Archive for March, 2009
March 21st, 2009
In logic, the law of the excluded middle states that the propositional calculus formula “P ∨ ¬P” (”P or not-P”) can be deduced from the calculus under investigation. It is one of the defining properties of classical systems of logic. However, some systems of logic have different but analogous laws, while others reject the law of excluded middle entirely.
< Wikipedia
Where I seem, to myself, squeamishly non-committal, is how I flee from P or ¬P. I do equivocate, P, but also, you know, from another point of view, ¬P. I have a weakness for reconciliation. It is this, I think. Not-P grows monstrously, refuses to stay the mere negation. P is a single small thing, fragile, and not P is the entire rest of the universe, with its crushing magnitude. P or not-P taunt me, mother or not-mother, writer or not-writer. Non-logically, somehow, there’s conflation and writer is among those things that not-mother includes; not-writer is implied by mother. There’s a fallacy, the artificial dilemma, and I keep getting squeezed into it.
I had this liberating moment with Virginia Postrel’s Substance of Style, which is a lot of pages to mostly make the point that we’re aesthetic creatures, and should make peace with the fact that we find aesthetics appealing instead of trying to always dismiss the frills as contrasting with quality and substance and meaning; that given adequacy of two options, we’re going to then choose the one that has an aesthetic appeal, not because we’re superficial and shallow, but because that’s what aesthetics is. And this may have been obvious to everyone else, but it drove home for me the sort of shame I can feel at liking the pretty, the fact that I have bought, somehow, into this false dilemma “smart versus pretty.”
And of course there was the epiphany about the epiphany: the epi-epiphany? That I have a habit of regularly conflating qualities that are on independent axes. That what intrinsic value or utility something has can land on the X-axis somewhere, and the aesthetic appeal can be somewhere on the Y-axis, and happiness lies in the upper right quadrant. But we do this all the time, with all sorts of things, finding we have to choose between the inexpensive and the environmentally friendly, or between safe/stable and interesting/exciting, writing that is literary or writing that is popular.
I recognize, of course, P is supposed to be a proposition, one to which we can assign definite truth value: Mara is a writer. Mara is a mother. Propositions P and Q where there is no implicit relationship between P’s truth value and Q’s. It’s just that my propositions are prone to conflationary thinking, the sort that used to drive me crazy, where you assume because I am a feminist I am going to have this position on the environment, on labor, on NAFTA. Which, I may in fact, but only as correlation. I have truths that don’t fit into neat propositions and propositions to which I can assign no truth values.
Maybe this is another manifestation of polarizing thinking, an inward version of the interpersonal dance, that we form twos because we are alike, we complement one another, only we inevitably proceed to divide the world between us, the final differences have a weight beyond the preceding million similarities.
The first polarity of my life, the younger sister, so much like me, and yet we were both shaped by all of the years we spent trying to prove how different we are. Only now we understand each other, that sometimes the differences that would appear most crucial seem like superficial ones, different expressions of the same impulse. You step back and look and we have lives with the same elements, the smaller people, the instruments, the books, the husbands.
The polarity that arises in friendship, as if to stem competition: I’ll be the happy homemaker and you be the ambitious and career-minded. Only, it turns out, you have a commitment to your family, and I need more than mine.
The polarity that creates the sparks in the marriage, when gratitude for the things he provides that I couldn’t, a spontaneity, a willingness to live in the moment gives way, splintering, into resentment that I must always worry about the bedtimes, the homework, the practicing, the vegetables, the chores, the character, the punctuality and I cannot find my way back to the whole I was before we divided the world between us.
I think time is the proposition that doesn’t yield a middle, time spent grocery shopping is time not spent reading and writing. I become divided feeling. Time is where I feel squeezed out, wrung out, must make the sacrificial choices, spend the evening regretting the blog entry instead of the violin practice.
New propositions, then, that time has not ended yet, that it is what will be, what has been, what is being in abundance, and that nothing is being sacrificed, that the tension I feel of wanting to be in two places, two roles, two lives at once is merely that of a limited perspective.
March 20th, 2009
Ignoring the long queue of serious things to be written about in my text editor, including the question of how one gently demolishes all of the invisible and unexamined rules one finds oneself living by and blogging by (including one about writing about serious things) — or at least how one examines and sorts out the ones worth keeping — I share with you images of things making me happy today.
[Not happy today is that I am still struggling to figure out how to format pictures into blog entries in a way that is not so completely gawkwardly ugly. Long sigh. I appreciate your patience with this...]
Starting with the notebook thing. I have a favorite notebook to write in, one I’d found at Target. I just counted, and realized I am filling my seventeenth of these notebooks, and I only have three blanks left on my shelves, which had left me mildly panicky, because this hardboundness, the dimensions, the line spacing, were all PERFECT and Target stopped carrying them, and I was quite sure that I would run out of notebook and never be able to write again. So it was with great joy yesterday I discovered, yes, the same dimensions, the same everything, the same notebook, but now, with graphically arresting covers (and nasty little stickers proclaiming their environmental friendliness):
Also happiness was picking up a dress Raven had given me as a gift for Ayyam-i-Ha, and this isn’t a great photo because of that self-portrait with a flash where my face should be thing (and ooh, is my mirror streaky? I’ll be right back after I go grab the windex):
But it also poses for you with the also-joy-inspiring, lovely early birthday present that I got from Jenny, a beautiful chickenwire beaded purse, like the one she gave away on her blog, only this one has personal touches just for me:
They just need somewhere fancy to go out to together. Which will wait, perhaps, until I have a husband who is recovered from a hard’s week travel and not sick, and there is a babysitter on hand so that fancy will also mean unaccompanied by the minors.
And while I am busy being delighted with early birthday presents, I share with you the quilt that arrived yesterday wrapped around a chapbook and the readings I am anxious to go spend this morning doing as soon as I post this, from the unreliable narrator. I think I will hang it as soon as I figure out a gentle way to do so, but for now I sit and pet it, it having a lovely tactile quality, and making me smile broadly every time I glance at even the image of it.
March 9th, 2009
So, I lament to a friend, my biggest fear about fasting is if I am doing it out of stubbornness and pride rather than being constantly focussed on the reason for doing it, somehow it won’t count. I worry about praying wrong, about fasting wrong. I sat down to say prayers this morning, wanting some sort of purification, and was interrupted by a child needing something and was out-of-proportion frustrated, unable to focus at all from the frustration, until finally I sat down to the journal and this is what hit me. What I have been longing for is less purification than a lobotomy. I have been wanting to be so freed from thinking selfish, self-involved thoughts, freed from confabulation and mixed motives, in a way that was, perhaps, not completely realistic. But, if in fact stubbornness and pride help me to sometimes to do the thing I ought to do, to follow Bahà’í law, then maybe they aren’t sins exactly (not that there is much of a Bahà’í focus on sin, mind you) but are traits that are subject to a purification in being put to good use.
It’s sort of like the game I used to play of “Opposite Virtues” where I thought maybe the whole idea of virtue could be nullified since in a given situation you could call on justice or you could call on mercy, both virtues, right? and justify whichever course of action you felt like doing anyway. Patience or eagerness? Persistence or the humility to know when to give way? But we don’t think of muscles that act in opposition as nullifying each other, to have only flexors or only extensors would be, well, useless — you’d stretch out your arm, and there it would be… So I suppose virtues could act in the same way?
I have carried around the T.S. Eliot
The last temptation is the greatest treason
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
maybe a little too long. My friend reminded me that we are told to look on each other with a “sin-concealing eye” and suggested that I go easy on the self-scrutiny, or at least try for more fair and balanced instead of going straight for the exoriation. Sometimes the right deed outweighs all of the various reasons that may have brought it about.
March 5th, 2009
Remember in that interminable last election cycle the period when political candidates would be asked “What is your greatest weakness?” and it would be something totally disingenuous like “I just can’t make myself stop working hard for my constituents?” What I’m about to say may sound at first like that but it isn’t what I mean at all
I’ve secretly always relied on self-discipline as the sort of strength to compensate for all other failings. The psychological studies where small children would be tested on their self-control, not eating one piece of candy now in order to get two later? And this trait being correlated with success later in life? Those were my confirmation. What I might not have in talent I have in dogged determination, I might not be pretty but I jump on the elliptical daily so at least I am not fat, I may not be gracious, but at least I can keep the house in order.
It kicks into overdrive with the fasting. I will do this perfectly, with grim determination. By the end of the day, the hours which are tricky when I am well-fed, balancing homework and practicing and getting dinner on the table, meeting the needs of tired children after a day of school, trying to pack more into the over-stuffed hours counting down before bedtime, hunger will leave me tearful and exhausted and I am afraid that if I sit down or stop moving at all I will fall completely apart. I wake up with a grim determination to eat before the sun rises even though my eyes and throat are scratchy and all I want is sleep. Realizing my period is about to start, that I will have a few days of the exemption granted to women “in their courses” I realize I don’t want to take the exemption because I am frightened that adjusting to fasting a second time will be too hard. I want to meet this body and spirit, to be obedient and grateful and I try to use sheer will to control the tightened lips the narrowed eyes when my husband comes home from work exhausted and collapses on the couch but I have no poker face, and I know it’s somehow written there “I cannot deal with weakness of any sort.” I cannot deal with my own weakness, I am terrified of it, and it makes coping with anyone else’s weakness of any sort — even the tremendously natural response to a day of fasting — oh, I break off, I wail. Why is there no compassion in me?
It’s fear that makes me write three pages every morning, fear that puts me on the elliptical every day, fear that makes the bed, the tighter better, finding relief in the taut sheets, the barren plains of the quilt. The self-discipline that was supposed to be a protective carapace, an armoring against all my other failings — my biggest fear is that it is hollow, empty, nothing inside.
I recognize that there is some nuance required here, that what I really want to find is a balance between the self-discipline required to get anything at all done, and the compassion for my own frailties, and others’. But what kills me about this problem, is that it is not one that I can muscle my way through with sheer will power.
I pray daily
I testify at this moment to my powerlessness and to Thy might, to my poverty and to Thy wealth.
but I hold that reality at arm’s length, I want to be sufficient to myself. I don’t know how to do this, don’t know how to make this okay, and I sort of suspect that’s the point. Here I get to be weak, powerless, frail, I get to recognize the limits of what I am able to do.
March 3rd, 2009
There are certain thoughts that seem to get pulled out every year like Christmas ornaments hauled out from the attic, thoughts that work like the jokes Raven and I make every time we see a particular sign, not new or especially funny, but reassuring in their ritualized familiarity. With the onset of the Bahà’í fast, I always think of the roommate of a good friend in college who had acquired somewhere the habit of fasting for something — something I would never have thought to do. Then, I have always been bad at praying for things, even though I understand it as a perfectly acceptable practice in the Bahà’í writings — I’ll say the prayers from the prayer book from the sections labelled for parents, for children, for husbands, for detachment and for assistance. But the praying for other people, unasked, has always seemed a little tricky, from the way it feels strange when other people announce that they are praying for me — there’s definitely an opening for arrogance there, or some other assumption, and I try to take it gracefully, gratefully, and ascribe the best intentions, but still — uncomfortable. Just, saying prayers with people I love in mind would be satisfactory if it opened in me some greater perception of their better qualities. Mostly when I pray, I want myself out of it — ‘Thy will,’ it goes. Help me cut through the labyrinth of my own desires and motivations and my ability to think I am doing something for a noble reason when it turns out, instead to be completely self-serving.
Still, fasting for something. I think this friend one year fasted for greater unity within her family and another year it might have been for detachment. So I annually, at the beginning of March, ponder what it is I would ask for. A sense of direction, maybe. This is a landmark year when I’ll finally have all four kids in school and I’ve toyed with throwing myself back into school (but where?) I’m impatient and then sad at what it will mean leaving behind, and it is not surprising that I am restless and frustrated and frightened. But I (mostly) trust that the sense of purpose and of what I’m doing, where I’m going will show up in its own sweet time, that to have it show up any sooner might somehow ruin it. I think of the flare-ups, the slamming, the little rages that are not as overwhelming as when facing the physical and emotional exhaustion of taking care of tiny babies, but still have formed into habits I hate passing on to the kids.
In Suzuki’s Nurtured by Love there was some bit about getting out of the habit of getting angry (which I read and tossed the book across the room; my sister points out that Suzuki never had children himself). And I am not about the elimination of anger. When you’re not in the habit of paying attention to your needs, anger can be a lovely alert that there is something out of order, from not enough sleep, to a pain you’ve been ignoring, to injustice in the distribution of household chores, to too much absence of the beloved spouse. But when it becomes a habit, a release you take instead of solving the problem… Yeah. I know I can do better, especially when it is something the kids faithfully mirror. And I think my own answer is mindfulness, which fortunately, is what fasting offers over and over again. I notice how many times an hour my mind can suggest a meal would be a really great idea right now. So I work on not suppressing the thought, but treating it like my four-year-old, yes, honey, that would be nice, but right now we’re fasting, alright? Remember that? I don’t distract myself away, just acknowledge, it’s a little uncomfortable isn’t it? And then it’s going to be okay. I don’t know if this means that the uncomfortable things that lead to my raising my voice (mostly, lately, a perfectionistic pressure, a sense of too much to be done, a sense of injustice that I have to do it all) will be easier for me to acknowledge as uncomfortable, if I will be more aware of what is going on before I let anger drive, but it is a start.
