. It's not just that is important to those who wronged you, because it lets them off the hook. But far more is it important to you yourself, because letting them off the hook also unhooks you. Without forgiveness, you are trapped by all the anger and bitterness you feel towards them. Without forgiveness, you can't forget. Without forgiveness, you carry around a bigger and bigger past wherever you go. And the bigger your past, the less room you have for a future. So without forgiveness, you close off your own access to a future of freedom -- a future whose shape you can never know till you get there, a future you can never enter unless you are willing to adapt to new ways and new things, a future you can never enter without looking forward in hope and curiosity. I already know all this. I already know I should simply abandon what has failed in the past, and press forward.

I still want my medal.

Thoughts on failure 2, Pancho Piquet

The following is from Robert Pirsig's book Lila:
__________

"Here's to Pancho Piquet."

"Who is Pancho Piquet?" she asked.

"The carpentero de ribera. He was an old Cuban. He spoke Spanish so fast even the Mexicans had trouble understanding him. Looked like Boris Karloff. Didn't look Cuban or Mexican at all.

"But he was the fastest carpenter I've ever seen," the Captain said. "And careful too. He never slowed down, even in that jungle heat. We didn't have any electricity but he could work faster with hand tools than most people do with power tools. He was in his fifties or sixties and I was twenty-something. He used to smile that Boris Karloff smile watching me try to keep up with him."

"So why are we drinking to him?" Lila asked.

"Well, they warned me, 'El tome!' He drinks! And so he did," the Captain said.

"One night a big Norte, a norther, blew in off the Gulf of Mexico and it blew so hard... Oh, it was a big wind! Almost bent the palm trees to the ground. And it took the roof off his house and carried it away.

"But instead of fixing it he got drunk and stayed drunk for more than a month. After a couple weeks his wife had to come begging for money for food. That was so sad. I think partly he got drunk because he knew everything was going wrong and the boat would never get built. And that was true. I ran out of money and had to quit."

"So that's why we're drinking to him?" Lila said.

"Yeah, he was sort of a warning," the Captain said, "Also, he just opened my eyes a little to something. A feeling, for what the tropics is really like. All this talk about going to Florida and Mexico brought him back to mind."

"What do you want to go back there for?" she said.

"I don't know. There's always that feeling of despair from there. I can feel it now just thinking about it. 'Tristes tropiques,' the anthropologist, Levi-Strauss, called it. It keeps pulling you back, somehow. Mexicans know what I mean. There's always this feeling that this sadness is the real truth about things and it's better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up north."
__________

While you are at it, you might be interested in this comment posted to some discussion site, commenting on the very same passage.

Pornography and erotic madness

About a week and a half ago, D called my attention to this article in the Atlantic Monthly, about pornography. It's a good article; and even if you don't have the slightest interest in anything I have to say next, I recommend you take a few minutes and read it. D wrote me, "Much of what today's article said I slowly agreed with, but none of it is very comforting or flattering or makes me feel great about sex. Much of it is repugnant and disagreeable. Sigh." At that point I had not seen it at all, nor even heard of it yet. But I figured I had to look it up. Anything that can make D feel bad about sex must be pretty powerful stuff.

What follows is based upon the thoughts that I sent her back in response, once I had read it.

There are two things that caught my notice on the very surface of the article, right away: both are important. One I like, the other not. What I like is that the author makes it very clear that the huge growth of Internet porn doesn't mean anything fundamentally new. So many people have written easy diatribes, either against the new technology (because we were all so purer in the old days) or against those wicked pornographers who are spoiling sex for the rest of us (because we would all have purer desires without Bob Guccione and Larry Flynt). This author, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, by contrast, makes it crystal clear that "The fault, dear Horatio, lies not in our web servers but in ourselves." The Internet has made it possible for people to access things they couldn't reach before, but there wouldn't be that much porn out there if a lot of people didn't want it.

What I dislike is how often Vargas-Cooper reduces the discussion to a focus on men's sexual response, men's desires, men's aggression. Is there an aggressive component in male sexual response? You bet! Absolutely true. Can it push a normal, inoffensive nebbish of a guy into brutal or degrading actions that would horrify him once he was back in his right mind again? Sure thing. We all know this. But is it really so very different with women? Here I have to pause a minute. Now obviously I'm not a woman, so I can't speak with first-hand authority about female sexual response. But Vargas-Cooper herself makes it clear between the lines that whatever it is "women want" -- even if it does turn out to be different from what men want in some ways -- is nonetheless not "nice," not "refined," not "dignified," not "cultivated," not anything of the kind. Whether it is in some details the same as or different from what men want, it has the possibility of being (in any event) just as nasty, dirty, elemental, and savage. She says this explicitly when she remarks that, "If a woman thinks of the best sex she’s had in her life, she’s often thinking of this kind of sex ["extreme", "raw", "unpracticed", "beyond our control"], and while it may be the best sex in her life, it’s not the sex she wants to have throughout her life — or more accurately, it’s not the sex she’d have with the man with whom she’d like to spend her life. " More intriguingly, Vargas-Cooper makes the same point even when she is trying to make the opposite one. She says, for example, that Internet porn (the extreme, degrading stuff) appeals "overwhelmingly" to men. Her proof is that men make up two-thirds of all porn viewers. Two-thirds is overwhelming? Let's do a little math. Right at the beginning of the article, she says that in January 2010 -- one month -- almost 60 million people visited a pornographic website. If two-thirds of them were men, that means that one-third of them -- that's 20 million -- were women. If 20 million women in the United States are viewing Internet porn in a single month, ... gosh, that sounds like a pretty big sample to me. So maybe it's not just men who get off on the crude stuff.

But what's important is not cavilling about little points like this one. What is truly important is to try to understand just what is going on here. How is it possible that sex -- the blessed gift of golden Aphrodite, that softens the sternest soul and brings beauty and joy and song into the world -- how is it possible that this very divine gift can be so aggressive, so brutal, so degrading? And note that I am not asking about perversions of sex -- we all know that anything originally good can be spoiled by evil. That's the whole point of the story of Lucifer. But Vargas-Cooper is clear-eyed enough to brook no confusion over the fact that it can sometimes be the nastiest sex that is the most enticing. So what does this say about us? Are we ourselves incurably corrupt? Are we somehow in our nature attracted to evil? That's certainly one legitimate reading, and it seems to be the one D was mulling in her remarks that I quoted above.

But I think there is another way to approach the question, and it appeals to me for a couple of non-intellectual reasons. One is that I enjoy paradox; another is that it is kind of fun to run smack dab against any kind of received wisdom. So this approach starts by admitting everything Vargas-Cooper says, but then also noting that -- as we all know from first-hand experience -- sex can be very good. It can even (sometimes) approach to the highest good human beings are able to experience. It is important not to forget this fact. And things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

Therefore: If, on the one hand, sex is (or can be, at certain times and under certain conditions) brutal and dirty and degrading; ...

And if, on the other hand, sex can also be very very good; ...

Then surely it follows that [somehow, in ways we don't understand] what is brutal and degrading can be [sometimes, in some respects, from some points of view, with other qualifiers that we don't even know yet or can't think of right now] good.

If I were to repeat that without all the cotton batting in my mouth, it would come out as: what is brutal and degrading can nonetheless be good.

D was really unhappy with this conclusion, at any rate when I stated it so baldly. She talked about obvious examples of human degradation like the concentration camps as clear examples that were not good. Coming back to sex, she added, "I might disagree with your assertion that brutality does not leave a mark on one’s psyche and character; I deal with too many rape victims at my school to accept that assertion. And of course, rape is a form of sexuality; it cannot be labeled only ‘violence and a desire for power’, although has elements of both apart from sexuality. Rape and other forms of brutal sexuality can be devastating, and not just to children."

Well of course I never meant to deny any of that. To say that a few very special brutal things can also sometimes turn out to be somehow good in some special way is not at all the same as saying that all brutal or degrading things are always good, always simply good, or good without further qualification. That latter would be crazy talk. In the same way, I never imagined (for example) that "Degrading = Good" could ever become some kind of slogan for social engineering or reform. That is the direction that the Marquis de Sade tried to go (almost exactly) and his results were nauseating. So this insight (or deduction, or whatever it is) can apparently not be easily or simplistically generalized outside of its original sphere of application.

It is also true that sexual brutality can leave deep scars on the soul. D wrote of the rape victims she meets at her school; Vargas-Cooper, in a very different way, writes of "Last Tango in Paris." There is no question that these scars can be deep and real. Again, I would not dream of disagreeing.

And yet, somehow there is a great mystery here. Because while it is patently, undeniably true that what is brutal can be evil and scarring, I think Vargas-Cooper is pointing to a more hidden truth which is that it need not always be so in 100% of cases. Of course I agree that the Shoah was evil; and of course it is clear that the rape victims in D's school are shattered and scarred by it. But what about Vargas-Cooper's one-night stand, the one where her young man could only be excited by something that made her uncomfortable? There are a lot of things I could say about that story -- first among them, that I would hate to be that young man because it must be sad to be him, to live with a soul shaped like his. But I think we cannot say that the event scarred or brutalized Vargas-Cooper, ... even though at some level it was intended to. But there are many levels here. One one level, she and the young man were friends, apparently. On a deeper level, he wanted to find something that would hurt her, because he found it exciting. And on a still deeper level she was happy to comply ... partly, I think, out of kindness or affection to him; but also partly, she seems to hint, because it was at least possible for her to be excited by it too. (She never says this explicitly, but I think it is implied by the other things she does say in other parts of the article about being excited by things that revolt one.) I don't think that necessarily means it would have excited her on a different night, or under other circumstances. Maybe it is just that she hoped his reaction could be contagious. Or maybe it is something else, ... I am really not sure. But I am certain that she would not have written about it so matter-of-factly if the experience had truly scarred her. So there is something mysterious going on here, where aggression is wounding ... except once in a while under special circumstances, when it isn't; where degradation is degrading ... except now and then between just the right people at just the right time, when it isn't ... or isn't exactly. It is very difficult to pin down with any precision.

Is there any way of understanding how it could have come to be in the first place, that these kinds of things can be exciting? Yes, I think so. The place to start is the observation that in some ways we appear to be made with parts that have overlapping uses. It is undeniable that one of the places in the soul (or brain, if you prefer) from which we draw the power and fantastic energy that fuel our sex drives is from that same pool which also feeds anger and fighting. Here is another point at which I have to correct Vargas-Cooper just a bit. She quotes Freud on "'emotional ambivalence' -- the simultaneous love and hate of the object of one's sexual affection. From that ambivalence springs the aggressive, hostile, and humiliating components of male sexual arousal." But I have to disagree with her use of the words "ambivalence" and "hate". Oh sure, I suppose it happens sometimes. But she writes as if it is fundamental to male sexual arousal that we have to both love and hate our partner, and that's not true. I would go farther and say that even if you accept the description of male sexual arousal as "aggressive, hostile, and humiliating" (at least in part) it still does not follow that it springs from hatred. The thing is, somebody who did those things while sane, while in his right mind, in the light of day ... that man would have to be motivated by hatred. Fully agreed. But to act that way in bed ... I'm not so sure. I won't deny that there are some guys who do feel that kind of ambivalence. You can find guys pretty easily to prove just about any disreputable point you'd like to make about men. [That was a small joke.] But I think it's also possible for a guy who feels no such ambivalence nonetheless to act in bed in this same kind of aggressive way. Why? Because he has gone temporarily out of his mind. Because he is in the grips of erotic madness, and so in a sense is no longer himself. Or you can say that is also a part of himself, but it's not a persona he would be willing to admit to the next day at work around the coffee machine. It is a persona that is so different from who he is the rest of the time that he can look back at the nighttime in wonderment. "Was that me? Did I really do that? To her?? And she let me?? Wow ... what could ever have possessed us ...?" Of course, what possessed them both was lust, erotic madness; and while a man is in the grips of it, that madness upends all his values. Things that he honors and cherishes in the daytime become of no account; things that he finds sordid or repugnant may in that moment shine with a new light. I expect that this is true of women too, although probably in somewhat different ways. But it is still madness. It still draws its power from the same pool of energy that fuels rage and cruelty and ferocity under other circumstances. And so that pool of energy colors the experience of erotic madness with its own special hue. It is because we draw power from the same undifferentiated pool of energy that sexual madness acquires a flavor of aggression and wrath. There is no need for it to involve any actual hatred or ambivalence ... it just makes us act as if we felt those things. Because it makes us crazy.

OK, that's a kind of quasi-biological explanation, that sex and fighting draw energy out of the same pool and both give their scent back to the energy itself. That's not really an explanation at the level of lived experience. Is there any way to make sense of this odd confluence of the repulsive with the attractive, that treats our immediate experience fairly? I have an idea, but I am not sure how well it works. But the fact is that our civilized selves -- our appropriate, refined, dignified, cultivated, self-controlled, "nice" selves -- are masks. They are roles we create, characters we play in the vast theater of Living With Others. We create them by overemphasizing some parts of our selves, cutting out other parts, and substituting plausible stories for the real reasons of our hearts. To that extent, they are -- not to put too fine a point on it -- lies. They may be necessary lies, because we know that we would repel the very people whose love and attention we crave if we did not play these roles. And of course they aren't really lies because we all know that we all do the same thing. We all know that there are parts of ourselves we don't show to others, and so we can guess pretty easily that they all have dark corners of their own hearts they don't show us. Still, there is a good bit of artifice to civilized life; and while the goal of civilization is to make that artifice effortless -- so that it becomes nearly real -- it remains a mask. It separates us from the immediacy of life, the rawness of direct sensation and reaction.

Sex cuts straight through all that bullshit, at any rate if it is good sex. False sex, civilized and refined sex, is clearly bad sex. So I think part of what people may find attractive about the crudeness of much pornography is that it bypasses our masks directly. It speaks directly to the dark corners of our hearts that we won't admit to anyone. It may be low and nasty, but it is direct and raw in a way that almost nothing is any more. And after so many years of trying to make civilized behavior seem like second nature, it can be a relief to give up and stop pretending. Even if this or that kind of porn isn't exactly your cup of tea, I think the rawness and directness make it appeal to us on some lower level that resents all the polite manners and cultivated behavior we have to put on every day before walking outdoors to meet the world. Even if there are ways in which the message of much pornography is profoundly false, it can feel true in ways that we may not be able to articulate clearly. This is the same kind of truth that I was trying to write about in my post "Beyond Dignity?" although there I wasn't thinking about pornography at all.

At a more abstract level, the metaphysical system that Robert Pirsig outlines in Lila (not the rather different system in his earlier and more famous Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) would also accommodate this "odd confluence" very nicely. In Lila Pirsig sketches a metaphysics in which there are multiple standards of good-and-bad, ... all equally valid! What is more, something that is very good in this scale might well be very bad in the next scale. (He explicitly instances sex as an example here, although not with the kind of graphic detail that Vargas-Cooper provides.) In the end he has a system that subsumes all these partial scales into a larger picture, and I won't try to summarize it right now. But I do think it works as a framework for understanding the paradox Vargas-Cooper highlights in pornography.

Without scaling Pirsig's heights, though, I think we can agree that what is right and good -- and exciting and gratifying -- in sex is not necessarily right and good in the outside world. Sex is almost a kind of world unto itself. Of course it can color the outside world -- D has written me eloquently about how sexuality can be a spirituality, and about how it can orient one's entire approach to life. But still, the things that are right in bed are not generally right outside of bed. In that sense -- that very restricted sense -- sex is like madness. This doesn't have to be a bad thing -- in the Phaedrus, Plato writes of madness (and also erotic desire) as a divine gift, something truly superhuman that allows us momentarily to transcend the world and reach for the gods. But it does mean that what applies here doesn't apply there. For this reason, I think we don't have to feel bad about the nasty aspect of sex. Even if it attracts us in bed, that doesn't mean it would ever attract us outside of bed -- and I'll wager that 99% of the time it does not. To say (as Vargas-Cooper does) that sexual excitement can include these elements which look rather unsavory by the light of day does not mean (as D fretted back at the beginning of this post) that there is something wrong with us, that we need to condemn ourselves or feel bad about who we are. All it means is that -- really and truly -- we cannot judge sex by the same standards we apply to the light of day. They are different worlds; and to each, the other looks like stark madness. That doesn't stop it from being a divine gift, however. The ways of the gods often look crazy to us.

In the end, there is no simple answer. Any attempt to wrap up the whole question, the whole experience, in a tidy formula will be wrong. Questions like this remind me why intellectual humility is a virtue; because the most interesting questions are always the ones we can't figure out.

Maybe I've got it all wrong. Thoughts?

Wrestling with failure 2, Undying fame

When I finally replied to D’s second letter about her failures as a teacher, I think I answered pretty obliquely. What I mean is that I picked up one theme ... I hope it was as central as I felt at the time ... and ran with it. What resulted was almost less a letter, though, than an essay on its own. She has not answered it directly yet, so I can only hope that she found some relevance in it.

Meanwhile, I think it is safe to say this essay reveals far more of my own faults than I would normally be comfortable with. But hell, this is a blog, right? Isn't that what blogs are for?

I've been thinking about your depression, but I am having trouble articulating something to say. I think I understand what you are talking about, because at some deep level I think I am familiar with the very same feelings: the details of our circumstances are different, but the substance or content of this particular depression is something I think we can each at least partly recognize in the other.

It all revolves -- on one axis, at least -- around this concept of "greatness". You would like to be a great educator. Well, of course you would. I've got that. I understand it completely. When I left graduate school, I spent a lot of time wrestling with the same desire, the same anxiety -- I was afraid that I was giving up my only chance at greatness, at undying fame. It is an intoxicating image. To know you can't have it is very depressing. Now, of course nobody ever promised me that I would actually achieve anything glorious if I stayed in school, still less that it would truly be a good thing to want. But the emotions don't take account of those contrary possibilities, do they? The emotions show us a golden, sunlit vista over there somewhere and then say, "But not for you." It can be terrible.

When this cloud has settled on me since then, I have spent a lot of effort thinking about the difference between the great and the good. Greatness is a goal that has meaning and value inside the world. And the lure is incredibly seductive. But we don't spend forever in the world, do we? Sooner or later, whatever happens in the world dissolves to dust. Either we've become dust with it (in which case who cares?) or we're off to something else. That doesn't prove anything by itself, but it suggests at the very least that there is some standard of measure besides greatness.

Such as what? Well, goodness, of course. In a sense that is a circular answer, because the Good is by definition what we all seek. Anything at all that we want is thereby in some sense "good". But bear with me a minute, because I think we both have some sense of what kinds of things form part of a good life. Do they also form part of a great life? Is it possible to have both?

I think it is tough. In the first place, there are a lot of special dangers reserved for the Great. One big risk is that they start believing their own press releases; this inflates your ego so full that it gets smack between you and whatever you are doing, so that it completely blocks any ability to continue on with whatever Great Work you got the acclaim for in the first place. A second risk is that everybody else starts to see you through a plexiglass window; instead of relating to you as a real person, suddenly all they see is this demigod the Celebrity. That blocks any ability to continue to have normal human relationships. Robert Pirsig writes a lot about this in Lila; but in concrete terms just think how the dynamic in your classroom would change if Barack Obama suddenly walked through the door, or some currently hot movie or music star. Like the song "Fame" puts it, "People will see me and die."

So if you become great, you run the risk that you won't be able to keep working, you won't have any normal human relationships, and you will feed on a steady diet of your own ego. Sound like fun? The other fact is that in order to get there, in order to beat out everybody else who is reaching for the same brass ring, you have to be the Best. And this means sacrificing everything to the hard work it takes to beat out all the others. Of course the fantasy is to do it effortlessly, by innate superiority; but only gods can do that. For the rest of us, it means sacrificing everything in your life to work yourself into a position where life itself becomes a misery ... all so that you can make an immortal name for yourself. When you put it that way, it doesn't sound quite so appealing.

But almost. Even with all that, the prospect of earning an immortal name is powerfully seductive. Even with all that, in a certain mood I might be willing to take the risk. It can be scary.

What does it take to achieve greatness? At least two things: ability and opportunity. In one of his more cynical moments, Bill Clinton supposedly expressed regret that the United States didn't face a major war during his Presidency. He knew his own political talents were huge, but the absence of an external calamity meant that he wouldn't go down in history with Lincoln and Roosevelt. There is also a story about Pericles, that one day he was berated by some man from one of the no-account cities that formed part of the Athenian Empire. Apparently this fellow shouted to Pericles that the only reason he could lord it over others was that he was an Athenian, and his city was more powerful than other cities. Pericles answered him, "If you and I had been switched at birth, so I grew up in your city and you grew up in Athens, neither one of us would ever have amounted to anything."

In other words, no matter how vast your talents, you can never achieve greatness in the wrong setting. You can never become a great educator at your school -- not because you haven't the talent to be a great educator (I am convinced that you do, never mind what you think), but because you are at that particular school.

So what am I saying? That you should apply to teach at a different school? Or -- infinitely worse -- that that ship has already sailed, and you weren't on it, and now it's too late? The seduction of greatness whispers both those messages to us -- urgently, longingly, achingly, despairingly -- but those messages are not mine. The fact is that there is a reason you are teaching at your school: namely, that "whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me." I have always taken it for granted that the reason you have taught in so many out-of-the-way places, and the reason you took on such painful work as to be a guardian ad litem, were that all these jobs reflected a kind of discipleship. As a Christian, you have simply been called to do these things. All Christians are (or at least so I understand it). And what this means is that there is a fundamental conflict between the goal of greatness and the goal of following Christ. To choose either one is, in principle at least, to give up the other. Is that not why we hear about winning crowns in Heaven ... because following the Way means giving up any chance for winning them here on earth?

But it is really, really tough. It's every bit as hard as celibacy or temperance. And some days the burden of being locked into a meaningless job in some isolated backwater, far away from the bustle and engaging activity that you feel in your heart must be your proper setting, ... some days that burden is just too heavy to pick up. On those days you find yourself slumped on your couch, staring at the far wall, unable to motivate yourself to stand up or walk across the room or do much of anything else ... except to pour yourself another drink and to sorrow. Those are the days that you want everything to change, and you can't begin to imagine how to change it yourself, so you are left hoping that somehow it will all change itself by magic. And then it doesn't, and you end up even more depressed.

Yeah, I know what those days look like.

I'm really sorry that this is where you've been recently. I don't know if you are still there, or if the gloom is starting to lift. And I don't have any really good advice for getting through it. As I say, I have spent many of those days reminding myself that the risks on the path of greatness are very great, and that if I had chosen that path the odds are overwhelming that I would envy where I am today instead. I remind myself that when Odysseus went to choose his next lifetime, at least as Plato tells the story in Republic X, he chose the life of a private man living a quiet life far away from all the noise and turmoil of public greatness. (At this point another corner of my mind comments sourly, "Well that's just fine once you've already had the chance to live as Odysseus!") And I remind myself that in the long run it's all equally ephemeral, so the permanence of a glorious name can never be as important as the quality of a life well-lived. Yet if quality here-and-now is the true measure of a life, then the longing for greatness is a red herring. Naturally there are plenty of decisions I have made over the years that have diminished the quality of my life in one respect or another. But if I want to revisit my decisions I should look at the ones that have made for a bad life, not the ones that have made me mediocre and obscure. All that latter stuff is just a distraction from what really matters.

I don't know if this is any help. Somehow I'm afraid it isn't.

Eleventh and twelfth dates

Over a span of eight weeks this summer, I spent fourteen nights with D. When I stop to do the math like that, it’s quite a lot.

I’ve had two business trips in that time. For the first one, back in late June, she was able to join me for an unprecedented ten days; then this trip, early August, the other four.

I’ve tried to think if there were any overriding themes for either date, but all I can pull together are odds and ends. Still, maybe that’s better than nothing. A few of them follow below.

From our eleventh date: ....

I discovered that D has very sensitive toes. Magically sensitive toes. Normally our fucking is so intense and all-consuming that they get bypassed; but on a whim one evening I began sucking them slowly. And the most delightful tremors rippled up through D’s body, and then burbled out in her voice: “Hosea, don’t do that – aaah! You’ll never let me do that to – aaah! – you because you’re so ticklish – aaah! This is really embarrassing – aaah! Oh my God!”

I also insisted on slowing down enough that I could play with her underwear – bite it, tug on it, really play with it – before finally sliding it off of her. She didn’t expect this. In fact, after I had paid so much attention to her toes, she had even forgotten she was still wearing any underwear. But it piqued her interest: after we both returned home from our eleventh date, and before our twelfth, she told me one day she had specifically gone shopping for sexy underwear.
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The weekend of this date, we had what must count as a perfect Sunday. In the morning, D suggested that we go to services at a local Orthodox church. She is Catholic, but she knows and loves the Orthodox liturgy and I knew nothing about it. So sure, hell, why not? Well, the Orthodox liturgy turned out to be very long, and it is all sung. But it was a peaceful, contemplative, devotional experience. Besides, D commented afterwards, “When you go to an Orthodox service, you really know you’ve been to Church today!” And then she laughed.

We stopped at a local delicatessen for lunch. It was a lovely summer day, so all the (many) patrons were enjoying the tables outside. From there it was a short walk to the theater where a new play was opening. I had secured tickets for two for the Sunday matinee, so we spent the heat of the day in a dark, air-conditioned room watching a remarkably inventive new story unfold.

After the play we wandered the streets a while talking. And then, about the time we were thinking of going back to the hotel, we heard what sounded like music coming from somewhere down that-a-way. We turned down that street, walked another couple of blocks ... and came upon a street fair we had read about but had not been able to figure out how to find. And here we had found it. A band was playing, booths were selling food and drinks and face painting, kids were running about playing, adults were talking, and everybody was having a lovely time. So we found a table near the music, bought a couple glasses of wine, and sat down.

Time passed, a new band replaced the old one, we had a few more glasses of wine and finally some food. The new band was playing strongly-danceable music, so D got up to dance. I’ve never been very good on my feet, but after enough wine I didn’t care so much; so I joined her. And it was fun. Before I realized how late it was the sun had set, and the folks organizing the fair were putting up a huge screen. The band finished, and the fair proceeded to show a movie (“Star Trek” 2009) out under the stars, for anyone who was still there.

We got to bed awfully late – actually that was true several other nights as well – but it was a perfect Sunday.
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But I also started to wear out, and my exhaustion came to light as bouts of depression. Up until this date, D has always reacted pretty badly when I get really depressed, backing off as if I were growing a green exoskeleton and bat wings. Finally this time she explained that I really do look physically different to her when that happens: my eyeballs get rounder (that’s what she said!) and my posture gets hunched and stooped. And she admitted that she found it scary.

But of course having her back away in fright just made me feel even worse, so it became a vicious circle. And we talked about more constructive ways for her to react. First, I told her, you can’t back away. Stay with me, hold my hand, talk to me, something. But don’t back away. Second, try humor. I spend a lot of time trying to make stupid jokes; humor is a very big deal for me. So make a stupid joke, even at my expense. If you can get me to laugh, it’ll get better.

At the very end of this date, as we drove to the airport, D told me that she was reflecting on the lessons of the trip. Two of the three were those two, right there. The third was just that our time together is finite. Unless we live to statistically improbable ages, we are both in the second halves of our lives. So we should treasure the time and not waste it ....
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And we talked about infidelity. This came up in a couple of ways. But actually, now that I sit down to write about it, I think the topic deserves a post to itself. So I’ll leave this remark here as a placeholder, and come back to the discussion later in more detail ....
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From our twelfth date: ....

We talked about attractiveness – who is attractive, what makes them so. D has given this a lot of thought. And it is great to listen to her talk about it. When D warms up to the subject of sexual attractiveness, her eyes shine and her face beams and her voice carries the echo of inexpressable yearnings. Nor does it matter whom she is talking about: old or young, male or female, black or white. Don’t misunderstand – there is no doubt that D is straight, as far as that goes. But Beauty and Attractiveness are things that delight her and entice her and compel her attention, whoever owns the body from which they radiate. She cannot help herself for loving Beauty, and to hear her put that love in words is a thing lovely in itself.
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D thinks I drink too much coffee. Maybe this is because I wasn’t very hungry for breakfast Sunday morning, so I drank five cups of coffee while she ate. Then by dinner-time I was famished, so I scarfed up most of the bread on the table while we were waiting for our meals. She later reminded me that this is not a healthy way to eat.

Dinner itself, however, was wonderful fun. The Consultant was in town; so we all ate together and compared notes on our lives. His divorce is complete, and he has asked his girlfriend to marry him. For my part, progress towards a divorce is on hold, and I am inclined to wait till both boys are in high school at any rate. But D and I still continue to see each other, naturally, every chance we get. The Consultant says he thinks being around D makes me calmer; he adds that he has no doubt she is a good influence in my life. We told a lot of stories (the Consultant, in particular, keeps a huge fund of them) and had a wonderful time.
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I spent several hours of the weekend reading aloud to D. It’s a very natural form of recreation for us when we’re not fucking; I love reading aloud, and D loves to listen equally well. I had also come to realize that a lot of our ongoing conversations seemed to hover around a number of the same topics over and over: education is one of these, religion is another. So I finally decided to start reading her Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (I write this with a bit of trepidation, because I anticipate eye-rolling on the part of readers who have encountered one too many Pirsig-cultist over the years. But I do think his discussions are interesting, they are relevant to other things D and I have talked about ... and she has never read it.)

Reflecting on these hours after she got back home, D wrote, “In analyzing the weekend, I was struck by the polarities; your depression concerned me and left you battered and overwhelmed, yet those hours we spent when you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance stand out as some of the finest hours I have ever spent with another person; a genuine dialogue and engagement with an important work. I will treasure them for years to come and eagerly look forward to September when we will pick up the discussion. I am ever so grateful for the time with you, and your love ... which exceeds all expectations.”


We’ll see each other for a day or two in September, if our current plans hold. I’m looking forward to it.