Welcome — have a piece of cake, folks. It’s the third anniversary of WTHIT!
The light has been returning, as the days grow longer again and we set the clocks forward, and so has my equilibrium and happiness — unresolved tensions with Ted notwithstanding. (Per some breaking gossip, it appears as if he may have quit or been let go after an angry confrontation with management.)
As I continue to go on dates with strange men from the free dating site — including an extremely tall Polish Ph.D who cautions that he will “test my humanitarianism and liberalism” — it occurs to me: I don’t want any man to change this. In the past, I have identified so completely with my caustic amours that their pet miseries became (and added to) my own.
**
When I was younger, I used to think if I can just get with this or that guy, life will be complete, and I will be happy. Never mind that my interactions and conversations with that particular individual more often than not left me feeling the exact opposite. I have the unfortunate (or enviable, depending on your point of view) tendency to fall into the reality and thought-world (and depression) of other people the way one might slip on some slick tile and fall into a swimming pool. And it’s hard enough for me to climb out of my own thought-pool. It took me twenty-five years the first time.
Of course you, loyal readers, well know that one of my habits is to think everything completely to death. I went to the proper philosophy-oriented college for this, of course: the brain-wanking went on around the clock, and it was highly fashionable to be as grim as possible in one’s premises and conclusions. Somewhere along the line, I had become convinced that the truth of a thought was directly proportional to how painful it was to entertain. Perhaps because the “truth” with which I grew up depended upon the paranoid avoidance of all other, threateningly contradictory input, and facing that input and experiencing the subsequent disillusionment was painful. I felt deeply betrayed by those who had, I felt, sold me a so-called bill of goods.
Closed-minded cynicism seems to be common among kids who go through these kinds of betrayals: we tend to view the world through the prism of our personal injuries and disappointments, and take the good things for granted. What’s worse, we would rather be “right” (this time) than heal, or make the changes that might just possibly allow a thin sliver of sunlight to penetrate the gloom. Pessimism becomes a habit, a chronic disease that becomes part of our identity. We wouldn’t know who we were without our bitterness and our depression.
Funny thing is, I didn’t miss it at all when it went away.
And it’s hit me, amid all these coffee and lunch dates: I’d rather be by myself than with someone who triggers those old habits. I feel like an alcoholic might when confronted with dates who are big drinkers. I like being out of pain. I like enjoying the present moment. Simple presence — and not some constant remove from the now, the restless daydreams of a dissatisfied imagination, into which I’ve escaped since adolescence — is what saves me now, every day.
**
My saucy gay 74-year-old former monk friend, who turned me onto the contemporary English poet David Whyte, has lent me a DVD of David giving a live talk in San Francisco. During the course of the talk, David recites several of his poems with his gorgeous, resonant Yorkshire accent, including the poem “Start Close In.”
Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.
Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people’s questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.
To find
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voice
becomes a
private ear
listening
to another.
Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.
Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
**
Give up on other people’s questions, he says. Don’t let them smother something simple. This is exactly the danger when, like me, you have a tendency to get derailed by other people’s realities. Especially when those “other people” are men — who tend to have better-policed boundaries and a more robust ego than I do — particularly men to whom I form some kind of romantic attachment.
“You don’t let anyone take you away from the conversation that you were born to, and that you were made for,” David cautions.
In today’s world, we should be saying “no” about three times for every “yes” that we say…a good “no” says that there’s a bigger “yes” to be said…and it says that you have a promise inside you, and a faithfulness that you’re holding to that’s beyond this present sense of besiegement…
Lately I have felt somewhat besieged by the demands of my gentleman callers. Last week a man about whom I felt decidedly ambivalent (at best!) decided he wanted to see me again — right away! (Not free tomorrow? What about this weekend?! Soon! Soon!)
I could already feel my old habits kicking in on the first date, when confronted with his educated, urbane naysaying — the placating nodding, the disingenuous smile, the beginnings of invisibility. I wasn’t comfortable being myself. I was making an effort to identify with him and to please. The things women learn tacitly from our mothers and from cultural messages that relate the expectations for our gender (as wives and mothers): Take care of everyone! Don’t hurt anybody’s feelings! Don’t be disagreeable! (Even the most ostensibly “liberated” women I’ve met occasionally find themselves slipping into passive aggression rather than face a conflict head-on.)
After a few attempts to direct the flow, I let my date dominate the conversation, which, while certainly intelligent and even interesting, was not particularly warm or personal. I found myself glancing at my watch.
Of course he liked me; I wasn’t even there. I was a mirror. As I have been so often in the past. This is not what I’d call being “faithful” to the “promises” I’ve made to myself. This feels like a leap backwards, visiting unhappier days…and I have no desire to return to those days.
A “no” to this suitor may be a “yes” to me.
**
Words cannot express, however, the love and gratitude I feel toward David Whyte. I wouldn’t mind losing myself in his expansive and generous worldview, but he wouldn’t want me to walk any path other than my own. And for that I say: Can we clone him, please? He is precisely the sort of man I would love to meet.
I did actually meet him, once, at a signing at a local bookstore. He was as gracious, approachable, and good-humored as he seems on tape, a striking Anglo-Irishman with what they call distinguished graying at the temples of his thick shock of dark hair. With his look and his presence, he could easily have had a career as an actor. He is in an apparently happy second marriage now, and has two children, including a son who recently graduated college. But surely he can’t be the only man alive who perceives the grandeur in everyday objects and listens respectfully to silence? Who has such a finely tuned sense of the numinous he can elicit an almost religious awe in atheists like my former monk friend with a single well-spoken observation?
I’ve spent time with plenty of self-titled (why would one want a label anyway?) nihilists and pessimists and positivists and scientific materialists and existentialists and Marxists and hedonists and anarchists and academic Buddhists and all form of hyperintellectual wank-ists. I just can’t take the fluorescent-lit mental masturbation anymore, which turns arid and sore without the lush swampy wetness of feeling, intuition, and mystery — those “dark,” “irrational,” and yes, even “feminine” elements that resist pigeonholing, analysis, and compartmentalization. “Not everything that counts can be counted,” said Gandhi. A bumper sticker sound byte, but nonetheless astute.
I want a poet, damn it. At least one in spirit. Not a furious slammer-jammer or a conventional sentimentalist who pens syrupy greeting card verse, but someone who will get the things about me I need to get gotten. Who won’t attempt to make me feel crazy, or wrong, or as if I should just kill myself now. Who will help remind me of beauty, and of why human experience is unbelievably rich, instead of trying to make me forget it (again) now that I know it. Someone who doesn’t take every bloody fucking miracle of existence for granted just because the religious fundamentalists are out of their minds. It’s not an either-or proposition, for Christ’s sake.
**
When I got an email from my would-be beau after our second date, interpreting my own experience for me in condescending terms — that my hesitation to see him again was not because I didn’t think he was a good fit (I didn’t), or because I wasn’t sexually attracted to him (I wasn’t), but because I was “afraid” — that was the dealbreaker.
For a moment I flashed back to the various passages in Fear of Flying, which I had read again recently, in which Isadora Wing obediently accepts the arrogant armchair psychoanalysis practiced upon her by her cool-headed Asian husband and her potty-mouthed British lover. Erica Jong expertly captures how even the smartest, most educated women will still go on allowing the males in their lives to be the final authorities and to infantilize them (with an indulgent smile and a metaphorical pat on the head), as if Daddy still knows best.
Another story David Whyte tells is the old myth of an early tribe in Ireland, a peaceable lot, lovers of beauty, whose attitude toward strangers is hospitable rather than hostile. These gentle souls are confronted by a very martial group of new immigrants on a hillside. The latter group charges the former with their weapons raised, and the peaceable natives “turn sideways into the light and disappear.” David describes them as “refusing to have that kind of conversation.” They will not engage under the terms set by the aggressors. He warns us against falling into our habitual patterns of engagement and contention, the same old tired arguments we’ve had a hundred times. And I know as he speaks that I don’t want that.
One of the nicest things about being with Sam (who is twenty years younger than I am) was that he showed me implicit respect (respect for his elders?) without my having to fight, negotiate, or otherwise struggle for it. He didn’t seem interested in exerting or exhibiting power over me in any way. That was refreshing — and healing. It showed me that not all my relationships with men have to be about who wins. Just being with Sam felt like winning.
I want more of that. I want a peer and a co-explorer, not another father. Not another competitor seeking weaknesses to exploit. Sonny was, oddly enough, a movement in the right direction, when I think about things from this angle: his open-ended curiosity outweighed his need to label everything, including me. He was definitely more like a peer, at times something like a fellow traveler, not a self-appointed authority figure or scold. (Like what my brother used to be, before he bought his acre of land, became a father himself, and stiffened into rigid fundamentalism.) Sonny loves yoga, Eastern spirituality, women…and David Whyte.
So even while I was making not quite the best choices for myself, I was starting to make better ones. Progress. And then Sam. In this light, it’s hard to be pessimistic.
**
David also mentions that the root of the word “desire” is the Latin de sider, “of the stars,” suggesting that to have a desire is to hold one’s “star” inside oneself…to follow a sort of true North of the soul.
What kind of “star” was my irresistible, persistent desire for Ted? I never had it under control, even a year ago, when I felt pangs of jealousy about his fondness for young women and resolved not to surrender to my nascent feelings. A lot of good that did. Lately I fancy I see his face everywhere — on strangers in the street, in newspaper photos, on extras in movies. As if everything and everyone were conspiring to make me think about him. They say we see what we look for.
Now he may be gone. I may be delivered, belatedly. I’ll miss him, even though he was blocking the entrance for anyone else. I doubt he’ll contact me, either by phone or online. Part of me wishes he would. A large part, actually.
But what kind of “conversation” were we having, really? On the surface, a good one, an affable one between peers who liked and respected each other. He appreciated literature and Eastern thought and had an attitude of curiosity toward the larger world. Beneath that sunny veneer, however, existed the all too familiar narrative of the carrot and the stick — of one person subtly lording it over the other, hinting at rewards never to come. I said yes to being toyed with, alternately the object of intense flirting and casual ignoring.
Is it any wonder that the only way to take back my power was to ignore him right back?
Maybe that was my way of turning sideways into the light.
I want to know
if you know
how to melt into that fierce heat of living
falling toward
the center of your longing
— David Whyte
thanks for the pointer to Whyte + love the “turn sideways into the light and disappear.”
I love that poem of his too.
Sounds like you’re on the right track. I’m hoping you found it within yourself to tell Bad Date that he wasn’t a good match for you, and why. If for no other reason, it sounds like he needs it spelled out to him that it isn’t you, it’s him. Take it from me, we both know I’ve been that guy all too often in the past, and he isn’t going to come to that realization all on his own.
I’m disappointed that you threw hedonism in with all the fluorescent-lit mental masturbators–sounds to me like hedonism is, at least in a certain regard, what you’re after. (Existentialism I can see, by association if nothing else.)
Then again, I think I fall into that big-drinker analogy you gave just a little too perfectly.
LOL Russ (“I’ve been that guy” and drinker analogy). I don’t think you’ll be terribly surprised to know that I was actually thinking about a good friend of ours while writing a good portion of this. (AKA Debbie Downer the Determinist.)
My beef, I suppose, is that the “hedonists” don’t call themselves “hedonists.” What I know are a lot of principled philosopher-hedonists, and that’s just not the same. Why everything has to be dissected down to its minutest parts, until it’s good and dead, I’ll never know, and where’s the joy in that? Everything gets defined down to the pursuit of sensation and nothing more, when there’s a LOT more, whether or not we admit it.
Wallace Stevens is my poet of the day. Here’s a stanza from his poem ‘Six Significant Landscapes.”
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses –
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon –
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
And this one, “Gubbinal,” was my song at school, surrounded by our morose pessimistic cohorts –
That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.
That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
I don’t know who you mean by Debbie Downer the Determinist–unless you mean Hammerhead, the Damned-and-Determinedist, who would just love to be called “Debbie”, I can’t even tell you.
I’m not going to defend the over-analytical nature of many of our cohorts, college or otherwise (even though I may qualify as one of them), but let me suggest something to you: many of us, particularly us out on The Spectrum, enjoy that kind of dissection. That may not be your bent, but if it gives sufficient pleasure, it still qualifies as hedonism. You may dismiss it as mental masturbation, but to me that’s not a derogatory term–masturbation is a *good* thing. Trust me, I’ve got that down to a science as well…and the results are mind-blowing. (“Mind-blowing”–now there’s a good alternate term for mental masturbation, right there.)
Not that I’m encouraging you to seek out the company of those that aren’t firing your cylinders. Just don’t think that they’re miserable in what they’re doing–perverse pleasures still count. But if your words are not for their ears, or vice versa, of course you shouldn’t take it as your own failing. Remember one of the first tenets of 70′s feminism: don’t apologize for having standards. Louise had a good point: you get what you settle for.
You could always do the guy thing: if you see Bad Date again, hold forth on your woo-wooism as unrelentingly as he is analytical. Don’t get sidetracked if he tries to break down your reasoning, just come at him from a different angle. Be the crazy hippie chick you just know he’s afraid of, deep down.
mind-blowing, lol
but it’s all about the exchange, isn’t it?
the magic of understanding and learning – change
there’s some kind of gravity towards same old shit…
but I fucking want to fly.
“I fucking want to fly.” LOL nice one Blue.
I guess that’s the bottom line, not to feel dragged down.
I already have voices in my head 24/7 that criticize everything I say; some of them sound like my dad, some of them sound like Jeannie (I’m still arguing with her in my head), some like my mom, and some are a combined chorus of collegiate voices – all male, and none of them tutors/professors – who articulate every possible outer attack (whether or not it comes).
The main reason I’m still hiding away on this blog is because I fear that the combination of virulent outer and inner critics together will overcome me. They practically killed me already, before I learned how to sit still, be present, and break the thought loop. (A writer friend once complained to me of how Elizabeth Gilbert writes on the defensive, anticipating attack, almost apologetic at times – a style I understand too well.)
One of those voices is undoubtedly Debbie’s – and yes, he’d be delighted to be addressed as such, no? You got that right. Another would be Leon, who could be head-pattingly dismissive.
My constant and often losing battle with them all is to resist the box-ification of reality, to point out that every choice we make regarding the language we use eliminates a whole gallery of possibilities. The very framing of a question determines how we are even invited to think about things. (Simplistically and famously, “When did you stop beating your wife?”) We inevitably grasp only part of the proverbial elephant. Artists know they’re speaking figuratively at best; philosophers seem to forget this with increasing stridency.
And so as with my fundamentalist papa, I wind up lapsing into frustrated silence – knowing that the whole of what-is has been greatly diminished by his framing of it, but at a loss as to how to respond.
I definitely don’t want to allow this dynamic to exist in future intimate relationships. I did send the suitor on his way, and I did tell him why. He still didn’t seem to get it.
Well, any doubts I might have had about eliminating my educated European suitor were cleanly dispatched by the Stanislaw Lem quote he sent me yesterday. It seemed to fit seamlessly with something I had heard by DW that day, along with my thoughts while reading old Bertie Russell again.
I enjoy some of BR’s arguments in “Why I Am Not a Christian,” and his wit is highly entertaining. But I take exception to his dismissive, cynical attitude toward the wonder that is the cosmos (in marked contrast to that of another giant among atheists, Carl Sagan). Anyway, I was a bit annoyed with my old humanist ally and his bah-humbuggery.
So this is the Lem quote I got in my email:
“For moral reasons I am an atheist. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally.”
I took it as a sign that I’d made the right decision.
Perhaps I’m over-analyzing my own over-analysis, but I have to speak up in defense of it: while we can say that in breaking down something oftentimes we don’t see the forest for the trees, be careful not to throw the baby out with the bongwater, as we say up here in Seattle. (OK, as *I* say…but it’s catching on….) By which I mean, avoiding close inspection and inquisition because you’re afraid of getting mired down in it, or parsing it away to “nothing”, is the opposite mistake.
Conversations with the Damned-and-Determinedists like Hammerhead may be daunting to some, and certainly it can be frustrating–that’s how I came to give him the nickname. (When people asked me why I called him that, I’d say, “You ever talk politics with him? You’ll want to take a hammer to his head.”) I remember a few years back I was in the company of a few non-college folks, at least one of whom thought that I was being too forceful in my opinions. Out of nowhere I said something that I haven’t forgotten: “I’m not trying to change your mind; I’m trying to change *my* mind.” Not everyone takes this outlook, but bear it in mind if you find yourself in disputational company.
The way I see it, everyone has their own bent. You like yoga, I like drinkin’. The tacit understanding here is that I won’t try to get you drunk, if you don’t try to get me to put my leg behind my head. Long as we can color within those lines, it’s all dialectic at its most healthy.
Aha, you used the word “healthy”…this trigger word gave me a little more clarity…as did my scientist suitor, who sent me a long, convoluted e-mail that demonstrated almost frighteningly his utter psychological instability.
It’s not the analytical thinking per se it’s the non-wholistic nature of it as I’ve seen it fall out in practice. (I’m avoiding the term “holistic” because of its current connotations, which makes me somewhat sad.) Certainly not by everybody I’ve known. But the way of our firmly “rationalistic” school – as with Dad, as with many intellectuals of my acquaintance – was to treat the emotional, intuitive, sub-conscious, non-linear-thinking dimensions of human existence and experience with suspicion, dismissiveness, and often outright contempt. (Those four years were some of the most difficult of my life. I think I do deserve some credit for forcing myself to “converse” in ways wholly unnatural to me, just for the sake of literacy, even when to do so was painful, like walking with bound feet.)
What I saw was this lopsided focus often went hand-in-hand with psychological illiteracy and even, ultimately, psychological ill health. (Depressed? Take a pill. Chemically regulate the machine and everything will be fine.) There was a big shortage of EQ. I reiterate: I have not found this to be true of everyone who “thinks things to death.” But it was positively rampant at St. Whoseewhatsit’s. I couldn’t identify what felt so wrong at the time. I didn’t have the language. I’m obviously still trying to find it.
I have been thinking about this today after dealing with the madness (!) of a message that was brimming with irritatingly egotistical assertions (e.g. how attracted I should be to him), projections about me (that demonstrated he had neither seen nor heard me), disturbing revelations about his marital history (with a wife he called a “frigid monster,” who was the story’s sole villain) his incarcerations, the order of protection against him (he claims it’s a miscarriage of justice), bottomless self-pity and blame with no sense of his own choices or responsibility in the matter…and to top it all off, a racist epithet about his sentencing judge. I’ll probably write more about this later.
But it’s times like this I’m grateful that I listen to my irrational “gut.”
Right on! I think your comments echo so many women’s experiences with the “dating scene” (especially online dating), relationships, past loves, and all the rest. It should not be about changing yourself at all, but so often it is, or at least it seems to be. As women we are programmed to be “people pleasers”, to morph ourselves into whoever we are with, as if we have no core of our own. We DON’T need another father or someone competitive, but society seems to breed that into men. The men I’ve dated come from the opposite end of the spectrum–not educated enough, all about emotions and reactions, very “of this world”, but that has its own set of baggage.
And the longing–ouch! Like that looooonging for Ted. I have one in my life now who’s not good for me but still I yearn for him. It’s a killer. The fact that you were actually able to have a relationship like you did with Sam was the epitome of good mental health. That’s what it should be–we both win.
Hey, look, everybody, a new commenter! And it’s a “sista!”
Welcome, Sistalite. Thanks so much for the good words. Nice to get some backup from a female reader on some of the things I’ve been writing about…particularly the issue of women tending to lose their voices around the men in their lives.
Win-win, that’s all I’m looking for. An exchange that doesn’t feel like a flipping battle to the death! As for the longing…at least these days my longing for Ted is only a sexual one. I know he’s not the “one,” and there isn’t that painful emotional attachment I’ve had to other men – but damn if he doesn’t still show up every day looking FINE for an old fart. Why is he still the most attractive man I know?!!
“I’d rather be by myself than with someone who triggers those old habits”:
If interested (a site I love):
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=desirehttp://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=consider
Can’t read all the comments, sorry. But hi anyway!
Don’t know why those two came out as a single link.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=desire
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=consider
Hey, Mand! Thanks! And thanks for the etymology links.