Archive for December, 2008
December 22nd, 2008
Struggling with mood, it doesn’t feel weather-related so much as just an accumulation of chips and dings, ordinary things feeling lusterless. It’s the good enough being the enemy of the perfect, things that are functional enough that they don’t warrant replacement, and yet the little dings giving me just a moment of irritation every time I see them, the accusing voice that tells me I am careless and don’t deserve nice things, that I am superficial, materialistic, greedy to be bothered by a crack in a favorite coffee mug when I have a back-up, chipped dishes, a stain on a favorite shirt, the wearing of the beloved quilt my mother made me, a crack in the screen of my iPhone that hasn’t affected its functionality at all (spoiled! and yet I spoil that with which I am spoiled!). Morning pages are filled with bile and I am amazed at my own ability to summon the effort to speak courteously to the people in my family, but I flee to the elliptical where I can turn frustration into sweat.
And then tonight I turn to Raven and tell him he must start calling restaurants on Alberta to find out what is open because it is completely imperative that we get out of the house. It’s when we are all bundled, each older boy pulling a younger brother on a sled down the snow-packed sidewalk, a cheery conviviality in the faces of the people who are out, the magic of the ice coating on everything, the laughter, a playfulness that snow is still bringing out in people even after a week of confinement, that I am able to remember that this will be something that is retold for years to come around family dinners, “Remember that winter when there was a foot of snow in Portland and the city shut down for a week? Remember the sledding, the board games and movies, and the time we all spent together?” It doesn’t magically fix my mood but it gives me the perspective I need to be grateful for what is there, in all its chipped, unglamorous, and ordinary glory.
December 21st, 2008
Friday night I was really grateful that some friends who are moving to Portland, new friends I am really excited about getting to see more often, who are renting a house here for the winter break, were willing to brave Portland’s icy roads and snow-inexperienced drivers to come have dinner with me and the boys. Because we talked about real estate and the state of schools one idea that came up a few times was that of the abundance. It’s so easy when trying to buy or sell a house to start believing in a scarcity, in there being exactly one right house/buyer for you and lots of competition for that same house/buyer. The anxiety is echoed for me in the way a lot of people get worked up about their children’s education (if they don’t succeed at this level, then how will they succeed at the next enough to get into a competitive college so that they can compete in the job market?) These friends sort of nodded and smiled when I said I try to maintain my sanity by countering this thinking with a belief in the universe’s abundance.
After they went home, though, I thought that I maybe carry around this abundance thing as a habit, that it still requires examination. I’ve been reading the collection of essays Unholy Ghosts: Writers on Depression edited by Nell Casey and one of the more provocative ones in there is Susanna Kaysen suggesting that it’s to her advantage to be depressive “What would we be without self-doubt and despair?” and she points out that her friends who are optimistic are disappointed often when things don’t turn out as well as their high hopes, whereas her pessimism means she gets to either be surprised in a good way or smug because she was right. “Optimism is a lousy self-defense mechanism.”
And not to be the world’s biggest equivocator, caveating that I don’t think that pessimism is not identical with biochemical depression, and so on, but, yeah, that resonates a little. I vividly remember being taken with the medieval idea of the wheel of fortune (sounds so much fancier in Latin: rota fortunae) in high school, and when fortunes are always being reversed, when things are good, you are really just a sitting duck waiting for that reversal. Self-sabotage is a way of wresting back the power, however perverse that seems, to bring the reversal on, myself, preemptively, rather than be the victim when it comes on by surprise.
But of course, that really is not so reconcilable with belief that the universe is abundant, and any moderate middle way seems excluded. And it occurs to me that I can find evidence for both points of view, so that it finally comes down to a matter of choice. I make a grid of the possibilities, the positions, the outcomes:
I pretend that this is scientific. That there isn’t the third option of trying always to act as if the universe is an abundant place that asks of me only trust and generosity, while there is a little voice in my head, that when things go badly, pipes up “What did I tell you?” I don’t to have been naive, a chump, right? But oh, we love stories of the Fool, how he has “chosen” the naive and trusting position and been miraculously protected.
My confession, that there have been the long dark nights when I have challenged God/the universe, attempting the scientific test: “You exist, you’re benevolent? Prove it, make that phone ring, let a message arrive in my email box, anything to cut the heavy aloneness going on here, or that’s it, I’m out of here.” And you know I’m still here, but the phone didn’t ring, and I don’t know that it’s not a protection of a benevolent universe that somehow I was endowed with some nature that says “Wait, hang on, that’s not a fair challenge, and things might, just maybe get a little better.” Or if it there isn’t a simple materialistic explanation with biological imperatives of self-preservation (and then what about those for whom that providence was not there?)
I like to pretend this is an updating of Pascal’s wager, that his wager on the existence of God wasn’t simplified somehow by not having to choose between a passel of religions claiming to be the exclusive way to know God. So I pretend that the wager on the nature of the universe is a non-sectarian way of approaching the whole business, but as I scrape the bottom of this idea, I know that woven into the fabric of my Bahà’í identity are the fragments I’ve blogged before “I swear by My life! Nothing save that which profiteth them can befall my loved ones. To this testifieth the pen of God, the Most Powerful the All-Glorious, the Best-Beloved.” and as long as I obstinately cling to this faith, I have no choice but to keep struggling to interpret the universe as benevolent and abundant.
December 20th, 2008
I wish I had something brilliant and original to say tonight, but this week it has been all about the weather, and most weather has happened before and is happening to a whole bunch of people at the same time, and as my online activity narrows to obsessively checking weather sites, I don’t have any delusions of having any unique insight into the weather. On the other hand, the number of times I have left the house in the last ten days is actually less than the number of cities Raven has travelled to in the same period, which does seem to distort reality a little, allow me to forget about the world beyond our house, our street, our neighborhood. The amount of food (and toilet paper!) in the house was diminishing and I had thoughts of rationing, of caching away a personal stash, thoughts I am not proud of… especially as there are lots of great places within walking distances that actually sell food and toilet paper. It probably was not the week for post apocalyptic fiction, not that that stopped me. I have watched the white encroach and recede, footsteps tracking past our house, the footsteps erased, and I admit a lot of the watching is comfortably from behind a window. The kids had snow days Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but of course there was no planning day to day on whether they’d be home or not, and even though I am not one to get excited about holiday parties at their school, there was a disconcerting sense of lacking closure in the having intermittent snow days the week before vacation, of rituals left undone.
In any case, the snow keeps coming down, and now that Raven is home (sixteen days!) I feel a little more relaxed, a little more able to enjoy a feeling of coziness rather than feeling desolate and stranded, grateful that there is no need or obligation to go anywhere or do more than practice with the boys, play goofy games of Scrabble where our six year old is allowed to put down any set of letters that phonetically resemble an English word, watch movies, read.
December 13th, 2008
Sometimes it seems like No, see, the internal editor chokes. Why all of these weak constructions, why do I start ideas with this wimpy introductions, why is it so hard to find a voice that is strong, declarative, decisive? In a moment of masochism I submitted the text of my NaNoWriMo novel to www.wordle.net and generating a cloud of words, like this one for the blog, where the words I use most frequently are the largest, so I could cringe in horror at the size of “maybe” “like” “seemed” “very” “really”"maybe” “still” “something” “anything.”
Is the steering away from unqualified declaratives a symptom, or a courtesy, is it a philosophy, a hesitancy to stake a claim that the universe IS a certain way? I was reading about rewilding and encountered a claim that the language we use is symptomatic of civilization’s unhealthy relation to the natural world, advocating the use of “English prime” that avoids using any form the verb to be. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, advocating the elimination of civilization, but I respect a willingness to examine how we say things, that it may matter as much as what we are saying. Am I an equivocator, or is it a courtesy trying not to exclude others’ point of view? Is it a reverence for ideas as living things that change, grow and evolve, so I try not to constrain them too much, because I am so delighted when they come back to me modified, when I get to see them take on a life of their own? So why do I still cringe at how wimpy my writing will sound to me?
So the struggle for voice that is neither indecisive nor officious is part of the blog silence. Another part, I think is that Raven’s traveling has begun to seem unending, and the time I was supposed to get off for good behavior, going to Dallas to visit Jenny, got cancelled when he had to go to the emergency room with a kidney stone hours before I was supposed to get on an airplane. And sometimes being the only parent is fine, and sometimes I cannot summon the energy to make everything that needs to happen, I withdraw rather than subject the kids to my grumpiness, I zoom back and forth between self-pity and guilt at not being able to do it all by myself so quickly that I only get glimpses of the reality that lies between them as I go sailing by, a terrain, I imagine, where this is difficult but not unmanageable and there are, doubtless, sources of help if I could figure out what to ask for, whom to ask. I know not to compare insides and outsides but the one voice tells me there are plenty of instances out there of people with REAL problems, the other points out the übermoms who raise multiple children while cooking meals from food they’ve grown themselves and write about it eloquently.
The other thing with the blog silence, and not being sure what I want to say publicly about my life is I have an idea of different people who might read the blog, and what I might say if one asked how I was doing is utterly different than if it were another of them. I think I am a different person in response to different people in my life, until I wonder if role isn’t stronger than personality. Which makes me feel fraudulent and inauthentic. But how do I talk about the Baha’í stuff in my life in a way that doesn’t alienate those who don’t share those premises? Or talk about the writing struggles for people who don’t write, the parenting struggles for people who don’t have kids? Which, yeah, even I find ridiculous. You don’t write just for people who are in the same situation as you because — well, who WOULD read this? But it feels like a struggle to be authentic when who I am seems context dependent. Which is the act? What language do I dream in? Is it a matter of glimpsing the truth as I swing between the different roles? Is this all because I am a Pisces? (or not?)
So I am back wandering the tedious laybrinths of self. Self as matter, with a cool state where it holds form and volume, a fluid state where its volume is fixed but it takes the form of its container, a gaseous state where it takes on both form and volume of container? Self as venn diagram, the little intensely colored spot at the intersection of all the spheres that I particpate in. The self I once thought was partitioned in response to all of the different places I would belong in a day, between school, work, family, friends — but that has remained so firmly partitioned that it seems like those partitions would remain if I did in fact withdraw to my bedroom closet for the remainder of my life. Self as double agent, passing between parts of my life that seem to be in conflict. Only it’s the agent whose ultimate goal is the reconciliation of the different roles, the elimination of conflict.
There is reconciliation. A friend sent me the lyrics to the protest song, Bread and Roses, telling me I deserved the roses:
As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it is bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too!
it helps to think that I am not the first to struggle to balance the domestic details and the need for meaning and beauty, a struggle that leaves me feeling divided against myself.
December 8th, 2008
One of the unexpected side benefits of friendship with Jenny was that when we lived in Dallas, whenever her sister-in-law, Libby, a gifted photographer, came into town from Seattle, she’d take pictures of the kids. She took pictures shortly after Søren was born,
and again after Rainer was born, 
and while the photos she’s taken remain among my favorites I have, I also have to note that I love her way of interacting with the kids, the way she makes the photo session fun and teases them into doing just waht she wants them to. So when she announced in her blog that she was coming to Portland I immediately called to ask if she would make time in her schedule to come do pictures with us again. She’s posted some of the results right here in her blog. Lovely, aren’t they?
December 3rd, 2008
Just finished Salvatore Scibona’s The End, which I loved, but my favorite parts are descriptions of one teenage character’s education at the hand of the Jesuits:
He was made to memorize what Aristotle had said about something, and then what Saint Paul had said about it, and then what Thomas Aquinas had to say by way of fitting them together. But on the exam he had to disagree with Aquinas and make a point-by-point case for the disagreement. It was another one of their dissembling SJ tricks. They knew that as a teenager he was engineered to disagree, so they commanded him to disagree, for which he had to resent them, he wanted to resist them, and where was the most obvious outlet for his resistance? With agreement, of course, with Aquinas. In this way they were making a Thomist out of him despite himself. Or some of them were; the others, the paradox crowd, were trying to turn him into a Lutheran, maybe.
(p. 213)
So in a later chapter the teenager is trying to explain his ideas of potential and actual to a priest
Father Manfred said, “The attaining of the object of the quest always disappoints, you’re saying.” He made a grandly sarcastic fake yawn.
“I mean,” Ciccio said, “I might say to myself common-sensically, I long for what I long for. But, you know, the thing you longed for is never what you advertised. Obviously. And why is that? Maybe because you’d rather long for it than get it. Which is stupid.”
“You’re saying the’rs something the matter with the sentence, ‘A potential is actualized,’ because the subject of the sentence can’t be what you say its and also do what you say it does at the same time.”
“Okay, then, that’s what I’m saying.”
“Okay, but this is not at the same time. This is motion. This is change. There are miles per hour. Time is elapsing.”
“Well, I don’t like it.”
“I’m not trying to be rough with you, boy, but isn’t that too bad? Aristotle is not your enemy, motion is your enemy.”
(p. 220)
All of which goes by way of a long preface to feeling just trapped in this post partum place of the meeting of potential and actual. I have a first draft which no longer has the potential to be all the things it did while it was unwritten, but still needs eighteen years of raising, needs diaper changing and nose-wiping and orthodontics and the thought of revising is exhausting. I try mapping potential and actual to present and future, to experience and anticipation, but it doesn’t quite work. I experience a craving for chocolate, and realize I love knowing I could ride my bike two miles to a nice little fudge shop, but I enjoy the idea of it much more than I would actually enjoy the chocolate. I think about how the unplanned throws into relief all the plans I didn’t know I had been making, like the old trick of the coin in the air where you pay attention to what you hope for as the actual means of making a decision.
I try doodling out new aphorisms for the state about how a bird in the bush could be a new and exotic species with a song sweeter than any anyone has ever heard while the bird in hand is actually a bit drab with feathers askance and its racing heart and eyes already starting to cloud over, and what is wrong with it? What diseases are you risking contracting with a dying bird in your hand? (yeah, not catchy enough to make it as an aphorism or apophthegm, right?)
And still, I tell myself, not even the most cloud-striding philosopher gets to live in the realm of pure potential, that intimacy as the trade-off for the ideal is not a bad bargain, that things not kept on pedestals can be explored realistically. I love my actual family and friends and not just the potential in them, right? Right?
I have early memories of wanting to turn images in my head into drawings and how it hurt that they always fell short. The parental me would address that hurt with “But that’s how you acquire the technique to next time coming closer to being able to translate the vision into reality” but, deep down? I think there is always the falling short and I am not reconciled to it.
