Time, the Ultimate Luxury

The writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit’s writing, which I discovered only recently, has captivated me.  But what informs her superb writing are her powers of observation and her contemplative mind.  In the past few months, I have read countless essays, reviews, and articles by her, as well as her book of non-fiction Men Explain Things to Me.  In addition, I recently started listening to the Audible version of Wanderlust:  A History of Walking, wherein Solnit reminds us that walking is an intellectual, spiritual, and revolutionary pursuit, as well as a creative and empowering act.  No surprise then that I am saving (and savoring) my reading/listening of this work for my daily, long walks.  Solnit is an intellectual nomad, however, whose interests roam far and wide.  So when I came across her Orion piece titled Finding Time, I was delighted to find that it dovetailed nicely with my ongoing obsession.  An excerpt from her article first:

The Four Horsemen of my Apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out. These marauding horsemen are deployed by technophiles, advertisers, and profiteers to assault the nameless pleasures and meanings that knit together our lives and expand our horizons…

I believe that slowness is an act of resistance, not because slowness is a good in itself but because of all that it makes room for the things that don’t get measured and can’t be bought.

For my part, I have come to the not-so-profound conclusion that what I consider a luxury is not any pricey item, event, or trip but rather, time.  As the writer and spiritual teacher Pico Iyer recently said in an On Being interview, “[l]uxury has to do with having a lot of time.  The ultimate luxury might now be just a blank space in the calendar.”  I couldn’t agree more.  So, in the midst of my busy days, I eschew fast food for the luxury of slow cooked steel cut oatmeal several mornings a week; spend extended periods of time in my kitchen, listening to my favorite podcasts or the excellent Radio Paradise as I cook dinner from scratch; and try, at least once a day, to pick up an intricate crochet thread project.  It’s not much, but carving out even a couple of hours in this manner, in an otherwise hectic life, does indeed feel luxurious.  

O Jerusalem

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!

(Matthew 23:37 KJV)

Six days after re-entry into the Eastern time zone, I finally feel as if I am sloughing off the intense jet lag resulting from a 7-hour time change and a grueling 20+ hour journey home.  Time now, then, to begin to digest the overwhelming experience that was an extended stay in Israel and in particular Jerusalem.  I think my incessant FB postings and photos provided the tourist version of the experience, so I intend to dig a bit into this beautiful, complex, and conflicted country's psychopolitical aspects.  As an ardent Zionist and someone who fell in love at first sight with Israel, I was surprised to find that my observations during this visit left me frequently troubled.  I will start by quoting my old friend Jim Teeple, a Voice of America journalist who did a two year stint in Jerusalem, and once commented:  "Jerusalem is a vortex of negative energy."  While I disagree vehemently that Jerusalem's energy is negative, it is undeniable that it is a vortex of complicated, conflicted, often contentious, and inarguably competing energies.  

As a non-Israeli, I am clearly not inured to the ubiquitous militarism that is present on every street corner, to wit, fully armed young men and women on buses and trains, at the grocery store, and at all tourist sites.  However, you do begin to get used to this after a day or two and in a perverse way to take comfort in it.  What took me aback more emphatically this time in Israel was the bellicosity I encountered in many--although certainly not all--Jerusalemites who I shared meals with, both in our apartment and in their homes.  The free-floating aggression that I perceived stemmed, as many individuals put it, from living in a country with barbarians geopolitically situated at every gate.  I could not help but note that this bellicosity, inherent in the "Earthly Jerusalem," the living reality of a Jerusalem of stones and houses and people, contrasted starkly with the image of "Heavenly Jerusalem" as the Jewish people's central symbol of peace of wholeness.  Literally, Jerusalem means "City of Peace."  But Jerusalem and the greater Israel today are anything but peaceful.  

The Israeli author David Grossman (his novel "To the End of the Land" is a must read) has written and spoken extensively about the difficulty Israelis have imagining peace, having been exposed to constant war not to mention the ongoing threat of terrorism.  Moreover, as a country resurrected from the ashes of the Holocaust, I recognize that Israelis struggle, on a subconscious if not a conscious level, with the constant and often immediate threat of annihilation as both a people and a country.  Recognizing both the conscious and unconscious drives at work in the contemporary Israeli psyche, as well that as the fact that I am not Israeli and do not reside there, I am aware how presumptuous what I am about to say is:  the current situation is simply not sustainable.  I spent only two weeks immersed in the prevailing psychological attitude I encountered in the people I came into close contact with and it was draining beyond description.  I cannot imagine how exhausting it must be to sustain, on an unrelenting basis, that level of unyielding de-legitimization and, yes, contempt of the perceived and actual enemy.  And I simultaneously extrapolate this conjecture inversely, that is, to the Arabs' perception of the Jews.  

Both sides, Jews and Arabs alike, must at some point reach a mutual recognition of the other's rights and a willingness to compromise their own claims.  I can only imagine the enormous mourning that will need to take place should such a compromise ever occur, as each side relinquishes its respective guiding myths.  The Israeli Jungian psychoanalyst Erel Shalit says it well when he urges his fellow countrymen to "listen to the whisper of the "soul" (in Hebrew, ruah) that otherwise might be carried away by the "wind" (ruah), unheard; the soul that here in Israel, if not attended to, may be swept away by darkness at noon." (Shalit 2004, 168).  

The Death Clock

Last week I entered a website called "The Death Clock," which describes itself as thus:  "the Internet's friendly reminder that life is slipping away . . . second by second. . . . [t]he Death Clock will remind you just how short life is."  http://deathclock.com The Death Clock provides you the exact date of your death, after calculating your responses to seven short questions.  It was with no small amount of trepidation that I pressed the "calculate" button after answering the questions.  My date of death:  September 10, 2037.  And lest you undermine the significance of the date provided, underneath it there is a rapidly diminishing number representing the seconds you have left to live.  This jolted me.  2037 is just around the corner.  I quickly did the math and realized that in 2037, I will be 79 years old.  That is far less than the 90-100 years I had hoped to attain (in the best of health, of course).  I will not even live as long as my parents have, so far!  After my initial alarm and reminding myself of the implausibility of the calculation—for better or worse—I began to more meditatively turn this supposed fact over in my mind.  22.5 more years.  20 of those years retired from my so-called career.  Having lost a couple of dear friends in their 50's to gruesome cancers in recent years, and my mostly helpless involvement in the painful spectacle that is the advanced stage 4 pancreatic cancer of another friend who is only 50 years old, having 20 or so hopefully productive years (and I judge this by my parents' health in the years leading up to age 79) seems in many ways like a gift.  Twenty years to enjoy family and friends; see my children thrive as adults and enjoy the grandchildren I am already imagining; live completely as I choose once I have broken free from the fetters of said career; travel the world with my husband so long as a modicum of good health permits; and invest my reclaimed energy (post-retirement) in doing my part to repair the world.  As the recent and imminent losses of loved ones have shown, I should be so lucky to have even this much more time. 

While I recognize that the Death Clock is an unlikely Cassandra (and it would thus be fitting if I refused to believe it and dismissed it completely), who knows?   However hackneyed my response to it might be, this prognostication shifted something in my psyche.  It has been a week now since I got the results, and it enters my mind frequently.  In response, I find myself going about my daily activities more consciously.  Perhaps short-lived, but if the end result of the Death Clock's prediction is an increased mindfulness on my part, then it is a worthwhile addition to my re-launched meditation practice not to mention my remaining years.  

May I Have Your Attention Please? This is the Universe Speaking.

Ignoring its previous, more subtle nudges to "slow down," lately the Universe has called out the big dogs in an effort to get my attention.  To wit, I find myself with an injured foot that has left me limping (the second injury to the same foot in six months); the receipt last week of a whopping ticket for driving 23 miles over the speed limit on my way to Bristol, Virginia to visit my parents; the return of my ulcer; and to add insult to injury, the removal of a basal cell carcinoma from my neck a few days ago.  (Not sure how that last is connected to the previous three, but I thought I would throw it in for good measure.)  And then there are the continuing dramas on the work and daughter fronts, respectively.  An unexpected incident in Bristol, however, might have marked a turning point.

For at least a decade, I have been curious about a little store located on Old Abingdon Highway about a mile from my parents' home.  On this recent visit, I finally ventured into Gwen's Herb Shop, which I learned has been in business at that location for 21 years.  There I met Gwen and her daughter, both master herbalists.  The store itself was not the dark and dank health food store, circa 1978, that I expected, but a brightly lit, relatively sparse, and highly organized space stocking only the highest quality herbal and nutritional supplements.  No stranger to the world of herbal and nutritional supplements (I was an early and continuing aficionada and familiar of those aforementioned dark and dank health food co-ops and stores), I immediately plucked a few items off of the shelves, at which point Gwen, a pleasant looking woman about 10 years older than me, approached and asked if I needed assistance.  Although I initially brushed her off, there was something about her energy that made me slow down, actually look at her, and then admit that I was looking for products along the lines of ones I was using already with only partial success, for both sleep and digestive issues.  She asked me if she could do a brief "assessment" to see whether, in fact, I could benefit from the items I had already selected.  The assessment involved asking me some questions, and then engaging in some "exercises" involving my placing one hand on a certain part of my body and then Gwen applying gentle and unobtrusive force and/or pressure to my other hand, which I was to resist.  I should emphasize that she asked permission at all times to touch me and even then, her touch was respectful and unobtrusive.  After about 15 minutes of this exercise, she told me that my insomnia was not related to any underlying sleep disorder, but rather to stress and anxiety.  As a result, the supplements I was already taking (and was about to purchase again) were likely insufficient if not ineffective.   She also told me I had an ulcer, which I suspected had returned but was still in partial denial about.  I would have blown this off had she not pointed to the exact spot where it was diagnosed,about a year ago.  Now, that diagnosis involved numerous doctor and specialist examinations, a CT scan, a colonoscopy, and finally an endoscopy before the physicians involved could identify where the ulcer was located.  In 15 minutes Gwen nailed it.  I left with two bottles of herbal supplements (both, I might add, priced lower than what I had initially selected) which seem to be helping, even after only a week.

While this interesting visit to Gwen's was only the last in a series of incidents reminding me to take things in my life down a few notches, for some reason I left that little shop with a commitment to start managing more effectively the stress in my life.  Unfortunately, I cannot yet retire and I likely have a year or so to go before the mother-daughter complex releases me from its stranglehold, but one thing I can do is resume my meditation practice.  After about 18 months of near-daily practice, for some inexplicable reason, about six months ago I  stopped meditating.  Just stopped one day; there was no gradual sloughing off.  It had begun to seem like one more thing I "had" to fit into my day.  Moreover, I did not seem to be mastering it.  I still spent the vast majority of the 20 minutes I allotted to the practice thinking of how my knee hurt, what I was going to make for dinner, or how often and in what manner my boss had pushed me over edge at work that day.  As a type-A personality, I do not like to engage in activities that I cannot master.  This week, though, as I recommenced my practice, I decided to approach it differently.  That is, I would not expect myself to achieve, in the time allotted, a complete focus on my breath with its concomitant emptying of the mind.  Rather, I would approach it for what it really was:  practice.  Practice, that is, in gently leading my mind, as every 2-3 seconds it raced away from my breath to the ten million distractions that bounced off of the walls of my brain, back to the breath.  To repeat:  the new emphasis would be on the exercise of continually bringing my focus back to the breath, and not on remaining focused on the breath. The latter, I seem to only now be grasping, is an exercise in self-defeating futility, at least for a novice like me.  Having given myself permission not to be "good" at this meditation thing, I am hopeful that I might be able to plumb its depths more effectively.  We'll see. 

The Moon and Her Mother

Another Aesop fable:  The Moon and Her Mother.  I find myself obsessed with them all lately.   

The moon once begged her mother to make her a gown.  "How can I? replied she; "there's no fitting your figure.  At one time you're a new moon, and at another you're a full moon; and between whiles you're neither one nor the other."


This could not be a more fitting fable to read as I struggle through a period of time, dragging into week three here, where my daughter and I remain at loggerheads over seemingly idiotic issues.  I am experienced enough as a woman and a mother to see beneath the outer drama to what is really going down, but it doesn't make it any easier to endure or resolve.  My patience is worn thin even as my heart is aching to connect with this complex, precious young woman.  I am hopeful that with the dark moon tomorrow night, our turmoil will also recede so that we can emerge into a different, lighter place with the new moon on Saturday night. 

Chodesh tov, my beloved daughter. 

Of Moles and Mystics

This past week has been one of the worst in recent memory.  It brings to mind a story in Aesop's fables about a young mole who went to his mother and told her he could see.  Now, as most people know, sight is something traditionally lacking in moles.  This mole's mother decided to test him.  She placed in front of him a piece of frankincense, and asked him what it was.

"A stone," replied the little mole.

"Not only are you blind," his mother answered, "but you have lost your sense of smell as well."

As a symbol of my own psychic momentum, the little mole, both blind and without a sense of smell, would seem to aptly describe my inability of late to effectively navigate my world.  The following is a brief but not exhaustive list of the struggles that have managed to undo me this week:  yet another tiresome, inconvenient snowstorm; mounting frustrations at work; the seeming ephemerality of what I thought was a solid, life-long friendship; a stubbornly oppositional 17-year old daughter; a (hopefully) minor health issue; and most prominently, standing (figuratively and, as often as possible, literally) next to one of my oldest, dearest friends and watching in horror as her partner, an intelligent, kind, and gentle man of only 50, teeters over the abyss of advanced stage 4 pancreatic cancer.  If the little mole is a symbol of my own inner potentiality, this week mine is decidedly retrograde. 

What did manage to ground me somewhat this week, if not lift my spirits very much, was a return to the rich, potent work of the Nobel Prize (Literature) winning writer Doris Lessing.  A chance remark about Lessing by a woman I met in Jamaica led me to order a rare book of interviews, Putting The Questions Differently:  Interviews with Doris Lessing (1964-1994), which in turn led me to an unread novel of hers already on my bookshelves, The Marriages of  Zones Three, Four, and Five.  I finished both in a few days time.  I am also currently listening to an Audible version of The Good Terrorist, so my Lessing immersion this week has been intense.  While I have read most of Lessing's prolific output--starting in my early 20's and ongoing--there are a few treasures that still await me, as these latest reads proved.   Lessing doesn't mince words and she doesn't suffer fools, so while reading her did not have a palliative effect, her brilliance and intellectuality at least distracted me from my own petty woes for a bit. 

What was intensely interesting to learn, especially from the Interviews and the Marriages novel, was the enormous influence Lessing's study of and immersion in Sufism had on her writing.  I know nothing about Sufis but the Interviews led me to another book, The Sufis, which I just started, by the Sufi Master Idries Shah, who Lessing studied with in the 1960's.  Which brings me full circle, because that book opens with a brief meditation on why Sufis consider the fabulist, Aesop, a Sufi Master in his own right.  I love Aesop, and recently heard the mole fable, narrated above, on a BBC podcast I follow (In Our Time).  So, while many of the dots of my life are not connecting this week, it is, somehow, compensatory and gratifying that my reading dots, at least, are. 

Ithaca or What Comes Next?

 

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.

Without her you would never have taken the road.

But she has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.

With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience

you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.

 

 

This poem of the modern Greek poet Cavafy is one of my favorites; I printed it years ago and it remains posted on the bulletin board over my desk at the office.  The city of Ithaca is both the place of departure and the goal of that prototypical wanderer in all of us, Odysseus.  In the poem, Cavafy warns Odysseus to pray that his road be long, his adventures many and, perhaps most importantly, not to rush the return journey.  The stanza above is a further warning to Odysseus not to return with concretized expectations about what he will find when he finally pulls into the harbor of his homeland.  In short, the poem tells us that perhaps the goal of the journey was the journey itself.   

 

Likewise, as I scan the horizon of my impending retirement, and as I consider the recent retirement of one of my oldest friends (shout out to Sandra!), I find myself meditating on what the journey has been all about, what expectations I am clinging to regarding what retirement will look like when I finally land on its shores, and perhaps most importantly, what arrival at the actual destination of retirement will bring.  An extended dream vacation?  A late life crisis?  The time and energy for more meaningful endeavors?  Depression stemming from the recognition that the incoming tide might, on any given day, bring illness and even death, at a time when I envision only freedom? 

 

Let's face it:  for those of us who are looking at retiring near or at the age of 60 or thereafter, the journey of retirement is simultaneously the journey into our old age.  While I have devoted much time and psychic energy in the past couple of years or so to planning--psychologically, financially, and spiritually--for my retirement, I recognize that retirement signifies not the end of the journey, but the start of a new leg of the journey.  Yes, I will take time to celebrate having made it through Dante's dark woods of midlife, and I will certainly take the time to decompress and reorient my energies.  But then the work must resume.  For me, that will involve letting go of my identification with the successes of my career, letting go of my children (a tough one that), and devoting serious time to the odyssey of my own creativity. 

 

Most importantly, however, will be accepting the mystery inherent in the journey to come.  I am re-reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  In exploring mystery as it is involved in different ways of seeing, Dillard writes the following:  

 

We wake, if we ever wake at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence . . . .  "Seem like we're just set down here," a woman said to me recently, "and don't nobody know why."

 

Grappling with the mystery, for me, means continuing to take responsibility for myself and recognizing that whatever path I take, the one taken by others is not necessarily for me.  This, in turn, means truly grasping and living the reality that what I am ultimately seeking lies within, not outside of me.  As the Grail legend admonished, it is "a shameful thing to take the path others have trod." 

 

 



The Virtue of Vulnerability

After an incredibly productive morning working from home yesterday (the world, upon awakening, was a sheet of ice here in the D.C. region after 18 hours of sleet and freezing rain), I ventured out mid-day for a brisk walk in the strong sun, rapidly melting sidewalks, and relatively mild temperatures (low 40s).  Plugged into one of my favorite podcasts, On Being, I listened to the unedited interview with Brene Brown, broadcast a few weeks ago.  Brown is a research professor and writer, most recently focusing on the gifts inherent in vulnerability and imperfection.  As usual, I was feeling validated and slightly superior because of the prodigious, high quality work product I consistently churn out (in the morning's case, I had just finalized a lengthy, sensitive, and particularly thorny report with the potential to dilute a politically motivated imbroglio).  The Brown interview, then, really pulled me up short. Speaking about herself, first, Brown proceeded to characterize as self-righteousness the following attributes:  perfectionism, judgment, exhaustion as a status symbol, and productivity as self-worth.  Moreover, she pointed out that these attributes do not induce creativity.  What?  But I'm zen.  I practice yoga.  I meditate.  I create art.  I have had years of therapy.  And, more importantly, I am a competent person who makes things happen in the world.  But the more I listened, the more I realized I was guilty as charged.  Interesting stuff that rocked my world a bit yesterday. I am not particularly in the mood for it after such a dark and dreary winter, but I guess it's back down into the underworld for me, to process this new insight. 

 

 

The Questionnaire

To be more specific, what I am referring to here is something called the Proust Questionnaire.  I recalled this questionnaire earlier this week, after my 17-year old daughter sent me a self-styled personal questionnaire (apparently there is an iPhone App for this), which she challenged me to take, to test how well I knew her (more about that, perhaps, in a later post).  As for the Proust Questionnaire, it refers to an English-language questionnaire given to the then-teenage Proust in the 1880s, by a friend.  It is the Victorian version of today’s personality tests, such as the one my daughter designed.  I decided to take the test.  Here are the results:

 

What is your greatest fear?  Even at the age of 56, I would have to say that my greatest fear continues to center on something dire happening to either of my children.  While it is always a parent’s atavistic fear that serious illness or premature death will strike their offspring, I somehow thought that, once I steered them through childhood without disaster striking, the intensity of this particular fear might abate somewhat.  While the specific contours have changed slightly, it seems as firmly entrenched as ever.  As a somewhat spiritually conscious individual, I recognize and accept that sickness and death are inevitable for all of us.  I even reluctantly acknowledge the existence of that most grotesque violation of the laws of nature, namely that children do not always survive their parents.   Nonetheless, this particular fear remains lodged like a cold, hard stone in the nethermost pit of my stomach. 

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?  The omnipresent feeling that no one else can do something as well or efficiently as I can, so I might as well just do it myself.  This attitude has not served me well in life.  It has often left me resentful of and impatient with others.  It has also left me feeling overwhelmed a lot of the time, as I do work or complete tasks that others could, in fact, do well enough, if not exactly as I would do them.  And, I would wager, it has rendered me intolerable—whether as a colleague, parent, or partner—to others on more than one occasion!

What is your favorite journey?  The annual pilgrimage my husband and I make to Jamaica has become my favorite physical journey, while my vivid, nocturnal dream life continues to be my favorite metaphysical journey. 

On what occasion do you lie?  At this point in my life, I consider myself an intrinsically honest person except when it comes to social niceties.  I confess to committing, not infrequently, the venial sin of the social white lie.  That said, I try never to lie in my personal and professional relationships.  I have done so in the past, and the results were always disastrous.  This was a hard-won lesson. 

What do you dislike most about your appearance?  Ignoring for the moment the parade of horrors that ageing presents in the mirror most mornings, my skin has plagued me most of my life.  Even though the ravages of acne are long past, and the scars no longer visible, the psychological scars, I fear, are permanent.  Not even the specter of wrinkles and sagging skin can send me spinning into total despair the way the ten or more years, in my teens and early twenties, serious acne could and did.  Thank God for Accutane, that little of shop of horrors in its own right. 

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?  My friends and acquaintances who consider me unnecessarily (and not, I might add, amusingly) pedantic might have quite a long list, but I myself am aware that I often preface comments, stories, anecdotes, etc. with the phrase:  “It’s interesting . . . .”  I try to catch myself when I am about to say this, recognizing fully that what I am about to say might not really be all that interesting to the listener, but nine out of ten times it slips out before I can withhold it.  It’s more of a nervous tic than a self-serving description of what I am about to say. 

When and where were you happiest?  I can only hope my husband and children are not offended by this, but in all honesty I am most happy when I am alone, reading or studying something that I find enthralling, and am able, however temporarily, to absorb myself entirely with what is before me to the exclusion of all my quotidian or larger concerns and commitments.  As an example, I can recall in particular a period of time in the early 1980s when I lived in Richmond, VA and was engrossed in my first reading of Remembrance of Things Past.  I worked all day, went for a run after work, and then 2-3 nights a week had dinner alone, at the long-defunct Grace Place on Grace Street, where I read Proust for an hour.  An idyllic setting (either indoors or during nice weather, on the outdoor patio behind the restaurant), a fabulous vegetarian meal, and my complete absorption in the magnificent, majestic world of ROTP all amounted to a little slice of heaven. 

What talent would you most like to have?  I have always marveled at musical talent.  I never learned to play an instrument and there is something about the idea of musical composition that eludes me entirely.  I have enormous awe and respect for musicians.  While I do not feel incomplete without this talent, I have often speculated that musicians have access to a spiritual or psychic dimension that precludes entry to non-musicians. 

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?  Like Lot’s wife, I find myself looking back when I know good and well I should not.  This results in lots of “would haves, could haves, should haves.”  Likewise, I worry a lot about the future.  Despite my 30+ years practicing yoga, I find it a daily struggle to live in the present. 

What is your most treasured possession?  This is a tough one, but if I had to say, my paternal grandmother’s small, dangling, diamond earrings might top the list.  These are not at all valuable, but they are simple, elegant, and I never put them on without immediately feeling my Nanny’s presence around me.  Very cool. 

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?  Those instances when I am, or imagine I am, estranged from someone I love. 

Where would you like to live?  Good question, but one that remains open at the moment.  This is a work in progress, so I will abstain at this time.

What is your favorite occupation?  No surprise here, but that would be reading, hands down.  Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays, anything really.  There simply are not enough hours in the day. 

What is your most marked characteristic? At the risk of sounding self-serving, I would have to say earnestness.  While I have, since childhood, been frequently accused of being “too serious” a person, I prefer to view myself as my beloved, late Uncle John did (or so he told me), as “intensely earnest.”  To a fault perhaps, but there it is. 

Who is your favorite hero(ine) of fiction?  Clarissa Dalloway.  I have read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway three times, and she resonates with me more with each reading.  My 2014 re-reading was especially resonant because at 56, I was finally the same age as Clarissa is on the June day on which the novel takes place.  Woolf’s depiction of Clarissa is so brilliantly conceived, so thoroughly dimensioned, and so absolutely documented, that I can relate to all of Clarissa’s ambiguities, whether they relate to class, friendship, motherhood, marriage, or sexual orientation.  She incarnates womanhood in all of its strengths and weaknesses.     

Gone Girl Part 2

Having returned from a blissful week in Jamaica (Wednesday), survived the tough re-entry into the frozen wasteland that is the D.C. metro area (ongoing), plunged back into the madness that is work these days (Thursday and Friday), and sailed through my academic presentation at the Georgetown University conference on “Passages” (yesterday), I am eager to pick up the thread I left hanging on “Gone Girl.”  As promised, while I was away I thought a lot about why this movie left me so angry.  (Well, I didn’t just think about it.  There was also plenty of reading and crocheting to be done on the patio of our room facing the cliffs overlooking the sea; doing daily yoga overlooking said cliffs and sea; eating healthy Jamaican food (largely prepared by that culinary goddess, Gwen, at Jackie’s on the Reef); connecting with old and new Jamaican and ex-pat friends in Negril; and surrendering completely to an awesome heated bamboo massage administered, in a little hut just a stone’s throw from the waves crashing into the cliffs, by the incredible Karen, at Jackie’s.)  Sigh.  Four days of arctic temperatures and a treacherous snowstorm yesterday make it all seem like a lifetime ago.  Okay, pity party over (not that I expect to garner any from the one or two friends who actually read this!) and down to some Sunday afternoon psychoanalysis. 

The view from our room at the Westender Inn

I admit it.  I, too, giddily rode the crest of one of the key opening scenes of “Gone Girl,” situated at a party in NYC (the Village?  Williamsburg?) where two beautiful, urbane hipsters meet and instantaneously recognize in each other not only the realization of their long-held fantasies of the perfect partner, but also their shared sense of superiority over other potential mates.  (Although I was more than slightly pained by then-future Husband’s sarcastic remark about an intellectual looking dude who he condemned as Proust-spouting.) But we have all been there—the moment or series of moments when we meet the person with whom we will fall in love and believe we will spend the rest of our days.  Whether it’s love at first sight, or love that unfolds over a more extended period of time, we recognize in this other precisely what we want, need, have been searching for.  So, now we have the “Once upon a time” opening for our story.

But even as any child reader of a fairy or folk tale knows, before you can get to the “And they lived happily ever after” ending, the protagonist must endure the daunting, often frightening, middle passage, where he or she must undergo a test and experience genuine suffering.  Having survived the test, the hero achieves redemption and, hopefully but not always, the story comes out right.  In short, fairy tales and folk tales depict allegorically the human condition. 

 

Why then do we, upon falling in love, assume that we can skip the middle passage and go directly from “Once upon a time” to “And they lived happily ever after?”  For those of us who have had any experience in long-term relationships—whether one that has stood the test of time and endured, for better or worse, or one that represents a second or third attempt to get it right—know, the heady, early stages are merely the opening scenes of the real story that has not yet begun to unfold.  Once the first or second flush of love has passed, we get to the “naming of the problem” stage.  I believe that this is the stage where we begin to see that, however many our partner’s virtues might be, he/she is neither the paragon we first envisioned, nor the answer to all of our own problems or shortcomings.  Even in the face of this recognition, however, in many, many relationships participants will go to extreme lengths, often lasting years or decades, not to name the problem. Indeed, some will construct a marriage lasting a lifetime without ever naming the problem, although I can guarantee you that in those cases, there’s a lot of strife and alienation existing in the royal realm.   If we are courageous enough to name the problem, then come the ups and downs of the story—the middle passage—where we try to negotiate the problem and see if we can maintain love, intimacy, and friendship, even as our boundaries have snapped back into place and we are no longer merged as one, amorphous blob of romantic love.  There is usually some climax, or decisive point, in the middle passage, where couples either:  (1) split up; (2) do the difficult, lengthy individuation work necessary to re-engage first with themselves, and then with the relationship, to move it to a higher, more sustaining level; or (3) petrify the relationship into something static and mostly dead that merely serves as a façade to erect before the extended family and community. 

And here’s where the movie comes back in.  Not having read the book, I could be either totally wrong about this or, alternatively, stating the obvious, but in my opinion the couple in “Gone Girl” pretty much parodied a marriage that had hit the “naming of the problem” stage and was too immature and underdeveloped to face that fact.  Not only are Husband and Wife unwilling and incapable of naming the problem, and thereby entering into the stage where the real work of a relationship begins (and the real treasures unearthed, I might add), but to avoid this step, Wife goes to psychotic ends in acting out her resistance.  Husband, on the other hand, enacts his resistance through the tedious affair-with-younger-woman syndrome and alcohol abuse approach.  My anger at this point in the movie stemmed, I think, from the collective’s more prevalent, misogynistic portrayal of the woman as the partner who will likely go homicidally berserk in a foundering relationship (think “Fatal Attraction”), whereas the man is more often portrayed as the sad-sack dunderhead who will just sleep with a much younger woman to avoid acknowledging the problem. 

But what really enraged me was the ending.  Prior to that, neither Husband nor Wife would name the problem.  Nonetheless, Wife’s psychosis more or less named it for them, and thrust them unconsciously into the middle passage.  In the middle passage, BOTH of them had opportunity after opportunity to consciously dive in and actually undertake the work on themselves, to submit to the test that the situation forcibly presented, but neither chose to do so.  Instead, at the culmination of a cascading series of more and more incredible events, Husband and Wife reunited and chose to return to the “Once upon a time” stage of the process.  WTF!!!   Not only did this hit me in the gut as just wrong, it left me with a story, to which I had just devoted two hours of my time, without a moral as a take-away.  I felt cheated.  But, more significantly, I was horrified.  And still more horrified, once I had time to cook it in my psychic cauldron and conclude that this parody of a marriage was just that:  a grotesque exaggeration of a tragic situation that many relationships and marriages return to over and over again and which, in the end, amounts to a life together. 

So people, start withdrawing those projections you’ve foisted onto your unwitting partner and start your journey into the middle passage.  Maybe that’s the moral of the story after all. 

 

"Gone Girl" (Spoiler Alert)

Last night my husband and I finally got around to watching the much vaunted new film by David Fincher, “Gone Girl.”  I had a vague idea that the film, based on the 2012 novel by Gillian Flynn, was about a wife who has mysteriously gone missing.  With that tiniest of kernels, I was somehow expecting a more updated version of Ann Tyler’s 1997 novel, “Ladder of Years,” about a wife and mother who, in the midst of a family beach vacation, leaves the rental cottage one day, disappears, and starts a new, anonymous life in a small town.  Boy was I disabused of that feminist fantasy in short order.  I clearly had not read the fine print and noted that this was a Fincher film.  I won’t go into the similarities in psychology and tone with “Fight Club,” but trust me, they’re there. 

For the first part of the movie, I was lulled into that place where I was mentally raising a feminist fist (several times I’m ashamed to admit) at the specter of a dissatisfied wife, married to a somewhat loutish (albeit hot) guy, who finally takes matters into her own hands and, without warning, leaves her husband to embark on an independent, more meaningful life.  Yes, I was thinking, you go girl!  Shortly thereafter, as it appeared this might be a case of murder at the hands of said loutish husband, I dredged from the murky shoals of my memory the Scott and Laci Peterson case from 10 or 12 years ago.  You remember that particular non-stop media circus:  hunky, sociopath husband murders beautiful, sweet, 9-month pregnant wife in cold blood.  I even turned to John and smugly stated that I knew exactly where this was going, based as it clearly was on that case.   

The next turn of the screw, once I had a handle on what was going down, left me infuriated.  What I thought was the ultimate feminist fantasy, had turned into a misogynist screed.  We women all know this script well.  Yes, she may have had good, or even compelling or life-threatening, reasons to abandon husband and hearth, but she will be punished for doing so.  I prematurely concluded, at this point in the film, that the patriarchal collective social, economic, and moral systems had stepped in and begun to dole out the comeuppance the wayward female was owed for her subversive actions.  I was pissed, to put it mildly.    

The next turn of the screw (knife, to be more apt), definitely required a suspension of disbelief, but I did not get too hung up on that problem because of the creepiness and gore that now took over.  Still clinging to the notion that there might be some type of redemption for the wife, who I was desperately hoping was still a victim of the patriarchy, I had to surrender that much too easy panacea and begin to wrap my head around the reality that what we were dealing with, in the character of the wife, was an outright psychopath. 

The final scenes of the movie returned all the characters to what passes for normalcy in a Fincher film.  However, to enter into those scenes fully, the viewer had to accept that, for all of them, insanity was the new normal.  Or maybe insanity was the old, persistent normal, and it was merely a case of events that temporarily pierced the veil of normalcy.  This, I think, might be the crux of the film. 

My reaction as the movie ended was:  “I hate this movie.”  I went to bed hating it and I woke up hating it.  It’s not unusual that I dislike a lot of films I see.  In fact, I am one of those grouchy viewers who thinks nothing of walking away from a movie mid-way through if it’s poorly done, uninteresting, banal, or overly formulaic.  But this movie, I HATED.  Which led me to think about Jung’s statement that “[t]he events which do not awaken any strong emotions have little influence on our thoughts or actions, whereas those which provoke strong emotional reactions are of great importance for our subsequent psychological development.”  So what, exactly, has this film stirred up in me that my reaction is so strong?  In the spirit of keeping each blog entry a readable length, I am going to postpone this particular cogitation for a later posting.  Hopefully, a week in Jamaica will shed some light into that dark cauldron of my psyche where all this stuff is brewing, if not boiling over. 

 

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Howard

In reality, the work of art grows out of the artist as a child from his mother.  The creative process has a feminine quality, and the creative work arises from unconscious depths.

(Jung)

This semester and next I am enrolled in a course, “Patterns of the Creative Unconscious,” which examines creativity from an inter-disciplinary perspective.  As I seek to engage in my own creative process as part of the coursework, I have found myself musing on persistent memories of a very old friend who, tragically, passed away in 2001 at the age of 43.  When we became friends at 17, Howard was the first artist I knew.  Although I had, as yet, no preconceived idea of what it meant to be an artist, it was clear to me that Howard was the real thing.  Part of my certainty came from Howard himself, who recognized early in life that he was an artist and casually yet firmly propounded that fact to the world at large.  Those of us who knew Howard then will recognize the courage, not to mention the profound self-knowledge, it must have taken for this gentle, sensitive man, who embodied the feminine in his dress and manner, to publicly define himself—in the Bristol, Virginia of the early 1970’s—as an artist.  But Howard’s self-assertions were not without a basis; his portfolio, which was growing steadily, had already begun to speak for itself.  

After graduation, Howard and I went our separate ways to college.  While we visited each other occasionally over the next few years, one particular incident has emblazoned itself in my memory.  I was visiting Richmond, where Howard attended Virginia Commonwealth University.  We met on campus, and Howard invited me to accompany him to the metalworking studio where he was taking a class in jewelry design.  What I saw in that dark, cavernous studio was nothing short of mythic.  Howard, donning his leather apron and visor, transformed before my eyes into Vulcan, the Greek god of fire and metalworking, as he literally bent metal over a flame.  Paradoxically, the jewelry Howard was then designing was heavy, emphatic, and sumptuous, so unlike Howard’s own physical presence (both sartorially and in terms of his long, rangy, musculature) and personality, which were flowing, ethereal, and airy.  As I consider that incongruity, I cannot help but extend Jung’s theory of dreams to the field of art.  That is, art, like dreaming, is both purposive and compensatory in that it serves to promote the balance and individuation of the personality. So it was that, in contrast to his own delicate beauty, the rings and bracelets Howard forged and then styled had a weight and a complexity that belied his own seemingly “unbearable lightness of being,” to quote Kundera. 

The Greek god Vulcan (Roman god Hephaestus)

While I was not fortunate enough to see the more mature work Howard would produce in the years prior to his premature death, I  knew from our attenuated contacts and third party accounts that he continued to study, work, and present as an artist until the very end of his life.  I recently reached out to Howard’s sister, Terry, and she shared with me that as Howard’s work evolved, he worked in many different mediums, including making his own paper from which he sculpted and then painted faces; creating a work of art and then adding  to it “items,” such as sand and styrofoam; and drawing in charcoal. 

Paper sculpture:  Howard Quarles

 
As I enter into my own creative journey, Howard returns to me as a powerful muse, one who incarnates Henri Matisse’s anthem:  “Creativity takes courage.”  Rest easy my friend and may your memory be for a blessing.

Working Girl: The Early Years and the Christian Delicatessen

As I approach the finish line demarcating close to five decades of an uninterrupted working life—and here (and only here), I define “working” as inextricably entwined with the primary aim of earning something resembling an income—I find myself slowing down a bit to look back at my former working selves, who I left behind on that long-distance race course littered with numerous, sundry jobs along the way.  While the earliest years, say between 12 and 14, found me baby-sitting and even mowing lawns on a regular basis (the latter, my first but not my last foray into the unwelcoming realm of traditionally male jobs), I landed my first “real” job at the age of 14, at a newly opened restaurant in Bristol, Tennessee, named “John’s Deli.” John’s was a decidedly Christian (not to mention Southern) take on that ubiquitous New York eating establishment:  the Jewish delicatessen.  Why a small group of local, Christian investors decided that Bristol, in 1972, needed a restaurant modeled on the Jewish delicatessen was not mine to question.  At that time in my life, my family and I only barely, if at all, acknowledged our own Jewish background, never mind discussed it openly with others in our new home in the Bible Belt region that encompasses southwestern Virginia.  So with a newly minted work permit, as well as what would become my lifelong bureaucratic companion—a social security number—in hand, I officially began my journey as a working girl.

Despite my family’s more or less unintentional suppression of my and my siblings’ half-Jewishness, the dozen years I lived in northern New Jersey, prior to moving to Bristol, had provided me with a few occasions to eat at an authentic Jewish delicatessen.  Specifically, these were the few, very rare, excursions I recall taking in the neighborhood surrounding my Jewish, maternal grandmother’s apartment in Elizabeth, New Jersey.  Even the scarcity of those memories, however, did not prepare me for the dislocation and outright confusion I experienced when I began my first week of work at John’s Deli.  Yes, there were bagels (frozen Lenders, six to a plastic bag) and cream cheese, but where was the lox?  The matzoh ball soup?  The challah (to appear decades later in a major, northern Virginia grocery chain, labeled, much to my very Jewish, then-husband’s horror, “egg bread”)?   The Entenmann’s pastries, if not real cheesecake?  Yes, there was cheesecake, but it was a far cry from its authentic cousin that was readily available at any diner—Jewish or not—in those now halcyon Jersey days.  Inarguably, it was an exile to the culinary desert for any unlikely Jew who might stumble through the doors of John’s Deli.  To add insult to injury, my sense of place was further skewed by the lines of New Testament scripture which were painted like a decorative border on the walls below the ceiling line on all four sides of the dining room. 

I worked hard at that deli, though, hard enough to know that restaurant work, in particular food prep in the kitchen, was back breaking and relentlessly boring.  Moreover, I was not very good at it.  I could not chop fast, or uniformly, enough.  I was squeamish about touching meat (my conversion to vegetarianism was not too many years away).  I was revolted by handling strangers’ dirty dishes and utensils.  Still, I did learn how to bake the perfect baked potato (scrub the potato; prick it in a few places; and then bake it in a very hot oven, unwrapped—no foil (this was key)—for at least an hour).  And while John’s would not be my last restaurant job, it was the first one to direct my thoughts to considering the type of work to which I might be better suited.  So it was that, even at the age of 14, I began to envision a more white-collar profession in my future.  That this was a challenging prospect for a young woman who would be the first in her family to even attend college, not to mention step into a professional career, had not yet occurred to me.  Maybe that scripture, incongruously New Testament as it was, which was writ large on the four walls surrounding me as I worked, had some blessings to confer after all.