As if a summons

[This post originated as a letter to Marie on February 10, 2017, the date I have posted it. But in fact I didn't get around to posting it here until April 25, 2020, some three years later. I'm indolent like that, as you've all long known.]

My love, my heart,

 

I saw an article today that sounds like it’s calling me, except of course that I have a job and a life and am generally busy with all kinds of other stuff. But I didn’t expect to read what I was reading.

 

A little background. You remember that when I was in graduate school (some 30+ years ago), I was studying political philosophy. In that time, the two most interesting writers that I ran across (other than the Big Names that everybody knew, that they offered classes in) were Carl Schmitt and Bertrand de Jouvenel. I read three short books by Schmitt (of which I lost two when we moved back home), and never actually read any Jouvenel until I was working at a slow job a few years later and had a lot of time on my hands. I’ve read one of Jouvenel’s books (Du pouvoir), and own a couple others that I mean to get to some day. (smile)

 

Check these two out in Wikipedia. (One place where I’m inclined to disagree with the article on Schmitt is that, according to my understanding, Schmitt’s Nazism during the 1930s-40s was pure opportunism and not based on any real commitment.)

 

But all these studies had something of the antique or historical about them. While Francis Fukuyama may have exaggerated in saying that the whole world was going to end up as neoliberal democracies, certainly there has been nobody literate and intelligent out there arguing at a philosophical level for any other set of political principles since … when? The 1930s? (I leave out the war period itself. Inter arma silent philosophi.) Of course there were self-proclaimed Marxists in the 1960s, but it’s hard to think of Marxism as a living body of thought by then. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but even so … the 1960s were a while ago. Of course there has been quite a lot written by political Islamists, but not much of that is likely to be directly applicable to Europe and the United States.

 

And then today I read this:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/behind-the-internets-dark-anti-democracy-movement/516243/

 

Followed (as a P.S.) by this:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/steve-bannon-books-reading-list-214745

 

And here I sit, out of practice and out of shape and libraries behind the curve. (sigh)

 

In that parallel universe where I had made a career out of Schmitt and Jouvenel, I would have languished in total obscurity at some small, liberal arts college, until today … by which time I would have tenure (therefore liberty) and the background to fight against this stuff in my sleep. (sigh)

 

Oh well.

 

Back to work.   

  

Seven deadly sins, for the New Year

By now you know the drill. Every few years I take the same silly quiz again and update my results here. Past entries are here, here, and here. Lust is back up again, possibly because I am involved with Marie. Gluttony and Sloth are doing pretty well for themselves. Pretty accurate, I suppose.

Here's the chart.

Greed:	Low
Gluttony:	Medium
Wrath:	Low
Sloth:	Medium
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	High
Pride:	Very Low

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

Sic et non

In an email a couple weeks ago, Marie talked about how since September she has been tying herself in knots – because she wants to marry me, and that's not possible (at least today) and from this she generated a huge amount of anxiety. Some day I'll get around to posting her message and my reply. But meanwhile, here's a sonnet I wrote this afternoon on the same subject.

__________
   

You find yourself by Yes and No entrapped,

Like Abelard inspecting rival creeds,

Or maybe loves me, loves me not's more apt,

Tugging at daisy blooms like worry beads.
   

Shall we be wed? I did not answer Yes.

And if not Yes, why then it must be No.

And if it's No, the question's foolishness.

Are you a fool, to trade in folly so?
   

Or maybe Yes and No don't rule the heart.

Perhaps there's color out past black and white.

We might need dialectic less than art,

Or harsh fluorescents less than candlelight.
   

Hold close, my love, and let me stroke your hair,

While blocks of questions sublime into air.

Intention of kindness

I went to our town's Theravadin Sangha this evening. It's been a few months since I was there last, but I thought it might be useful in light of the. ... umm ... distractibility (or whatever you call it) that I wrote about last night. Anyway, the woman who gave the dharma talk (after we sat for 40 minutes) started by asking if anyone had made New Year's resolutions. No-one had, but she used this entry point to talk about intentions and intentionality. She even invited us to consider setting intentions for the rest of our lives ... or, you know, if that seemed too intimidating then maybe for the next year, or the next two weeks, or whatever we felt we could handle. 

When the discussion started, one young man whom I hadn't seen before said his intention was to be kinder to his wife, because they were fighting a lot and he claimed it was all (or mostly) because of his own spite and jealousy. And I thought, "Oh wow, there's actually someone I might have something useful to say to." So when we were all done I talked briefly to him:

"Your story is none of my business, but I spent a lot of years where you are right now and one thing that helped me was just to slow down. It's so easy to respond to a trigger in ways that you later regret, when you jump at them automatically. And what I finally learned after decades of jumping at triggers was just to pause – for 30 seconds, or a minute, or 5 minutes – and then ask myself What do I really want to say? What's going to help? Anyway, it helped me."

He thanked me and said he'd try it. So hey – maybe I did something useful today ....

Sent from my iPhone

Not anxiety

Worked late. Went to the store. Got home. Ate dinner. Had a couple glasses of wine. Watched a couple episodes of a TV show from five years ago that I just got from Son 2. Went to bed. Masturbated. Drank two shots hard liquor. Ate snacks. Back to bed.

And you know, I didn't need to do any of it. I wasn't even hungry for dinner.

So all of it -- the whole evening -- was just distraction. To keep my mind busy. Why? To avoid feeling ... ummm, whatever-it-is. In the past  in this blog I've called it "anxiety" but that's not really right. "Anxiety" sounds like I'm worried about what's going to happen, or about my to-do list, or something, and none of that's true. It's not loneliness -- the boys were staying with me through yesterday and I would have felt the same thing, only it would have been masked by talking to them. And I might not have drunk as much, nor had the late night snacks. Nor masturbated. (It's a small apartment without much privacy.)

What's the point of all the activity, then? Beats the shit out of me.
 

Made of eggshells

Marie has been really upset since the election, to the point of not being able to sleep and having massive anxiety attacks. Part of me wants to tell her she's kind of overdoing it -- shit, your candidate didn't win but it's not the Apocalypse. But of course she's not doing it on purpose, so it's not going to help to say any of that.

  
I've tried to help however I can. For the most part this doesn't mean holding her, because she lives a thousand miles away (although she did say she felt a lot better while she was visiting my family over Thanksgiving). But I've sent her encouraging words, along with instructions on the most basic form of meditation and a loving-kindness mantra for her to repeat (not this one, but close).  

Finally a couple of weeks ago her doctor put her on Zoloft. And naturally she had a very bumpy start. The first days or weeks on any new anti-depressant are like that. So she told me she was feeling very fragile, and asked for support.

I sent her a letter with a couple of things in it. First, I talked a little bit about how I experience fragility, echoing a couple of the ideas I describe here (though not the whole essay). But then I tried to offer her a little more:

Your body feels like eggshells -- brittle, bare.
Your skin feels tender as if washed with lye,
Then left to sit, exposed to open air,
Scarred by the very snowflakes in the sky.
 
Your spirit feels like eggshells -- fragile, low,
To flinch when startled at a sudden din
Or brood on gloomy, long-remembered woe
That wets your eyes and stabs your heart again.
 
But you are more than eggshells -- for you know
I love you and you love me in return.
Outside it's dark and wet with sleet and snow,
But here inside the coals of love still burn.
 
No eggshell lasts forever -- but when it breaks,
The bird inside spreads out her wings and wakes.

Marie was very grateful. The day I sent it she was feeling so rotten she couldn't process it any farther than to say, "My boyfriend sent me a sonnet! How sweet." But a few days later she was able to consider it as poetry, and we discussed back and forth how it might be improved.

Clearly she was thinking about more than she said. And then one day she went almost completely silent until night-time, when she sent back ...

My body feels like eggshells – brittle, bare,
My skin abraded as if scoured with salt
Then left to chill, exposed to bitter air
As blow by blow of news my eyes assault.
 
My spirit feels like eggshells – fragile, low,
Remembering past times hope was entombed
And still the news pours in new tales of woe:
Of Klansmen, oilmen, loonies given room.
 
Yet I am more than eggshells, for I know
I love you and you love me in return
Though all outside may bleak and bitter grow,
Yet here inside the coals of love still burn,
 
And burning, still inspire that bird to wake,
Which, stretched in hope of flight, all shells will break.

And all I could think was, "Hot damn, but I love being involved with a(nother) poet!"

 

Lovingly molested

Marie visited me for a week over Thanksgiving, and just flew home tonight. Together we drove out to where most of my family was gathered for the holiday. She met them; they met her. A good time was had by all.

But also we talked and talked, as always. And a couple days ago, the conversation was a little interesting.

I was talking about my dad -- specifically, about how he was always trying to worm his way into learning about my private life, as if he were groping at me with his questions. I've written about it here, and probably other places. Marie pegged his behavior nicely as "voyeuristic". And for a long time I didn't have a very good idea why he would even want to know all this stuff about me, except that he always had. Sometimes I thought maybe it was because he enjoyed the power that came from knowing things and being able to make me squirm when he talked about them.

But as I talked to Marie, I added that I had recently thought of another hypothesis ... another possible reason that might have explained his behavior. And I told her that this hypothesis could have meaning for her too.

My idea was this: maybe my dad was lonely. Well, of course I know he was lonely -- he didn't have many friends, and those he had rarely saw him. He didn't have any family except my mother's, and over the years he had alienated most of those. He didn't have a job to go to. So yeah, he was lonely.

And his social skills were a little off. He could be entertaining -- he was an actor by trade, after all -- but he didn't trust people and so he had trouble making new friends. He wanted to be loved and accepted, but he was afraid to let himself be honest and real with others ... and that has to be the first step. The only circle he (mostly) trusted were his immediate family: my mother, my brother, and me.

So I think he wanted to be my friend. Actually I know that's what he wanted, because many times -- usually when he was really drunk -- that's exactly what he would say. "I don't want you to think of me as a father ... just as an older friend who has been through some things you haven't yet, so you can ask me questions and I can give you advice." (Notice, by the way, that this implies he had a really unpleasant idea of what fatherhood entails. I think this is related to his lifelong hatred of authority.) And so I think what he wanted was for us to sit around shooting the shit and "lying about women" [his phrase], the way he imagined that Real Guys must do in the locker room. (My father was a classic Non-Athlete, but I think his image of masculinity must have dated from high school gym class -- which he hated, but which he must have thought he should have liked in order to be a Real Man.)

In short: I think he pawed at my life with a perverted, voyeuristic lust because he wanted to be my friend, and didn't know how. And didn't know that it was impossible, because the Father-Son relationship is prior to the Friend-Friend relationship and excludes it.

Marie thought this was very interesting, both charitable and plausible. But what the hell did it have to do with her?

Well, I don't remember if I've told this story yet but her mother molested her when Marie was 12. Her mother was an alcoholic, and one night (after Bible study!) she came into Marie's bedroom and started massaging Marie's vulva until she came. Marie was really upset at this but figured that a Good Girl wouldn't tell her mother to stop; also, that God wouldn't have allowed it unless she (Marie) was already hopelessly corrupt and soiled. It fucked up her ideas about sex for decades, and that in turn seems to have crippled her sex life until she and I got together early this year.

And I asked Marie, Why did she do it? She wasn't getting off, after all. And she probably wasn't particularly aroused by it -- as she objected later, when Marie confronted her with this and she said that she had no recollection of it (probably true because she blacked out a lot), "I like men." (Marie's father was dead by then, of suicide. Marie's mother was drinking heavily and fucking anything in pants.) So why did she do it? Marie didn't know.

Well, I suggested, maybe it was the same kind of thing that was going on with my dad. Maybe at some level she thought that she was doing Marie a favor. After all here was her oldest daughter, just on the cusp of womanhood ... about to come into her sexual inheritance. If you assume that her mother's higher reasoning abilities were all wiped clean out by the alcohol, it's not so crazy to think that she might have thought this was somehow a good thing.

Of course I told Marie that this was just a hypothesis. She'd have to think whether there was any external data that could make it look likely.

And after a minute she said, "Oh shit. There is."

Marie's mother was a very feminine woman. She was pretty, and paid a lot of attention to her appearance. She always had to have a man in her life, and it thrilled her to be the focus of some man's adoration. Marie was 12 -- just at the cusp of womanhood -- and didn't care about any of that. In mythological metaphor, she was totally devoted to Artemis and scorned Aphrodite. (See, e.g., this link for just how dangerous that can be.) Marie's mother kept trying to convince her to care about boys.

And so, Marie went on, ... maybe it makes sense that her mother would try to show her why it was worth it to care about boys. To show her how good sex feels. To let her experience directly why sex and romance can reasonably dominate your life. Throughout it all her mother kept saying "It feels so good." Maybe that really meant (if you look through the drunken haze) "It's worth the sacrifices. Make yourself pretty. Make yourself sweet and soft. Because then men will want to fuck you, and there is nothing sweeter in all the world."

But that means, Marie went on, that maybe she still loved me even while she was molesting me.

She was sobbing softly into my shoulder by this point. I held her, and kissed her, and tried to reassure her that yes, it was perfectly possible her mother still loved her. I reminded her that many of the terrible, cruel, destructive things that people do are caused not by malice but just by ignorance and clumsiness. And if anything can bring on ignorance and clumsiness, heavy drinking is surely on the list. So yeah ... it's all possible.

We talked about a lot of other things over the course of the week, but that may have been the most unexpected.