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blinking through middle age

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“Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you’re going to die anyway.” -from Fear of Flying, Erica Jong

Erica Jong’s heroine asks in Fear of Flying: “Would most women get married if they knew what it meant?” She follows up by stating that perhaps in middle age, marriages would work better. It’s hard to say, of course, but seems reasonable enough to presume. But then maybe it’s more likely that a second or third marriage would work best, regardless of how old the participants are. The book’s protagonist is already stymied in her second marriage and seeking comfort elsewhere. Much ado has been made about “starter marriages” and the likelihood of future marriages working because you learn from the mistakes of the first. I don’t know what to make of this. It too seems plausible – but not applicable to me.

If this is true, what of middle-aged people who never married and got no “practice” other than in a collection of short or long-term, ultimately dead-end relationships? I cannot say because I am in this demographic: middle-aged and never married. I have had a couple of long relationships that never held any future promise and a lifetime, otherwise, of flings and experiments to which I would scarcely be able to apply a name or formal distinction. In between there have been shorter and longer periods of just being on my own, which have always been the happiest and most content times of all.

Confronting the ‘more’

While it’s true that being alone and – by extension – independent has given me a lot of joy, there are moments, often more frequent than in the past, that I imagine my calm life could be enhanced by the presence of someone else. I’ve already written before about not wanting to invite in ‘the wrong element’. After all, as Doris Lessing wrote in The Golden Notebook: “What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do”. It’s a delicate balance: you may finally confront the fact that you want and need to love and be loved, but to do so, is second-rate enough? Do you fool yourself into thinking that second-rate will do it for you? Can your view become so blurred that you think the ‘wrong element’ could be right? I’ve concluded that it’s most important to recognize the need for love – and go from there.

The ark of the ache of it

Many times I have cited Denise Levertov’s “Ache of Marriage” – and given a lot of thought to the ache one must feel within a marriage – but what about the ache you have without it? It’s something you feel without ever having had the missing part in the first place. It’s not constant but comes in waves. It can look so miserable when you look at it from the outside. Mundane, like a constant sacrifice of one’s own identity and preferences. What is it that softens us … age? The right element? The sunset? The need for warmth? Previous experience (which can also harden us)? The desire for daily soup? (Soup would really do it for me.)

Past sheds light…

Blink. Blink.

A recent experience, brief enough to be like the blink of an eye, has contributed one significant thing to my life. It opened a long-closed part of me and made me realize it made no sense to close it again. I had so many times before let previous experience influence me, to close me off, to shut emotional responses down. And now… maybe it was this recent experience, maybe my age, maybe all the previous “practice”, maybe the starker-than-ever realization that there are only so many sunrises and sunsets ahead, maybe a combination of everything that convinced me to stay calm, and stay open?

Death & all the little deaths preceding it

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Life, as we know, can be tedious and brief. What else is life? We think it owes us happiness and that our job is to strive for that. But is happiness the same thing as finding meaning? And how does one find – or define – meaning?

This tedium and brevity is illustrated, but also upended, in the S-Town podcast, which has been quite popular and quite… human. The man who is the focal point of the podcast is complicated. Early on he talks about sundials and how all sundials have mottoes engraved on them. He mentioned “Tedious and brief” as one of them:  “All sundial mottoes are sad like that.” And yes, sundial motto or clever tattoo, “tedious and brief” is what we experience, with temporary and memorable bright spots deposited throughout the otherwise tedious (and brief) journey.

sundial

Build your own sundial.

…When I returned from being away for a few days, I looked out into the field and saw that hordes of birds had gathered in a huge swarm in a field near the road, not far from home. Upon closer inspection, one could see the twisted carcass of a picked-apart deer. It’s more common to see a fox in this roadside state of non-being. But here, the picked over remains of a deer, a feast for avian life, made me consider life – in general. And how inconsequential its endings. To end up dead in a field for ravenous birds to pick at.

A realization that someone from high school had died some time ago, someone I did not know well but remember in the mind’s eye – these bright memories that form the spine of all the silly stories of youth and even inform the way I came to identify myself (the eternal, calm counselor to heartsick friends). I’ve reached that age when people either start to die or unspool the threads of their tidy lives into tangled knots of midlife crises. And then it’s the stark contrast between the graveyard (metaphorical or not) and the musical chairs game of midlife.

“The interim is mine”

Never mind all the things we do in the interim before reaching death, fooling ourselves. (The word “interim” now always reminds me of a scene from Neil LaBute’s Your Friends and Neighbors. Jason Patric’s character boasts about something he had done, “The bitch deserved it. She never understood me.” “Don’t you think you’re going to have to pay for all this in the end?” “If there ends up being a God, probably so. But until then, we’re on my time. The interim is mine.”)

In this interim that belongs to you, or to me, or to us, we can live for the little deaths, whether it’s the small, crushing disappointments that erupt under all the surfaces of our smooth-going, gliding-along lives, or the orgasms we covet (la petite mort, in the purely French sense), or all the bad habits we accumulate but brush off until they kill or damage us, which we instinctively know but still act on, and literature chronicles for us:

“Nothing records the effects of a sad life so graphically as the human body.” -from Palace of Desire, Naguib Mahfouz

“My health was excellent. My daily consumption of cigarettes had reached the four-package mark.” -from Bend Sinister, Nabokov

“An alcoholic, his blood no longer able to clot, who bled to death into his joints and under his skin. Every day, the bruises would spread. Before he became delirious, he looked up at me and said, ‘It’s not fair—I’ve been diluting my drinks with water.’” -from When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalinithi

“In such a state, the philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche remarked, ‘One cannot get rid of anything, one cannot get over anything, one cannot repel anything—everything hurts. Men and things obtrude too closely; experiences strike one too deeply; memory becomes a festering wound.’” -from In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Gabor Maté

“A great deal of pathological drug use is driven by unmet social needs, by being alienated and having difficulty connecting with others.” -from High Price, Carl Hart

Real death

I’ve thought about mortality a great deal (it’s human to do so, after all) from so many angles. I am not sure why it comes to mind so often right now – maybe just as a counterbalance to pettiness. Maybe because there is frailty everywhere. Maybe because it seems meaningless to end up dead in a field (even as a deer), which makes me, as a person, think that even though I won’t leave an indelible mark on the world when I die, I like the idea of at least affecting or influencing those closest to me, which is not really possible if there is no one close to you during this fleeting, brief “interim” that belongs to me, to you, to us, to those who exist in this particular window.

Lately I’ve also read books specifically on the topic (Kalinithi’s aforementioned book as well as Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal).

“If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?“

“I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.” -from When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalinithi

Remembering the man, losing the details

I have written before about the passing of detail with the passing of people – how we don’t know what we will want to know from the people who have died before us. We don’t even preserve their histories and details when they live to a ripe, old age – so how can we hope to gather all the detail from people who die at 30, for example? My mom lost her brother last year, and she has come to realize that not only is she the last one left from her immediate family, her brother was the keeper of all the details. She had counted on being able to ask him about things from their childhood, or about things they had experienced ten years ago. When he died, she lost not just him but that last link to the shared history, to the details. And death looms over the life – and its details – that passed.

“It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined.” -from The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

“What we remember lacks the hard edge of fact. To help us along we create little fictions, highly subtle and individual scenarios which clarify and shape our experience. The remembered event becomes a fiction, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings. This is obvious to me. If it weren’t for these structures, art would be too personal for the artist to create, much less for the audience to grasp. Even film, the most literal of all the arts, is edited.” -from The Painted Bird, Jerzy Kosiński

Tedious and brief – and you are not to blame

“Death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order of things.” -from Being Mortal, Atul Gawande

Yes, death is inevitable. It’s coming for all of us, some sooner than others. Life is “tedious and brief” – and does not care for you. But at some point, it is no longer seen as a game of chance or a hand you are dealt. It is no longer abstract. And if you don’t live to a ripe, old, senile age, somehow you are accused of moral failure. It’s your duty to try to stay alive as long as possible.

“Premature death, particularly if it’s due to terminal illness, is no longer seen as lucking out in the divine lottery, but as a personal failure, like a self-induced bankruptcy.” -from Karaoke Culture, Dubravka Ugrešić

And yet if you overstay your welcome in life, you are anticipating death, perhaps impatiently and angrily, while others either want to hasten your death or force you to keep living even when you don’t want to, falsely selling the idea of prolonging youth when in fact old age is all you can prolong at a certain point:

“The problem was her death: it simply wouldn’t come. If it had crawled in through the central heating system, she would have gladly given herself over to it. Death doesn’t smell. It is life that stinks. Life is shit!” -from Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, Dubravka Ugrešić

“‘Why don’t you dream up a way of dispatching old people comfortably, instead of tormenting them by dragging out their old age?’ Pupa emerged from her slumber. ‘Forgive me, I don’t understand …’ ‘Crap! Prolonging old age indeed! It’s youth you want to prolong, not old age!’” -from Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, Dubravka Ugrešić

“All primitive cultures knew how to manage old age. The rules were simple: when old people were no longer capable of contributing to the community, they were left to die or they were helped to move into the next world. Like that Japanese film in which a son stuffs his mother into a basket and carries her to the top of a mountain to die. Even elephants are cleverer than people. When their time comes, they move away from the herd, go to their graveyard, lie down on the pile of elephant bones and wait to be transformed into bones themselves. While today hypocrites, appalled by the primitive nature of former customs, terrorise their old people without the slightest pang of conscience. They are not capable of killing them, or looking after them, or building proper institutions, or organising proper care for them. They leave them in dying rooms, in old people’s homes or, if they have connections, they prolong their stay in geriatric wards in hospitals in the hope that the old people will turn up their toes before anyone notices that their stay there was unnecessary. In Dalmatia people treat their donkeys more tenderly than their old people. When their donkeys get old, they take them off in boats to uninhabited islands and leave them there to die. Pupa had once set foot on one of those donkey graveyards.” -from Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, Dubravka Ugrešić

Waiting around to die

Also in this interminable interim: “As we grow older, we weep less and less. It takes energy to weep. In old age neither the lungs, nor the heart, nor the tear ducts, nor the muscles have the strength for great misery. Age is a kind of natural sedative, perhaps because age itself is a misfortune.” -from Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, Dubravka Ugrešić

Part of this indeterminate-in-length waiting room that is life – and it really is a waiting room, even if that makes it sound most mundane (but a lot of life is misery and the most mundane of dullness) – is the part where you are actively waiting to die. Perhaps the medical industry – kabuki that it can be – is trying to extend your life, but at whatever stage of the process you’re in, whatever age you’re at, it’s still kind of a ‘waiting around to die’ ride at the fair: ups, downs, twists, spins, loop-to-loops, and even some maneuvers that turn you right upside-down.

Aftermath

Yet, even with the knowledge of the expected end – that we and those around us will die – it is something we do not know how to handle or prepare for. I again use my mother as an example here – she lost both her parents, her sister-in-law and her three cats (each of which was over 16 years old) all within a short span of time. To say she was devastated by grief would be an understatement. It didn’t matter that her parents were in their 90s, that her sister-in-law finally didn’t suffer any longer or that, as many insensitive souls said, her cats were “just cats”, she was heartbroken, and the hits just kept coming.

It’s this aftermath that’s hardest to know what to do with. The people who remain: how should they move on? Should they? I mean, do you ever really move on? Are you the same person after you experience a major loss and the kind of grief it visits upon you? Of course it – death and grieving – is a part of life; do you come out the “other side” dramatically changed because, in fact, your world is changed so significantly (because of these absences/losses)? Or is grief the engine of being exactly the same person you were in a changed world (and you start to “let go” or “stop grieving” only once you start to change in facing the new reality)?

“Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.” -from Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter

Photo (c) 2008 Nathan Rupert used under Creative Commons license.

Wind turbines and renewable therapies

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On an Aimee Mann listening kick. It has been years since I paid attention. I think when I first moved to Oslo almost ten years ago, Mann had released a new album, and I swallowed it whole. And then nothing. She recently released a new album, Mental Illness, which is quite good, but the final track, “Poor Judge” is superlative.

But I’ve gone deep into the back catalog:

“Just one question before I pack – when you fuck it up later, do I get my money back?”

Heavens… such memories, both of listening so intently and relating to Mann’s clever, cutting lyrics and then seeing Mann live with Naomi oh so many years ago. Some other life, really.

If you really pay attention to Mann’s lyrics, you actually can get a little mini-therapy session, I think. A glimpse into how things go. But we don’t listen.

Just as we never can take even our own advice when the rational side of ourselves tells us what to do. If such a thing exists.

“the bottom fell out and i became withdrawn”

Many people, even those I barely know, with many different problems, ranging from nymphomania to fear of death, from existential maladies to relationship woes (infidelities, parental lack of communication, getting dumped, etc.), keep turning to me to discuss these issues. Some in a therapeutic way and some in a misguided bid to send me into some kind of (mental?) overdrive. But all I can come back with is the question, again and again, “What is it you want to achieve?”

“My parent isn’t coming to visit this year and didn’t bother telling me. Should I confront?”
“That depends. What do you want to achieve?”

“I want to fuck every person I see. Is there something wrong with me?”
“That depends. What do you want to achieve?”

“My latest boyfriend, who was also my lawyer/contractor/plumber/boss, dumped me. Should I just give up on dating?”
“First of all, don’t date your —- (anything that you rely on). Second of all, that depends. What do you want to achieve?”

There will also be some curious reader who will see all these descriptions/scenes and imagine that everything applies to them. But no, not everything is, “Me! Me! Me!” and the world does not revolve around you. But still I’d ask the same question: “What do you want to achieve (by imagining everything is about you)?”

You can keep talking, exploring, finding out what you want to achieve through your actions – or letting what you want to achieve dictate what course of action you choose to take.

But the questioning will grow wearisome. (I guess that’s why people ask me; it’s wearisome to ask oneself endlessly without a wall to throw the ideas against.)

It all brings to mind once more the words of Pessoa:

“What men wanted and didn’t achieve, what they killed in order to achieve, and all that souls have secretly been – all of this filled the feeling soul with which I walked to the seashore. What lovers found strange in those they love, what the wife never revealed to her husband, what the mother imagines about the son she didn’t have, what only had form in a smile or opportunity, in a time that wasn’t the right time or in an emotion that was missing – all of this went to the seashore with me and with me returned, and the waves grandly churned their music that made me live it all in a sleep.” -from The Book of Disquiet

“There are times when everything wearies us, including what we would normally find restful. Wearisome things weary us by definition, restful things by the wearying thought of procuring them. There are dejections of the soul more subdued than any kind of anxiety or pain; I believe they’re known only by those who elude human pains and anxieties and are sufficiently diplomatic with themselves to avoid even tedium.” -from The Book of Disquiet

Zero-sum game: Learning to give

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I read recently that there is a backlash to e-book sales in the UK. I love the immediacy and convenience of being able to get books on my Kindle device, especially because I live in the country, and even if bookstores were more accessible, I’d find precious little to suit my tastes. I could never feed the hunger for a book a day that is my current appetite, and if I could, I would not find quite the range of things I want. Thus, I appreciate e-books, but there are moments that I long for the real thing. (I suppose this is not unlike something like … if I may be so crass, sex toys/masturbation versus actual sex. Imitation does its job and in many cases may even be more effective, but it’s more clinical. Nothing is quite the same as the real thing. And guess what? It’s National Masturbation Month now! Take note!) In fact, imitation is one of the ways we can isolate ourselves, which is the point of this meandering ramble.)

We could praise this shift – moving to more compact and “less wasteful” modes of producing information, but we lose tradition and the ritual that comes with selecting a new books – the heft of it in your hands, the smell of the paper, the thickness and quality of the paper, the artwork/design, the way the book’s spine wears and pages grow tattered. We love them in a way we will never love an e-book. As cumbersome as it was to travel with books, for example, I enjoyed taking books on the road with me and then leaving them behind in airports, airplanes, hotel rooms, friends’ houses, cafes, wondering if their story would continue – would someone else take possession of the book and get something completely new? What would happen to a book I purchased in Iceland and left in Halifax, Montreal, Mexico City? Now, this will never happen again.

We have certainly lost something – not just in consuming and loving literature but in the way we live, the way we define ourselves, the way we consume, the way we relate to and love others and ourselves and, fundamentally, the way we are. Perhaps it does not matter because the universe as a whole is just a long series of losing things – or things imperceptibly changing. But observing the moment we live in, it feels hollow. No amount of flashing lights and distractions can distract from the emptiness the culture creates.

Dubravka Ugrešić writes in Karaoke Culture:

“The very foundation of karaoke culture lies in the parading of the anonymous ego with the help of simulation games. Today people are more interested in flight from themselves than discovering their authentic self. The self has become boring, and belongs to a different culture. The possibilities of transformation, teleportation, and metamorphosis hold far more promise than digging in the dirt of the self. The culture of narcissism has mutated into karaoke culture—or the latter is simply a consequence of the former.”

“We walk through the world with our memory sticks around our necks, each of us with our own homepage, each of us with an archive stored on the web. We, are everywhere . . . And the more voluminous the archive that trails us, the less of ourselves there seems to be . . . We don’t communicate with each other . . . Oh so modern, we put things on YouTube so anyone can gawk at them. We used to send out ghostly signals of our existence, and now we make fireworks out of our lives. We enjoy the orgy of being, twittering, buying new toys, iPhones and iPads, and all the while our hunger just grows and grows. We wear memory sticks around our necks, having of course first made copies. The memory stick is our celestial sarcophagus, our soul, our capsule, our soul in a capsule*.”

“In all its manifestations karaoke culture unites narcissism, exhibitionism, and the neurotic need for the individual to inscribe him or herself on the indifferent surface of the world, irrespective of whether the discontented individual uses the bark of a tree, his or her body, the Internet, photography, an act of vandalism, murder, or art. In the roots of this culture, however, lies a more serious motive: fear of death. From the surface of karaoke culture shimmers the mask of death.”

We are indeed more alienated and isolated – both from others and, even more alarmingly, from ourselves. But with gadgets, platforms and forms of high-tech mirrors, we fool ourselves into thinking we are self-aware because we are self-involved, self-obsessed even. But it’s the superficial self we plaster all over every new social media channel and into every app – crying out for attention – and connection – but moving further away from it all the time as we turn ourselves into caricatures, and eventually, commodities. And we start to see each other as commodities for exchange.

Treating each other as commodities, and treating ourselves as objects we must market and ‘improve’ so we can place the highest value possible on ourselves (but in a way that somehow empties us of self-esteem), started as a pet peeve for me but has grown into a full-blown worry as the trend has accelerated in the digital age and become its own form of epidemic. Dehumanized automatons cataloging themselves online for consumption in one form or another. I am no less guilty of committing this commoditization crime, subscribing to the “marketplace” idea of love or care. We convince ourselves there’s an endless supply of other, better, more interesting options, and so teach ourselves to dehumanize – that there is nothing to treasure, and nothing to trust in. It’s not a new idea, attempting to assign an ROI to people, to cut losses. It’s a game of emotional preservation, but it’s also a perversity. Eventually it does become about summing up balance sheets and ensuring you’re not playing a zero-sum game. And what in the hell does that have to do with care, love, compassion, feeling? It’s not just treating others this way – it’s an internal devaluation that leads us there in the first place.

Erich Fromm captures these very concerns in his The Art of Loving – and did so long before the advent of the internet:

“Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions. Human relations are essentially those of alienated automatons, each basing his security on staying close to the herd, and not being different in thought, feeling or action. While everybody tries to be as close as possible to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety and guilt which always results when human separateness cannot be overcome. Our civilization offers many palliatives which help people to be consciously unaware of this aloneness.”

“At any rate, the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one’s own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.”

It’s not just technology that has created this, as evidenced by Fromm’s observations from the 1950s. But technology sprays fuel on the fire and changes. Ugrešić highlights how technology radically changes the perception of everything. I relate, having succumbed to the same mindless tv addiction she describes and am now “clean”. I take it a step further to say it has changed our perception of who we are – how we are – what we are capable of (so much more in some ways, but so much less in others):

“It’s a notorious fact that technology radically changes one’s perception of everything, including time. Thirty years ago I could wile away the hours on the cinematic aesthetics of Andrei Tarkovsky and similar directors. Today I am ashamed to admit that my eyes have simply been weaned off them; the shots are too long, too slow, and the plot, if there is one, plodding and ambiguous. I used to love all that auteur stuff, but today I don’t have the patience. In the intervening time I’ve become hooked on cinematic “fast food.” Flowing in my veins, this fast food has changed the rhythm of my heart, my attention span, and the rhythms of my respiration. The truth is that I overdosed on television, and so I don’t watch it anymore. I’ve been clean for a while now, and I don’t miss it a bit. But I do watch lots of documentaries—it doesn’t matter what they’re about, the most important thing is that they’re “slow food,” that they offer me the illusion that what is happening on the screen really is happening. The way I read has changed too. At first I was surprised when friends told me that they were going to speed-reading courses. Now I’m thinking about enrolling in a course myself. My eyes are too slow, the computer screen just gets richer and faster, and my attention span is ever shorter. From the sheer quantity of information my memory is getting worse and worse. It’s not just that I have no idea what I consumed on the Internet yesterday, it’s that I don’t remember what I sucked up five minutes ago.”

Should we be alarmed? It can be argued that laws, social mores, technology of earlier ages also came along and changed things. Airplanes, telephones, cars, inheritance laws, vaccines, and so on and on. Every generation predicts the end of civilization (or possibly something slightly less hyperbolic but nevertheless negative) because of change. But change is inevitable. Does it matter, for example, if young people’s brains end up being wired differently because of their affinity for devices? Does it contribute to this disconnection people my age and older are screaming about? Does it matter that taking notes in longhand will make the information stick if young people never really learn to write? Should these be the things we get upset about? Should we listen as Pope Francis chides the digital world for acting as a roadblock to “learning how to live wisely, think deeply, and to love generously”?

Is the loss of tradition, ritual, care going to objectify everything and everyone? Have we already crossed that line? We already “value” everything that is instant or fast. We cannot seem to handle things that are ambiguous or hard. Where do we find hope in this landscape?

Maybe it’s in all those people who take up knitting; all these “rebels” embracing old-fashioned books and letter writing; maybe it’s the neighbor planting a garden. And at the core, perhaps, it is also extending the sense of humanity and connection – building love, which is actually one of the most difficult things. No wonder we run in terror.

Fromm again:

“This attitude — that nothing is easier than to love — has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.”

Fromm poses a question, which he may actually, in some measure, have answered himself:

“Here, however, an important question arises. If our whole social and economic organization is based on each one seeking his own advantage, if it is governed by the principle of egotism tempered only by the ethical principle of fairness, how can one do business, how can one act within the framework of existing society and at the same time practice love?”

The answer, as I see it, apart from finding a way to love, is to cultivate true giving. The two go hand in hand.

“Nothing’s free unless it’s freely given” – Charlie Hilton, “Pony”

We can only love if we give freely, and we can really only give freely by loving. Actively. And through both, we can feel alive.

“Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a “standing in,” not a “falling for”. In the most general way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.

What is giving? Simple as the answers to the question seems to be, it is actually full of ambiguities and complexities. The most widespread misunderstanding is that which assumes that, giving is “giving up” something, being deprived of, sacrificing. The person whose character has not developed beyond the stage of the receptive, exploitative, or hoarding orientation, experiences the act of giving in this way. The marketing character is willing to give, but only in exchange for receiving; giving without receiving for him is being cheated. People whose main orientation is a non-productive one feel giving as an impoverishment. Most individuals of this type therefore refuse to give. Some make a virtue out of giving in the sense of a sacrifice. They feel that just because it is painful to give, one should give; the virtue of giving to them lies in the very act of acceptance of the sacrifice. For them, the norm that it is better to give than to receive means that it is better to suffer deprivation that to experience joy.

For the productive character, giving has an entirely different meaning. Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.”

*See also Hal Hartley’s 1998 film The Book of Life.

Identical twin

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How I ended up with a broken – or at least bruised – heart isn’t terribly important. I lost my heart, temporarily, briefly, to someone who was ridiculously cute, with tastes ridiculously astute, and I struggled with it for a while. I had been swept up in something I could not control. It became clear that while I had really loved, for whatever misguided reasons, I had loved someone who did not really exist as he had temporarily existed for the brief moment we had. Maybe I did not really exist in that way either except for that moment in time. Who knows? It’s irrelevant now. It took some fumbling in the dark to realize that that’s really okay – it does not, as he had once said, take away anything from that moment. He was right. I was never in the game of pointing fingers and laying blame about anything – it was never like that. It’s easy to get lost in the maze of feelings, twisted up inside by injudicious expectations… until you map your way out.

Always life’s impossible balance between expectation and hope. Probably in my life I had expected that certain events would play out as though they were predestined – like when I was a child I imagined that it would be perfectly reasonable that I might be married and even have a child by the age of 25. I suppose I thought and even expected this because it was the reality modeled for me. My parents had me when they were 24, and they had been married just over a year. Their marriage to each other was already a second marriage for both of them. I didn’t consider that perhaps my life would take a different path, that I would spend so much time undertaking formal education, that I would want to uproot myself from where I came from to explore the world, that I would come to think of being 24 or 25 as being almost a baby still, that nothing I did would lend itself to ‘family life’. I didn’t like ‘family life’ as a kid or growing up, so as time went on, I realized that having some other form of family life – one I built myself – was not a priority. The expectation slowly went away, deferred for an undetermined hope of “someday, maybe”.

This hope was dashed early on for various other reasons, but I was still very young, so I had time to get used to the new paradigm, to build different expectations and hopes while convincing myself most convincingly (!) that I didn’t need or want this ‘family life’ or anything like it – ever.

Did hope die then? I don’t think so. It’s just that when you are in your 20s, you don’t feel like it matters. Expectation, though, was dead and buried. Year by year, one by one, all the friends become ‘family people’ (pod people?!). I live on my own island, making the best of, the most of, it. It’s fulfilling enough, but is it enough? Is there still, against all hope or reason, some hope remaining for something that is the unlikeliest of unlikelies? It’s hard to say for sure – there are glimmers. I have made my peace with it.

Still, the body gives and takes away. Strapping young armcandy-like men swoop in and buoy me up but also remind me that I am not 30 like they are. (Who imagined that one day I’d be old enough to refer to someone in his early 30s as ‘shockingly young’?) These virile ‘youngsters’ who casually exclaim, “Marry me!” because we both watch the same tv shows cannot understand how this (in)delicate balance becomes unbalanced – when expectation shifts to outside hope before toppling over completely. Nor can they understand the set of deeply conflicted, jarring feelings that accompanies this whole thing. The older, the wiser, the better.

He: Actually, I think about this a lot. At 6 AM, most 45-year-old men are probably shaving, putting on a tie and getting ready to have a family breakfast before the morning commute.
She: How do you feel about not being one of them?
He: Sad. Elated. Lucky. Hard done by. Jealous. Smug…
She: Heavens. That sounds exactly like me.

How doleful, but unexpectedly joyous, to consider this shared fate, this shared set of discordant, inconsistent feelings and to know, at least in some way, this part of making our way through the maze is not something we have to do completely alone.

Photo (c) 2013 Julie Pimentel used under Creative Commons license.

From looking up to hooking up

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Reading such an extensive diatribe against the Baby Boomers, and daily hearing and seeing the battle lines drawn between entrenched Boomers and Millennials trying to gain a foothold, I have wondered where the comparatively ‘diminutive’ middle child, Generation X, fits into this fraught landscape. A negotiator? Invisible as always? Luckily I am not the only one asking the question.

Apart from asking the questions about intergenerational politics and warfare, it’s interesting to consider that Gen X is the last generation with active memory of a pre-digital world, when the “looking up” mentioned below, as the writer meant, looking at the world and people around you, face to face and eye to eye. Or meant “looking up” in the phone book or library card catalog. And hooking up? Well, there were no apps for that. (And oddly now that we have apps to make ‘hooking up’ easier, there seem to be fewer real connections than ever.)

“We all need to remember what was important in the pre-digital world, and before the toxic smartphone culture. I’m as guilty as anyone of that, it’s alluring and addictive, but it’s important to look up.”

Douglas Coupland, who coined the term “Generation X”, discussed this point in the article cited above:

“Though the fact that Gen X straddles the analogue and digital eras is, he says: ‘A sacred trust. Once we go, there’ll be no living memory of the analogue era.’

So does he think that algorithmic culture has surpassed or will surpass human intuition? ‘Actually, yes. I know you’re supposed to say ‘no’ and cheer, ‘Yay humanity!’ But intuition is doomed.'”

Bigmouth, whip in hand

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All at once the winds of the past start whipping, frothing up a deposit of the beautiful debris of yesteryear. It’s blowing without warning, independent of forecast.

The man, steady, with whip in hand and discussions of ethics on the lips; the memory of yet another Creeley poem (which I had forgotten entirely in my Creeley hysteria a few weeks ago, despite “The Whip” long being a favorite), The Ukrainians and the frenzied sound of their Ukrainian-language Smiths’ covers.

I spent a night turning in bed,
my love was a feather, a flat
sleeping thing. She was
very white
and quiet, and above us on
the roof, there was another woman I
also loved, had
addressed myself to in
a fit she
returned. That
encompasses it. But now I was
lonely, I yelled,
but what is that? Ugh,
she said, beside me, she put
her hand on
my back, for which act
I think to say this
wrongly.
And on the horizon, the PoPos – not slang for the police, but the “Po” countries: Poland and Portugal. And the UK, which I prefer to just call (Y)U(C)K.
Photo (c) 2008 nerissa’s ring used under Creative Commons license. And no, not that kind of whip.

The ego – at length

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Almost all the French men who populated my intimate life only a few years ago (five to ten years?) have come to be like entirely other people in the ensuing years. All men who vowed they would never have children now have unplanned but very welcome infants and toddlers running around. All men who claimed they would be ‘terrible fathers’ are now the most doting and madly-in-love parents of all. All men who are older, and avoided young parenthood, completely contradict the assertions of their youth and middle years. Did they really change; were they suppressing their true selves and desires or did they simply adapt to circumstances mostly beyond their control?

I am reminded of this as I finish up the wearisome and dully pretentious novel, L’égoïste romantique by Frédéric Beigbeder. I’d never have grabbed this book myself, but one of these aforementioned French men gave it to me back before he had his daughter, when he probably imagined himself (or even fashioned himself) a bit like the antihero of this book – a sex-obsessed, louche writer – a bit self-important, a bit navel-gazing (to use a term others use but I don’t. I never saw a reason until I sat down and read this).

I keep picking up books that are 800+ pages long, and feel a bit disappointed in myself for starting them. I am building up my tolerance and attention span for that kind of heft after years of not reading much of anything. But even the mental toil and time that those books require does not compare to the mind-numbing feeling of reading this tedious book – made all the more annoying by the fact that it’s not in my native language. It’s light reading, not lengthy, not profound in any way. But it’s still an effort, which I only decided to make because I had read about a quarter of it years ago and never finished (obviously because it was boring, eye-roll worthy) and because it had been a gift, so I feel obligated, despite receiving it so many years ago and not even being in touch with the giver any longer.

Reading statements like, “Les femmes veulent transformer leurs amants en maris, ce qui revient à les castrer”, I roll my eyes and think, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Is this really a profound or even a cool observation/thought? Was it worth the paper it was printed on? Still, in the interest of equality, it continues, “Les hommes ne sont pas meilleurs: ils métamorphosent leurs maîtresses en femmes de ménage, et les vamps en mères de famille.”

Or “Je stagne sentimentalement.
En Amérique, ceux qui sont dans ma situation disent:
-I am in a transitional stage.”

Funny that something very brief can ignite an outsized reaction – at lunch yesterday I read Borges’s “The Aleph” – so short but infinitely more rewarding than these rambling epics and masturbatory drivel I’ve otherwise been reading. Is it effortless complexity and casual passion – all these contradictions – in Borges that stir the brain and make curiosity and questioning bubble to the surface? While the sense of “when will this end?” returns again and again with these other efforts.

It is perhaps this same brevity that so alarms us, wakes us up, in life experiences as well. Brief but intense.

Book: L’égoïste romantique – Frédéric Beigbeder and “The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges
Film: La Belle Personne (via MUBI)
TV: Both Underground and Hap & Leonard are back!
Soundtrack du jour: Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings

Shrinkage

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“That was a hold-onto-the-table moment!”

Staring at my poor hand, the victim of my pen exploding on it while trying to scribble down a note while sitting in a parking lot this morning, I’m trying to remember everything I wanted to write down. Black ink everywhere. It feels a little bit like everything has of late – big splotches everywhere messing up the otherwise clear and expansive horizon.

The sun is out! Here in my corner of the world it feels and looks like spring – bright, clear daylight before 7 in the morning. Sun! Have I ever been this elated about sun in my entire life? I suddenly understand why my ex, who lived for sun, would exclaim, “There is sun here!” each and every time it appeared. He practically took the day off work to enjoy it (it was Seattle – you can’t count on getting more if you don’t grab it and enjoy the moment, which is, actually, true of most things in life). I rolled my eyes at a lot of his declarations of joy. I simply had not lived long enough yet to realize that even (maybe especially) these small things are as important as they are.

It is always a bit like this in March; I really am like a bear stumbling out of a cranky hibernation. I start the new year feeling hopeful pretty much every time, but February always knocks me down (some years worse than others). Through my own myopic stupidity, this year I let many feelings expand and expand at the expense of other things, like living in suspension (which I kind of do anyway in February). This time I came back to life for real as March dawned and realized what I have neglected, how inadvertently small the world can become/how my concerns shrink when I prioritize too much depth (and overthinking, one of my greatest weaknesses) over the broadest possible horizon.

The sun, the bright and long days, reawaken the curiosity, the desire, the urge to explore, step out of the shadows of winter – to run hills, to sing at the top of my lungs (or even quietly), to take coffee in the evening on the deck, to throw my arms around everything and everyone I love.

Photo (c) 2010 RyAwesome.

五大 – Zen boredom

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“Everything feels remote and random from afar.”
“Yeah, I have also had my a-ha moment: This is fucking boring.”

Dear “Hideo”,

My friend Emi and I once gave her abusive boyfriend Ed the nickname “Yuki” (after the yuki daruma, or snowman. Why? Because in tough situations, he melted and/or ran away. Same difference, right?). I will call you “Hideo”; first because bestowing fictional names is hard. Second because there is something about the hesitant nature of your cowardice, how your self-esteem and your desires bounce wildly, up and down, like a rubber ball uncontrollably hitting the walls in an empty room, that reminds me of an actual Hideo I once knew. He was easily scared, a bundle of nerves but driven by supposed feelings and strong urges that he regretted almost as soon as he admitted or gave in to them. I recall how, as the hours ticked on, spending non-stop, sleepless days and nights wandering through Tokyo with him, we got into minor disasters that led onward to other seemingly endless obligations. He, distracted while driving his Mazda Miata in bumper-to-bumper city traffic (the standard for Tokyo), rear ended another car, setting into motion days of events related to this minor fender-bender. He was high-strung, hung up on the rightness, procedure, protocol, etiquette of how to handle every post-collision step.

My tiredness and jet lag during those interminable days made me grow calmer and more docile than normal – I may as well have been catatonic. On balance I became increasingly bored until I was more interested in how air conditioning blowing full-blast in a hotel room could not remove the stifling humidity of the clinging, wet September air; it merely made us shiver in sticky frigidity as we awkwardly attempted to have sex, which made him into a fumbling, nervous wreck, both before and after. I became even more tuned-out and bored, but felt a tingling of interest about the background story as to how Sanrio characters ended up being used on the packaging of condoms, like those he’d found at the local 7-11. Badtz Maru the penguin is Japanese sexy time for me forever after.

It is this same kind of disengaged, but intellectual and detail-oriented “let’s see how this turns out” interest that remains when I think of you. It is with dwindling, and possibly non-existent, interest that I write, isolated from whatever excitement or warmth I had once perceived or felt. The feeling, as I have tried to say a million times before – but have stopped myself for one reason or another – departed a long time ago. Today, interaction (if it could be called that) is rote, checking in because checking in is what you do at some point – expected, de rigueur. It’s passionless and entirely devoid of heartfelt curiosity and certainly of urgency or magic, maybe even devoid of real concern. It’s exactly the daily life I never wanted, going through the motions, saying hello during brief windows of available time, running through the dull (and duller) lists of daily activities and a gloss-over mood check. A few platitudes, meant to be reassuring. Each interval feels compartmentalized, and in no compartment is there any fever, flurry, fury or impulse to do, to act, to entwine, to overlap, simply to be together. The lack (of all these things) should not feel personal but does. And probably is. I kept making an effort but was the only one wandering in that compartment, either because I really was the only one who was genuinely interested or because you really are that self-involved, selfish, blind and thoughtless, or as your ex-wife had hissed repeatedly: “unfeeling”. I am a small part of a nebulous problem, one fine, almost invisible, strand in the tangled web of which I occasionally get a glimpse, but into which I am not interwoven.

I knew I would be stepping into an unpredictable tempest of an entanglement – received fair and early warning. Not quite the all-caps screaming, lights flashing warning, which, upon reflection, might have been more appropriate: UNKNOWN TERRITORY. I did not know that that “unknown territory” would be so boring, and that the ‘agony’ of it would be so humdrum. Wishing for small signs, never seeing any because signs don’t exist in uncharted territory, but interpreting the smallest things as much bigger than they are because they are the only perceptible signs of any kind. Every ‘sign’ is either my imagination and/or something that keeps me on the hook (probably not done maliciously or consciously but done nevertheless). Realizing that the two of us are, actually, ridiculously self-centered, both cut from cloth but in completely different patterns, we aren’t going to be sewn together. I already know I will never be – and never was going to be – one of those women who, godforbid, marries a Boeing machinist named Rick, Scott or Bill who drives a fully loaded Ford F350 Power Stroke Diesel, and who spends the rest of her life doing laundry, trying to match up stray socks while lamenting this stupid, stupid mistake of a life, so it is not as though I have been waiting around for some standard, prescriptive finality or entrapment.

Yet, I have been trapped by my own feelings, the certainty and level of them unprecedented for me – but also unreciprocated in their depth and truth. It was an illusion for you, a stepping stone out of an unhappy situation and the mania that followed. I don’t see why it makes sense to stand still to discover that no, after so much time, I really was just a well-equipped harbor in which a damaged ship could complete repairs, but not at all someone with whom a person could see him or herself ‘setting sail’, so to speak. I keep ending up in this situation – thinking that in the absence of something else (i.e., I would not be otherwise occupied with emotional entanglements and similar horse shit, so sitting on the periphery, waiting for the madness to abate or for the feelings to become clear, doesn’t hurt). Yet, even if it does not usually hurt (but sometimes does – I grew in very short order to feel shut out and isolated), and does not stand in the way of anything else I would not be pursuing anyway, I’m selfish with my time, and it’s being squandered – right now. Particularly because once again I’ve put myself in a situation where the terms are all dictated by someone else and their needs, their life’s circumstances. I am not sure it can easily – or ever – be otherwise because everyone else’s lives are so dramatic – or, better said, everyone else is so filled with anxiety, nerves, troubles to the point that they elevate everything into an all-caps BIG DEAL. And almost nothing is a big deal to me. I go with the flow, and you’re easily pulled into the undertow.

Another part of all this is the undercurrent of feeling foolish and suspicious – there are hidden things, activities, falsehoods and booby traps, all silently taking place in the background, behind all the doors and compartments (for whatever reason – to keep all options open, to not hurt anyone’s feelings, to avoid a ‘serious’ or uncomfortable discussion or make any choices). I was just left to wait, wonder, wait, wonder, wait, watching the clock, feeling the days creep by, knowing this was nowhere I wanted to be today, next Halloween or anytime in the foreseeable future. In the beginning, once beyond the skepticism, most barriers down, I am all or nothing – ready – open – ripe – for complete upheaval and transformation (even if it is fraught with uncertainty and uncomfortable change). But when that willingness is met with doubt, a lukewarm response, mania, avoidance, long periods of silence, masks … anything but what I would need to drop anchor, so to speak, all moves swiftly toward nothing.

At first there was sadness and pain (it comes with realizing that someone with whom you have haplessly fallen in love is not who you thought they were – and they don’t feel the way they proclaimed in some misguided, too-early frenzy), then there was uncertainty and resignation (this is the internal argument – you already know your feelings are all but dead, but you’re wondering if you should make a last-ditch attempt at CPR), then came the release of clarity with unfeeling and indifference (accepting that the feelings are gone – those feelings, anyway) peppered by a dash of the compassion I’d extend to anyone swept up in the whirlwind of personal crisis – not my personal crisis, even if I were a piece of the puzzle. And then, somewhat surprisingly, one nondescript day, came boredom. Deceit, dodging, shame, self-preservation, boredom, lack of feeling or whatever is actually going on behind the scenes might matter to me if I weren’t first annoyed-bored out of my mind, followed by the serenity of zen boredom, just like that September day in an icy-humid Tokyo hotel room. Zen boredom, by which I am overcome and to which I have completely succumbed.

In some, but not all, ways, this experience mirrored an entanglement from many, many years earlier (so long ago that it was another century). I met a smart, funny, seemingly stable guy, R, who had shown what seemed to be deep and genuine interest in me. Early on, in the interest of transparency and openness, not wanting to scare me away sometime in the future, he talked about the period in his life to which he referred as “The Dark Years”. It had been the late 1980s, early 1990s, when aimlessness, music and heroin flowed freely – but still well before the spotlight was shone on this ‘gritty underworld’ of Seattle, which eventually exploded into broader public consciousness. There were a number of local, high-profile overdose deaths at the time, and this R character had apparently been a part of this scene, had been friends with these departed people. This history that he dug up and shared felt totally incongruous to the life he projected by the late 1990s – professional, conscientious, tremendous follow-through, baseball enthusiast and whatever-other-stuff mainstream-seeming American dudes did then. Totally out of step with this personality, the goals, the drive I had seen. I could not reconcile the two. (I later learned, and still need to remember, that the ‘demon’ of the dark years – for everyone who experiences such things – is never really dead. It is always there to seize onto a thread of vulnerability and unravel everything, eventually weaving its way back into a position of influence, the loudest voice in the person’s head. The surface is, after all, just the surface.)

Briefly, I had had considerable joy with him. We could put ourselves into garlic comas at the local Mediterranean joint; we could geek out over baseball players, strategy, terminology and stats; I could mesmerize him with my eyes, until he said stupid things like, “You are so beautiful” over cliche flickers of candlelight. We could end up bruised and carpet-burned on every surface of our bodies, pierced by punishing, raw physicality. None of it really mattered, which was the point. Because life was not at all the same then as it is now. I am much older, less patient with nonsense (even if a whole lot more compassionate). At the time of the Dark Years R affair, I actually lived with my boyfriend – a boyfriend who was not R. R was someone on the side, about whom my boyfriend knew. It had been his idea to ‘structure’ the relationship this way. Open. Mostly for his benefit, even if he did not benefit from it very often. I was young and figured I should take advantage. The danger, of course, is that you can get swept up in the intensity of the non-official, non-sanctioned affair. Because the affair has no stakes, you can actually lose yourself in it much more easily.

In fact, I look back and think that, unlike in more traditional situations, where one person meets and likes and is shy/nervous/in the throes of a crush on another person, the fact that I was already spoken for, in some way, was like a safety net. It erased all the inhibitions and hang-ups that come with fumbling-meeting-dating idiocy generally. I was free to be exactly who I was without any kind of self-doubt because I didn’t care what any person I subsequently met thought or felt. In meeting R, in greeting his wide-eyed amazement at the balance between my love for baseball and my intellect, my academic interests and out-of-control sexual appetites (or whatever – these are things he said, true or not) and everything else (possibly even the fact that I was not available), I could just enjoy the situation and then walk away.

But because it was so easy, and I felt no attachment, it morphed into, as I wrote, “getting swept up in the intensity”, which emerged without even realizing it. A strange attachment did start to form, during which he declared a whole lot of feelings, started making plans about the future, asked me to consider leaving the boyfriend, moving to a new city, and for a split second it almost sounded reasonable. You see, danger.

Before I ever had to decide anything, or even give it any real thought, though, he started to withdraw. I can never really know what precipitated it, despite what he said, the little seeds he planted – his excuses. The last time I saw him was intense and physical – but also totally disconnected. I felt nothing but the inevitable ending, and I knew it would be the last time I would see or talk to him. In bed in semi-darkness, not saying a word, his face betrayed regret, written thinly over a deeper layer of detachment – both emotional and chemically induced distance.

“I think the Dark Years are returning,” he announced, as he turned over and away from me. I knew what this meant – regardless of whether the actual darkness and its accompanying past activities and addictions had really returned or not, this was his escape route. I understood that there was a huge part of his life that I did not and could not understand. Only problem was that he did not need to make flimsy or unnecessary excuses – he could have walked away without a word any time – he had always been the one to insist that there was a ‘future’ to be had together, but that idea mostly left me silent – and bored. Despite the intensity, I had never asked for or wanted that. I did not want anything, and if I had, it would not have been that.

That last time was an early morning in late winter, maybe early spring, grey as all Seattle mornings are in my memory, and R crawled out of bed, and started dressing to go to work. I did not bother to get dressed. I was anxious just to be rid of him, pressing him toward the door, feeling a sense of relief that this was just a few minutes and a few meters away from being a part of the past.

“It’s been fun,” I said in a flat tone, standing in the doorway, watching as he walked out onto the landing. He kept looking back at me as he walked away, repeating, falsely reassuring, “Don’t worry — I’ll call.” With sardonic smile, I said, “Okay.” I shut the door knowing I would never see or hear from that guy again. (No suspense: I never did.) I turned on the tv to see another relic of “the dark years” (otherwise known as the 1980s), the film White Nights, with its dismal Lionel Richie theme. Another smirk. I made coffee, and chalked this whole thing up to experience – the experimental years I would later refer to, as now, as my own dark years.

And yet this experience has not saved me from letting the same kind of misguided forces pull me toward and through unwarranted intensity and misplaced feeling. Or imagining there is a future when there isn’t. Or finally reaching that place where I know what’s coming – no matter the reasons and their antecedents – and I just smirk, perfectly zen, and say, “Okay, I was bored anyway.”

Bored, but sincere.

Photo (c) 2011 Antony Mayfield