The Long Way Back

I am ready to accept comfort wherever I find it – even from Deepak Chopra.  I don’t know what made me rent one of his movies through I-Tunes the other night – I guess it’s that I was so frightened again by my strange collection of tingling and numbness that I reached out for whatever looked comforting.   That was the “Happiness Prescription.” Surely I would learn something – something about Eastern Religion in an easily digestible form.   

I don’t know that I learned anything.  And yet, what happened to me was better than learning.  I was seduced.  I had a tiny tiny break through.  Deepak is totally slick with his red leather Versace Pope shoes and modified Pompadour.  But I didn’t care – I was wild for some kind of reassurance, and under the spell of his his spiel about the universal consciousness I suddenly instinctively tapped into something that had always eluded me before.  I understood what it meant to breathe and exchange air with the universe, to be part of the great eternal present as experienced through an individual body. 

It only lasted one day.  Then I went on a bike tour of Rotterdam and pinched a nerve in the OTHER leg, bringing the tingling to that one, too, and sending me spinning back into insanity.  But for a few minutes the day before that happened lying on the couch in my office with the windows open to the chirping of whatever insects inhabit this shady green corner of the solar system I felt peace and the  possibility of continuing, something I hadn’t felt for quite a while. I have faith that it will come again.  If only I could quit getting these dreadful tingles.

What Deepak preaches of course and what I have never come close to touching is meditation.  That great stillness is as unavailable to me as the presidency of the United States.  I can imagine it, but it is not in my capacities to achieve it.  Nonetheless, I am going to try (for the great stillness, I mean).  I did a tiny stint on the couch in my office again today, listening once more to those chirping entities.  Nothing happened except that I imagined my head as a farmhouse with the windows open and the curtains blowing in the breeze.  But I will keep at it; maybe tomorrow I will move closer to emptying my mind of the garbage that fills it, maybe I will start to ditch my Narcissus.  I do hear myself sighing from time to time and feel for just a second that sense of awe at the great otherness.     

Child-parents

So easy to rail at right-wing lunacy, anti-science, intellectual relativist, etc., in the abstract, but so complicated in the particular.  I came home to find my mom on-line; she greeted me with “did you know that asparagus can cure cancer?”  Okay.  We have all heard that raw vegetables have diffuse preventative properties.  But Mom had received a spam that swore that two tablespoons of pureed asparagus a day would actually zap cancer, and she BELIEVED it.  I was so depressed.  Mom.  Really.  And after she had been nattering the past few days about the pre-WWII Germans believing Nazi propaganda (she gets strange obsessions) to which Dad replied that Hitler was a great orator – right, Dad, I’m not surprised, because you think that Rush Limbaugh is, too.  Well, people will believe absolutely anything – that the Jews were responsible for inflation, that we are not causing climate change, and that asparagus cures cancer. 

At dinner over pannekoeken (which were too exotic for their Midwestern tastes) Dad demanded to know how I know that I am right that illegal aliens are not responsible for the problems with Medicare – this is our eternal argument.  How do I know that I am right about anything, that the huge divergence in incomes in the US is not good, that there were NO weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that evolution took place, that the world is not 4,859 years or whatever it is old?  How indeed?  I don’t even know what to say to him. Because I spent several years as an undergrad, then many more as a PhD student, learning how to evaluate sources?  Because I do not inhabit Jacobean England?   Because I recognize the Enlightenment?  Do I really have to defend science?  And what is so overwhelmingly disorienting is that I have often deconstructed the type of knowledge produced by science.  But when push comes to shove, and I am asked to opt in favor of asparagus as a cure for cancer and chemo, I’m going with the chemo.

In the abstract I loathe the lunatic fringe, the fat, self-righteous people in mom-jeans, blithering inarticulately about God, natural law, and the Constitution.  I hate it that they have turned my parents into people who not only refuse to think but who are proud of not thinking.  But the individuals, the individuals.  I see Dad with his mournful expression and bug-like face, with his big glasses and eyebrows like tumbleweeds, Mom with her cotton-candy perm and seersucker blouses, and I just want to cry with the excruciating tenderness of it all.  They are like little kids.  They are kids who never did very well in school and now they have grown-ups who whisper, the folks at Fox, who pull them aside, tell them secrets, get them to be complicit, tell them that they are as smart as the people with degrees.  Of course they are thrilled.

But I also hate it that after ostracizing me throughout my childhood as a weirdo who always had her nose in book – just typing the words arouses a very bitter anxiety, oh look, that Tracy always has her nose in a book – the family has now ganged up on me with their spams proclaiming their pride at being rednecks.  What have I ever done to deserve this - except go to university in order to exercise my right to the pursuit of happiness? 

Okay, okay, take comfort in the knowledge that these little bursts of populist fervor erupt periodically and always vanish again into the malodorous swamp of superstition whence they emerged.  We can trace it in the conflict in Sophocles’s Oedipus – Oedipus rationally seeking the answer when he himself is the unknowing perpetrator of the crime; Savonorola and his bonfire of the vanities tailing the burst of Humanist learning.  The wingnuts will soon be chased back into their slough, just as Savonarola was burnt on the very spot of his bonfire. I know, I know, but it is a bitter recognition, that Mom and Dad will eventually be chased back into their hole  

What do I do with Hemingway?

“Art begins in a wound, an imperfection – a wound inherent in the nature of life itself – and it is an attempt either to learn to live with the wound or to heal it.” (John Gardner, A Moral Fiction)

They went back after Christmas break, and I was alone again in the deep dark Dutch winter, so I reached for the source, the images that most had thrilled me back at the beginning, images of Paris, the Bohemian life, Hemingway whom I hadn’t read since 1988, when I spent the summer drifting around the Place de la Contrescarpe, parking myself in front of 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine and shuddering with the desire to live, experience, read, write, and, most of all be cultured, whatever that was. Periods of great longings are always more attractive in retrospect, and, looking back at the abundance of that summer – an apartment in the 16th and infinite time with absolutely no deadlines, no expectations, I feel some friendliness towards the incomplete and wounded person that I was. So my rereading of The Sun Also Rises this week was a step backwards in time, hoping to redeem that summer and….

We are all in love with Hemingway, right? Even though it’s a terrible relationship. He is even more deeply wounded than we are, permanently exiled, ludicrous, pretentious, unreliable, self-serving, promiscuous, mean, and narcissistic. But he is the absolute coquette, and we women are jealous, jealous, jealous, of his self-sufficiency, his life of eternal wanderings in and out of cafes and bars, of writing a few “true” paragraphs here and there, of taking the train to Lausanne to cover big events for whatever newspaper, and doing whatever the f**k he wants to just because he is Ernest Hemingway, even BEFORE he is Ernest Hemingway. Like Jack Kerouac, Hemingway represents everything that we want to be but can’t because there just isn’t any attractive female version of the blazingly sexy alcoholic, suicidal maniac whom everyone lusts to be. Like Kerouac, his wound keeps him forever incomplete and on the road, looking for a cure that he will never find, and writing novels about it.

(And where did he get that great job??? “Upstairs in the office I read the French morning papers, smoked, and then sat at the typewriter and got off a good morning’s work. At eleven o’clock I went over to the Quai d’Orsay in a taxi and went in and sat with about a dozen correspondents…” Goes back and goes to lunch with Robert Cohn.Walk up to the Café de la Paix for coffee. Office. At five o’clock meets Brett at the Hotel Crillon. Writes some letters, she doesn’t turn up. Taxi to Café Select. Driver takes him to Rotonde instead. Sees Harvey Stone. Cohn appears. Go to Select, Stone reappears. Jake says let’s go to Lilas. Frances comes. They cross Blvd Montparnasse, sit down in a café. Goes back to flat after listening to Frances complain about Robert. Brett has been there with the Count. They come back in an hour. Drink there; chauffeur comes in with basket of champagne. Go to an excellent restaurant in the Bois, paid for by the Count. Bottle of brandy from 1811. Takes Brett home in the Count’s car. He goes home.)

Like Abelard’s loss, Hemingway’s only makes him more extravagantly virile, more desirable. Jake is like Heath Ledger’s character in Brokeback Mountain. In both cases the figure behind the character – Hemingway and Heath Ledger – is playing a game with the audience. I am so overwhelmingly manly, he jokes, so over-the-top unquestionably a real man, that I can play at not wanting to have sex with women and women will only want me all the more.

It’s all a fake, he’s just pretending to be sad. Early on in the book, he thinks that Brett only wanted what she couldn’t have. “…I started to think about Brett and all the rest of it went away. I started to think about Brett and my mind stopped jumping around and started to go in sort of smooth waves. Then all of a sudden I started to cry. Then after a while it was better and I lay in bed and listened to the heavy trams go by and way down the street, and then I went to sleep.” It’s just that pleasant nostalgia for those early lost loves that we never really wanted anyway because we were on the way out even as we enjoyed the flurry of feelings that they aroused, but for which we will sigh, irresponsibly, for the rest of our lives, letting new loves know that they can never measure up.

And the bullfighting, my God the bullfighting. Jake is responsible for the still-current masculine conviction that talking about sports is cool but that what women use to bond (shopping, talking about clothes, weight, kids) is somehow ridiculous. Fine Jake, but I wish that someone could tell me how watching anything makes you manly. How is watching a bull get a sword thrust into its muscular shoulder manly? In other words, how does manliness equate with spectating? I had never lingered over those bullfighting passages before but forced myself to do it this time – like eating meat, I think that if you are going to read Hemingway you have a moral obligation to recognize the thing for what it is. They are brilliant passages, each pathetic detail, the bull going crazier and crazier, his eyes rolling, smoke coming out his ears. But the coolness one derives from watching is so infuriatingly tautological: “These men were aficionados. Those who were aficionados could always get rooms even when the hotel was full. Montoya introduced me to some of them. They were always very polite at first, and it amused them that I should be an America. Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have aficion. Here might simulate it or confuse it with excitement, but he could not really have it. When they saw that I had aficion, and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent, there was this same embarrassed putting the hand on the shoulder, or a ‘Buen hombre.’”

Is Hemingway speaking our language? Are we all talking back, self-conscious, complicit in his mythmaking? Or is it just a joke? The last few lines where Brett complains that they could have had so much fun and Jake replies that it’s nice to think so makes me think that he is. It’s a great story that we tell ourselves, but we all know that it’s a fake. Like the idea of sitting in a bar until very late at night drinking and smoking. A lovely story but in fact it just feels really bad the next day. It’s sordid, stupid and sodden. And we know and still we do it, we know it and still we love it. Like Brett. Jake tells her:
“Don’t do it.”
“I can’t help it. I’ve never been able to help anything.”
“You ought to stop it.”
“How can I stop it? I can’t stop things. Feel that?”
Her hand was trembling.
“I’m like that all through.”

Me, too.

Oh well, “[u]nder the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.”

Exile from my own body II

Year That Trembled and Reel'd Beneath Me

Year that trembled and reel'd beneath me!
Your summer wind was warm enough, yet the air I breathed froze me,
A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken'd me,
Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself,
Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?
And sullen hymns of defeat?

(Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass)

Well, yes, he is writing about the Civil War. Still, the new Terrence Malick movie, The Tree of Life, gives us permission to understand our pathetic little lives in cosmic terms. So the Civil War as analogue for the struggle of the middle-aged woman for mental and physical equilibrium - maybe it isn't quite so outrageous as it seems. Anyway, we have been borrowing from Walt Whitman to think about female mental anguish since Now Voyager.

Exiled from my own body, afraid to be alone, go to bed, take a shower, remove my shoes, afraid of anything that might force me to touch my own skin that does not respond, to feel dead flesh. Sitting seems to pinch the nerves running down my legs, teasing little tingles in my toes, creating a hypersensitive spot on my ankle, and other horrors. I am afraid to sit. I am afraid to lie down. I am afraid.

These are past pains, the fears of 2011. I have been nutty with pain and fear this past year.

However, this is the New Year. In 2012 I am part of my own body: I am with myself, in myself, integrated with myself. My breath is a bridge, connecting me to myself, connecting me to the universe. My fingers massage the pressure points in my legs, establishing harmony. My body is not an alien thing, but a perfectly tuned instrument that I play with my breath. This is the New Year, this a new world.

This is simply menopause, right? The dizziness, detachment, sense of doom - this is all part of it, right? I am not truly dying, right? No, no, all will be well. This is a new year. A year of getting better.

Exile from my own body

I am so ashamed. Soldiers who have seen things that I cannot imagine, suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, children horribly abused by their parents, people who have lost their jobs and can’t buy Christmas present for their children. And here I am, devastated by some crazy anxiety disorder. I have a privileged situation – a job that I love, two beautiful kids, a loving family and friends. But somehow I cannot get myself together to talk myself out of these debilitating attacks of – I don’t know what. Attacks by an insidious enemy that stalks me and seizes my body, wracking me with tingles, numbness, and terror. The panic rises, an iron vise tightens around my chest. The tingling gets worse. I try to breathe deeply, try to console myself. It isn’t real. But my head doesn’t accept that it isn’t real. It must be something terrible, nothing imaginary could feel this bad, I will lose control of my body, I am falling into pieces. I will not be able to move.

I fantasize about going out into the courtyard and screaming until the ambulance comes, they admit me to the hospital and take care of me.

I went to several doctors, but the tingling and numbness change places so that I can’t pin them down. Sometimes in across the top of my foot, sometimes my ankle goes numb, then tingling up my leg. Then the next day it is the other leg. It feels swollen but there is no visible swelling.

And then I tell myself think of Grandma – at my age having to go wait tables at Woolworth’s to make ends meet after Grandpa died, think of her having electric shock treatment, good God, for depression. What is wrong with me that I can’t pull myself together?

I am not used to living alone. This isn’t new; I was very depressed back in 1982 when I lived alone for a few months, depressed when I was so alone in my first marriage. But what is different that this has started to paint itself on my body. I pray for it go away. Let me feel seamless again, not notice my body. Please go away and leave me alone.

I have a new sympathy for madness. I never understood that madness is entirely physical – that is the very essence of it. We can’t get away because it seizes the body. I have always felt that slight disconnect of not quite fitting safely into my body, but this total alienation, this exile from myself, is new. I see pictures of myself smiling and think that was before I was sick. I want to go back. I am so ashamed of myself for falling to pieces, but I would give anything to go back.

More on DSK

Have to re-think what it means to be a feminist. I have never asked myself many questions about it, taking it for granted. Of course I’m a feminist. After all, for a specialist in literature that means granting authority to voices that resist the master narrative. That's what I do for a living. But reactions to the DSK case have turned a light on in my head – for the first time, I have a sense of why some people dislike feminists as a group.

The feminists they dislike are the ones who seem happy to ignore the basic protections of our legal system – like presumption of innocence – in the case of a rich white guy to argue that of course he is guilty, even if the case gets dismissed, as will happen any day now. People who argue that the fact that the accuser turns out to be a fraudster does not mean that her word on this should be disqualified even though the single bit of evidence we have is her testimony. People who mistake the broad metaphor of rape for the legal reality of rape by interpreting an unpleasant interaction between a rich, white male and a poor woman of color as necessarily a literal case of rape.

Most frustrating of all to me is that they will not own the problem that they create in arguing that the jury (which of course will now never sit) should take the word of a known liar for proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If we extend that argument we have to justify accepting the word of all those racists who have identified random men in a police line up. The problem with our judicial system is that it has convicted the innocent to a degree that we are just now beginning to fathom through DNA evidence because juries do in fact listen to an emotionally persuasive voice.

When I think of all the people later discovered to have been innocent who have been locked away because the jury takes an accuser’s word as true I want to be very very sure before we convict. I don’t care what color the accused is – I am no more willing to lock up an innocent rich white person than I am a poor person. The eagerness to lock up a rich white person is a manifestation of a particular ideology. I have spent much of my adult life arguing that feminism is not about ideology; it’s about listening to a variety of voices. I continue to maintain this. But I do understand why a certain type of feminism arouses such disgust. Yeah, it is very difficult to make rape charges stick, but it should be.

Mac MacClelland’s I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD

I had to hunt it down – it’s been on all the blogs the past few days, Mac MacClelland’s story of how violent sex with her buddy Isaac cured her of the post-traumatic stress disorder she had acquired watching a horrendously abused Haitian woman called Sibylle flip out. The usual stable of highly privileged journalists were calling the story brave – but I’m pretty sure that only other journalists would have that reaction. I think that rest of us are probably more likely to think that poor Sibylle is sad hero of the story, the one with the problems, the one who must be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The journalist from the most comfortable society the world has ever known who plays at living in war zones, disaster areas, then flies back home after a couple of weeks, doesn’t really have a lot of standing to represent herself as deeply traumatized but still brave after a trip to Haiti and then a really violent round of sex.

What kind of a person writes a story like this after witnessing the absolute catastrophe of tens of thousands of ruined lives? “The shocking lack of sympathy I got from some industry people I talked to about my breakdown was only compounding my concerns that I didn’t deserve to be this distraught. ‘Editors are going to think I'm a liability now. What kind of fucking pussy cries and pukes about getting almost hurt or having to watch bad things happen to other people?’"

No. The question is not what kind of pussies puke after seeing tragedy. The question is what kind of prima donna asks us to sympathize with her when she has just asked to stare at pretty much the worst life has to offer. What would make her imagine that we read her accounts of disaster zones to sympathize with her reactions to them?

Happily, it looks like journalists are beginning to feel a bit silly about embracing the article. One journalist's defensive response to readers’ generally disgusted reaction to Mac’s grotesque egocentrism pretty much says it all. The journalist sort of gives up trying to defend herself and settles for: “On behalf of free thinkers and art lovers everywhere, I reserve the right to enjoy writing you'd rather I didn't. I'm as overly politicized, hypercritical, and analytic as any other neurotic journalist….Some things are simply to be enjoyed for their decadence. This is one of them.”

No. No one gives a rat’s ass what any journalist reads for pleasure. We are objecting to your characterization of Mac’s piece as fearless. Yes, to the half-witted assertion that it takes guts to hang around in a situation which you can LEAVE, go home to food, comfort and fake violent sex after a couple of weeks.

Okay, we need journalists to do that. But we do not need hear from them how brave they have been. Because their psyches just aren’t really the point. We need them because we wouldn’t know anything at all without them, but having to wade through the journalist to get to the information is a pretty high price. It is really disgusting and really embarrassing.