**

I emailed an apology to Sam last week, for unintentionally contributing to his stress before he left. Doc had urged me not to do so, emphatic that I was not at fault, but right now what I need from Doc is an apology that has not been forthcoming. Sometimes you just have to bite the damn bullet and say you’re sorry. I realized I needed to trust my own intuition on this. Maybe I’m done with external guides.

After over ten years of therapy, I left therapy, with, I imagine, a greater awareness of my issues, and perhaps a greater ability to cope — but no life-altering changes. Now, after three years of coaching, I think it’s time to terminate (even if Doc and I patch things up, which we will, eventually), because while I’ve acquired a few more useful tools (e.g. Doc’s much-touted Voice Dialogue), I’m still mired in much of the same stuck-ness regarding work, money, goals, and (dare I say?) dreams.

“No one really understands what causes change,” says my girlfriend Jeannie, who holds a Master’s in counseling. I grew up with stories of miraculous conversions, and responded to the altar call more than once; in college, I met strident objectivists, fervent Hegelians, and condescending nihilists; within my more recent yoga circle, acolytes gushed about the life-changing wisdom and practices of Yogi Bhajan or Swami Kaleshwar; and Doc was always giving me some new binaural CD to alter my brainwaves. Everyone thought they had the answer, the secret to making life make sense and work for them, and they wanted me to see the light, too. But at the end of the day, watching certain behaviors and struggles continue, regardless of held beliefs to the contrary, I would wonder: what really rewrites our scripts?

What impresses me most about the past few months, regarding my brief but powerful encounter with Sam, is that a profound change occurred in my basic makeup — the kind of change that one can spend years in counseling and not have happen. Internal obstacles that had stood like imposing concrete walls for a lifetime collapsed as if made of poorly glued toothpicks. Big love, it seems, can effect big change. It was love for my atheist best friend, after all, that was pivotal in collapsing my fundamentalist faith in high school — because if everything the “Christians” told me was true, then everything she thought or felt was illegitimate, and not to be trusted.

Sometimes a relationship forces a sort of ultimatum, where you have to choose between a dearly beloved person and your attachment to a certain way of believing or being. Just ask any formerly homophobic PFLAG parent.

**

But speaking of PFLAG, I’ve become a tormented paranoid in the absence of any new information about Sam, coupled with the offhand tidbits and speculations I hear from other people.

I hadn’t mentioned it before, but Rob, Sam’s buddy, prefers men. A number of people assumed that Sam was gay because of their close association. And I did sometimes wonder if Rob harbored feelings for Sam, especially given the truly weird and uncomfortable dynamic between the three of us. But sometime after a conversation with a mutual friend from work, who had thought Sam had been planning to go to Las Vegas for some kind of Hunter S. Thompson adventure, and who had believed him to be questioning his sexuality, I started going slightly crazy with jealous, fear-riddled doubts about nearly everything I believed to be true. Did Sam and Rob have a “thing,” unbeknownst to me? Did Sam really go to the middle east, or did he just not want to tell me where he was actually going? Was the conversation he had with Rob in front of me, about what to tell people regarding his job, staged for my sake?

Rob and I have never related very well, as you know, but over the past six months I’ve watched him transform from a gangly kid with bony knees and nerd glasses into a suave, handsome, vaguely Machiavellian character (now a supervisor), with a hip, flattering wardrobe in just the right color palette. It’s as if he finally got that queer eye for the queer guy. He’s growing his beard out until Sam comes back — which does not reassure me that he isn’t in love with my erstwhile boyfriend — and currently looks kind of like a redheaded Charlton Heston in his Ben-Hur galley-slave incarnation. (Maybe I’m guilty of gross stereotyping, but I do take small comfort in the fact that Sam’s wardrobe consisted entirely of jeans and T-shirts, without any regard to what colors might flatter him.) It does make me wonder for whom Rob made himself so pretty.

It would certainly be ironic, and a rather sad commentary on “straight” guys, wouldn’t it, if the man who ruined me for other men turned out to be not that into women. One of the major differences with Sam was that I never felt the least bit objectified or depersonalized: he always seemed to be making love to me, as a person, and not just playing and getting off with a handy female body (eyes slightly glazed over). In my doubt-ridden moments, of course, I wonder if that meant he liked me so much personally that he made an exception for me. That it was all just an experiment, and one he decided to end without telling me. (Then again, I seem to remember Sam grabbing my broad German-frau booty on more than one occasion, as if he really liked it.)

So I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s anything to any of these speculations. Oftentimes when one latches onto a specific hypothesis, the mind starts to fill in the blanks, and suddenly the circumstances and facts seem to support it. In other words, we find what we’re looking for. And I’m definitely more inclined to believe something is true if it makes me feel bad.

It makes me feel bad, to think about Sam being secretly involved with Rob. Cold, and somehow not good enough. Afraid that he lied to me. And very, very foolish.

**

The other part of that hypothetical scenario is just as disturbing, because it thrusts Sam more deeply into a world I was actually happy to see him leave. Having to give him up completely was a little easier if I could frame his departure as something he needed to do for the sake of his own physical and mental well-being. Of late I’ve been listening to trip-hop band Massive Attack, notably this early hit –

Midnight rockers, city slickers
Gunmen and maniacs
All are featured on the freak show
And I can’t do nothin’ ‘bout that, no, no
But if you hurt what’s mine
I’ll sure as hell retaliate

You can free the world, you can free my mind
Just as long as my baby’s safe from harm tonight

I love that chorus precisely because it seems to be saying: go ahead, be rebels, be revolutionaries, insist on expanding my mind like Timothy Leary, just don’t let anything bad happen to my baby. Which is pretty much where I’m at. But more on that presently.

I do realize that no American can be entirely safe from harm hanging out in Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s a different kind of gambling than the kind Sam ostensibly left behind. He was so annoyed when his friends got upset and cried about his voluntary “deployment”…I wasn’t the only one whose fretting for his safety inspired his wrath. He might have been overwhelmed by his own mixed emotions, and unable to deal with all of ours. Maybe it’s difficult for a lifelong outsider to cope with a sudden explosion of concern. “He probably has problems receiving,” was Doc’s comment.

I hope he was telling us the truth, at least, about where he was going. In an earlier post I know I speculated about whether he had gone back to his parents’ home to “fade away” — one of my more dire scenarios — but I have a dozen of them. In some versions, he’s losing his life, in others just his mind (my counselor girlfriend started musing about schizophrenia), and in still others he just wants to get away from me, that crazy, needy woman who cried when she couldn’t reach him on the phone for a couple of days. Sam was a pleaser who took care of people; maybe he didn’t have the heart to tell me he wanted to break up with me.

I hate that I’m not sure, now, where he is. I hate that I’m obsessing about all these crazy-making things. In the end, I know Sam has to attend to his necessities, whatever they may be, and they may be legion, and take up most of his time, but I also know I deserve some kind of communication — even if it’s just a breakup fuck-you emailed from an all-male Libertarian meth compound in Reno. We briefly shared a reality, a private universe — what was for me, at times, a kind of paradise — which has since been assailed by every manner and variety of doubt imaginable. The darkest part about living in perennial uncertainty, depending upon neither Jesus nor Ayn Rand nor Swami Kaleshwar to tell you what’s what, is that you can start to doubt your own judgment, even your own experience.

And my only partner in this particular experience has vanished, leaving me to my freakouts and conspiracy theories.

**

On a different note, I was remembering calling Rick one Sunday afternoon in May to find out if he wanted to meet that evening. He told me he’d spent Saturday night out drinking with Sam. Apropos of nothing, he asked if I was religious at all, and mentioned that Sam was Catholic. “I’m not really into self-improvement,” he joked, “like a lot of the other people at work.” He seemed reluctant to make plans with me that night. I caught the unexpected vibe that he wanted to nudge me toward Sam, as if he thought the two of us would be more compatible than he and I were. (I even wondered if he knew something I didn’t, e.g. that Sam had taken notice of me.) I was vaguely irritated by this unspoken intimation, thinking at the time that I had no interest in Sam, and every interest in Rick. But of course Rick turned out to be right. He and Sam would become buddies, Rick would get sent back to jail…and the rest you know.

**

There’s another phrase my mother would love: Rick would get sent back to jail. I once noted, during the days of Rick, that I’ve had better luck, sexually and otherwise, with men who are current or former users of illegal substances. For many people, certainly the mainstream of society, this signals a serious character flaw or psychological dysfunction on my part as well as theirs. I would have judged myself harshly for this too, during my first two or three decades, having been effectively programmed by my parents, Ronald Reagan, and After School Specials to fear and loathe non-FDA-approved mind-altering chemicals and the freaks who supposedly ingested them.

Use always equals addiction, and addiction is always equated with personal weakness, a lack of the ability to cope with life that the “well-adjusted” and responsible citizenry allegedly have. But as you may have noticed, I no longer buy that we live and act in a vacuum where we can triumphantly master the universe through our personal will (as much as that goes against our national mythology). As you may have noticed, I find the cultural frameworks around us deeply dysfunctional themselves. Both James Baldwin and Jiddu Krishnamurti, men whose writings I turn to like a compass (maybe there’s at least a couple of guides I trust) pointed out that there’s nothing particularly healthy about being well-adjusted in a sick society. Maybe it’s not so incongruous that Buddhist master and Shambhala founder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was a raging alcoholic.

**

Statistics can be interesting. Two-thirds of attendees at Alcoholics Anonymous are men. An extensive American study found that over one third of the male population has been dependent on alcohol or drugs at some stage of their lives. The figure for women was exactly half that. Alcohol and drug abuse were strongly associated with an increased suicide rate in men.

From this I do not conclude that men are somehow weaker than women, any more than I conclude that higher incarceration rates indicate moral inferiority among minorities. I believe instead that this is merely indicative of what both my own personal observations and independent studies (about addiction, Western culture, and men) have led me to conclude: that males of the species possessing any sensitivity or impulse toward authenticity whatsoever simply cannot “adjust” to Western patriarchal capitalist culture and its demands without explicit damage to their mental and emotional well-being. Damage that, given no opportunity to heal (or even be acknowledged), often leads them to seek release, escape, or at least some form of anaesthesia. This subject could be a thesis in itself, but I’m not going to make one of this post. (Suggested reading: The Hazards of Being Male by Herb Goldberg, anything by Warren Farrell,  Stiffed by Susan Faludi…not to mention my oft-quoted Carol Gilligan favorite.)

I don’t recoil from things like drug addiction or attempted suicide as if they were contagious diseases or shameful personal failings. I actually consider them to be symptoms of a sick society. Much like the inordinate rate of depression in American women.

**

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz…

Those are, of course, the opening lines to Allen Ginsberg’s notorious paroxysm of a poem, “Howl,” his heaving tribute to the Beat generation.

My favorite minds of my own generation, like Damien Moreau and Tony DeRocca, were great admirers of William S. Burroughs, Ginsberg’s lifetime friend (and onetime lover) and the Beat least palatable to the general public, who wrote bannable book after bannable book.

These days, for Sam and the intelligent rebels of his generation, old Bill seems to have been replaced by the more contemporary Hunter S. Thompson, but the two men had more than a few things in common. Both were vociferously pro-drug, pro-gun, and anti-government; both yearned for a return to a (somewhat romanticized) frontier society; both were known for the anarchic subjectivity of their hallucinatory prose: Burroughs for his autobiographical “routines” featuring alter ego William Lee, and Thompson for his “gonzo” journalism that inserted him into the story as a central character. Both found the values and modus operandi of the American system corrupt and destructive to human beings. “The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams,” said Burroughs, “the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.”  “In a nation run by swine,” wrote Thompson, “all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to keep from Losing Completely.”

Academic David Savran wrote an interesting book (another for the reading list) ten years ago called Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. He has quite a bit to say about Burroughs and the Beats, and the effect of this postwar consumer culture on white guys in general (who are supposed to be the powerful ones), most of which is too dense and layered to go into here. He quotes Norman Mailer, who (in his essay “The White Negro”) talks about the (Beat) hipster as “postmodernist subject,” “the fragmented, decentered, ephemeral subject of late capitalism” — a male essentially stripped of history, continuity, meaning, or identity, and basically lost in the supermarket, so to speak (to borrow from a band Sam and I both like).

Analyzing “Howl,” Savran asserts quite graphically that “the ‘best minds,’ having introjected the god (‘Moloch,’ or American industrial capitalism), attempt to exorcise him by allowing themselves masochistically to be penetrated, adulterated, maddened, befouled — in short, feminized — by various sharp metallic objects, drugs, poisons, and cocks. Grisly variations upon the subjects of postwar commodity culture, they are sickened and destroyed by that which they compulsively and helplessly consume.”

I’d agree with Savran that mind-altering substances can “feminize” men, in a sense,  but not in the masochistic and unnecessarily degrading way he (and perhaps Ginsberg) seems to mean here. Breaking down boundaries and inhibitions, drugs allow for a fuller range of emotion, perception, sense, color…almost exactly the opposite of that “flattening of voice” that Carol Gilligan watched happen in young boys as they became socialized for elementary school. Drugs not only bring relief from pain, but they can also, at least temporarily, open up shut-down capacities and faculties and enable a richer experience, a whole other spectrum of aliveness.

**

I am thinking again of Tony, that self-proclaimed hermit who wrote like a belligerent and even misogynistic version of the rock critic Lester Bangs — with a lot of sound and fury — but in person he came across as fragile, as if he might dissolve like spun sugar if you handled him too hard. He was a disturbing sort of handsome, intense and bony, with long, grey-streaked curls, and always seemed to be watching me with smoldering dark eyes. For a long time I averted my gaze uncomfortably from those smoldering dark eyes. But when I finally turned mine his way, he literally, visibly flinched, as if my focused attention physically hurt him. He would eventually push me away with violent protestations.

It was for Tony’s sake, for Damien’s sake, for Sonny’s and unknowingly for Sam’s sake that I tackled my independent studies in sociology, as well as for my own. These were highly intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive men, after all; it didn’t make sufficient sense to me to conclude that their affinity for chemicals and my affinity for them just meant that we were all similarly pathological (compared to some normative and faceless John Q. Public) and leave it at that. Maybe we are all misfits in a system where “fitting in” is its own kind of pathological. Of course there’s always a choice involved, but it’s naive to say that the alternative to being high is preferable to being high. Maybe one can’t blame society for all of one’s ills, but neither can one take personal responsibility for everything that’s wrong with our collective picture.

The 12-step Serenity Prayer says it all, actually, when it invokes one’s deity of choice to “grant me the strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” It recognizes that we are neither the masters of the universe nor its hapless pawns; we are fumbling along somewhere in between.

And god help us.

**

The wallpaper on my laptop is a photo of Sam, my only photo of Sam, but it wasn’t taken by me or by anyone I know.  It’s an arty black-and-white shot that somehow wound up being appropriated from one of Sam’s former Internet presences (he wiped out all online Sammage because of thefts like this) and is for sale on a stock photo site. In the shot, his head is down, his brow propped against one wrist; he looks like a man at the end of his rope. So far it’s been used in print ads about addiction and mental illness, and has even made an appearance on a national TV talk show. It seems oddly appropriate that Sam’s image has been turned into a public signifier for stigmatized, tormented outsiders. I feel a pang every time I see it.

Sam’s retreat into silence may forever be a mystery to me, I may wonder ever after what was really going on with this young man who made me so very happy so very briefly, but regardless, he will always be the man who changed me. Sam changed me, in ways that no book, no counselor, no guide, no religion, no system, no theory, no practice, and no drug — prescribed or otherwise — has ever done.

I will always love him for that.

Now if I could just go on without him.

“Here” was Boulder, an affluent town full of New-Age Caucasians.

I knew exactly what she meant.

Lately, I’ve been scared. Honestly scared. We’re in a recession, food and gas prices are climbing, and I’m underemployed, over budget, and under deadline to find a new place (probably a tiny studio) to call home. I am currently surrounded, in my work and personal life, by well-meaning but mostly middle- to upper-middle-class white people who reassure me daily that everything is going to be fine, that what needs to happen will happen, that the universe will take care of me, and so on. My roommate, who with her mother co-owns the condo where I’ve rented a room for a year, is certain of this.

Such faith does not come easily to me, having lost my very dramatic fundamentalist faith very dramatically in my youth. One moment I was secure in the (warm, if somewhat oppressive) bosom of home, family, church, and God; the next, I was thrust into a boundless black hole, floating like the proverbial inconsequential speck in an indifferent universe, unspeakably alone, my existence and actions apparently as meaningless as those of Camus’ unsympathetic Stranger. No wonder, I thought, I had never felt the presence of Jesus, purportedly walking alongside me all the way; no wonder my fervent prayers, often delivered on my knees while hitting my chest with my fist, had never been answered. It was all an elaborate racket, a comforting lie to keep people complacent and obedient. Squaring my jaw and my shoulders, I told myself that everything was now up to me.

I was not at all sure I was up to the task.

And I must say, it’s been a struggle most of the way since — living on the perimeter at a subsistence level, and learning to make do without. The profound sense of abandonment I felt when I lost my Christian community and beliefs is still very much alive in me. Eventually I did come to believe that a spiritual dimension exists, that there is inexplicable depth and mystery to our conscious and unconscious lives, that everything is interconnected. At certain extraordinary moments I’ve felt I’ve touched upon something numinous and eternal. Rumi and Rilke are two of my favorite poets. But there’s still that doubt at my core.

Part of me (a big part, that is perhaps just a big kid) really, really wants to believe the Intenders and the Manifestors and everyone who embraces what the scientific materialists would call magical thinking. I’ve seen The Secret. I’ve read some of the more involved of the “new physics” books like Lynne McTaggart’s The Field. Her latest work on meditators affecting remote plants is actually exciting to me. I’ve so rarely made anything I really wanted to happen happen, and never for long. I’ve wished upon a hundred stars. I’ve forwarded the chain e-mails. And now all around me, in the holistic community where I work, there are voices reassuring me that the universe is looking out for me.

Of course, these are all Caucasians, most of whom can afford to shell out for the high cost of yoga.

And I go back to our Woman on the Street, puncturing the bubble of our possible cultural complacency. Do our beliefs reflect our undisturbed privilege? The casualties of Myanmar and Beichuan — hell, the (mostly nonwhite) victims of the New Orleans flood in our own country — how, pray tell, did everything work out for them? (I have to say I’m offended by some of the more materialistic aspects of the Secret craze. You want a fully loaded Hummer, and over here this Haitian can’t even get a spoonful of rice. What’s wrong with this picture?) Vox Feminista’s anonymous commentator, with a laugh, refuses to play along. Maybe she, from her differing vantage point, has seen too much that conflicts with the majority story, the way James Baldwin had when he spoke in The Fire Next Time of the “innocence” of white Americans. Or the way unrepentant firebrands like Jeremiah Wright have, who then say things that offend the sensibilities of the mythologically correct — those who, to borrow from Baldwin, insist on believing that our unimpeachable republic’s founders were all “freedom-loving heroes.”

…

Of course, then there’s Oprah. Oprah, the alternately admired and maligned evangelist of reality-creation. I refuse to say anything bad about Oprah. She had no such privilege; she was born black, and female, into poverty, and endured horrific physical and sexual abuse as a young child. That she would turn out to be one of the world’s wealthiest women was unlikely to say the least. She gives away millions, and spurs a TV nation to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. If she wants to tout the power of intention, more power to her. Bully for Oprah, I say.

She most have done something right along the way.

…

The other day a good friend of mine with survival struggles of her own introduced me to her remarkable friend Pablo. Pablo is from Spain, has traveled the world on a shoestring, and carries a different set of life experiences and assumptions than many of the middle-class white Americans in my social circle. For this reason (as well as for his infectiously enthusiastic and affectionate nature), I listened attentively to this diminutive middle-aged gentleman when he decided to expound upon the topic of success.

“I arrived here on a Thursday. By Friday I was working. You know how you get the job? You go where you want to work, and you say, ‘How long until I can work here?’ And when they say, ‘We don’t have anything,’ then you say, ‘Okay, then I will wait, I will come and sit here until it’s time for me to work.’ And then you go, and you sit, and you wait. And you ask them, ‘Is it time yet?’ No? Then you go and you sit some more…”

My friend tells me that Pablo is fond of offering the choice, “Is the answer yes, or yes?” He said to me, “Everywhere I go, people help me, because they know I have love in my heart.” For Pablo, things do indeed seem to “work out,” and he sure ain’t your typical Boulder-ite living anything close to a typical life. Talking to him was like a whack upside the head. He doesn’t do things the usual, conventional way; he disregards the rules we unthinkingly live by, like how to go about getting a job, and makes up his own. He assumes that strangers will want to be helpful. (“Everyone is amazing,” he says, “it’s just up to you to find out.”) I love this. Especially since he seems to make it work.

I don’t know about Rhonda Byrne, but I’d sure love to be more like Pablo.

How long until I can work here? Until I can live here? Until I can be your girl? Mind if I crash on your sofa — in Tokyo?

I don’t have money, but I have love in my heart.

Is the answer yes, or yes?

Curious about the game that was about to start, I ventured up to the umpire, a freckled boy older than my brother, and not from our neighborhood. He whirled around and hissed at me (squinting, in Disney-movie-mean-boy fashion) to get outta here, get lost.

“You’re too little,” he spat contemptuously.

For no other reason than my complete vulnerability (I was three or four), this stranger’s scornful assessment filled me with overwhelming, all-consuming shame. He had exposed my inadequacy to everyone; inadequacy that I had been until then unaware of, which was only more proof of my stupidity. I ran home, hiccuping with violent sobs, and threw myself into the green vinyl chair in our TV room. I can still remember the feel of the garish 1970s afghan that covered it, the rough texture scratching against my wet cheek.

This minor interaction really shouldn’t matter anymore. Except that it took root in my body, like a tangle of vines growing inside my ribcage, squeezing my heart. The cells themselves seemed to form a memory of this powerful sensation, and every time I experienced myself as defective or less-than, it became stronger. How could I be so stupid? How could I have ever considered myself an equal, when I was (for reasons that were not always clear to me) so thoroughly inferior? It was as if the Big Kids were still on the desired side, and incompetent little AlienBaby was always on the other.

I vividly remember this happening again when I walked into the youth minister’s office at my church and found the boy with whom I was completely infatuated (and with whom I had hoped to go to prom) holding hands with my good friend Katy. She had somehow neglected to mention to me their newfound puppy love. The feeling of humiliation was total and sweeping, and this time there was nowhere to run — no green chair to hide in.

…

I wouldn’t have believed that other people experienced this feeling so intensely also, or that it could make others likewise want to disappear into nothingness, if it hadn’t been for certain authors, notably Dostoevsky. Few writers have approached his ability to comprehend and recreate the squirm-inducing scenarios that attend and feed the shame of perceiving oneself as less-than, laughable, ridiculous. And even fewer do it with his depth of understanding or his compassion. Part of the author’s greatness, I believe, is his great love for the flawed and flailing human being, a love that treats his characters more kindly than they treat themselves (or one another, quite frequently).

…

One example is the dialogue between fourteen-year-old Kolya Krassotkin and monastery novice Alyosha Karamazov in the “Precocity” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. Kolya was immediately painfully familiar to me as a wannabe intellectual, lying about his familiarity with Voltaire and other philosophical novelists, talking a big talk, trying to bluff his way into respectability. (For my part, I’ve pretended to know what the hell Jacques Derrida was all about — having only seen a movie about his life! — and faked knowledge of bands like Neutral Milk Hotel or the Magnetic Fields, just to appear cooler and “in the know.”) Here’s a rather obnoxious excerpt from Kolya’s convoluted and pretentious ramblings:

But please don’t suppose I am such a revolutionist…Though I mention (Byelinsky’s character) Tatyana, I am not at all for the emancipation of women. I acknowledge that women are a subject race and must obey. Les femmes tricottent, as Napoleon said…and on that question at least I am quite of one mind with that pseudo-great man. I think, too, that to leave one’s country and fly to America is mean, worse than mean — silly. Why go to America when one may be of great service to humanity here? There’s a perfect mass of fruitful activity open to us…I must own, they’ve been at me to go (to America), but I declined. That’s between ourselves, of course, Karamazov; do you hear, not a word to any one. I say this only to you. I am not at all anxious to fall into the clutches of the secret police and take lessons at the Chain bridge,

‘Long will you remember
The house at the Chain bridge.’

Do you remember? It’s splendid. Why are you laughing? You don’t suppose I am fibbing, do you?

Here the author parenthetically gives us a window into Kolya’s mind:

(“What if he should find out that I’ve only that one number of The Bell in father’s bookcase, and haven’t read any more of it?” Kolya thought with a shudder.)

He is deathly afraid of being exposed as an incompetent child, a fraud. (Aren’t we all?)

Alyosha gently calls Kolya on his transparent ploy, noting that Kolya has a “charming nature” that has been “distorted,” saying that he is in fact “very sensitive.” In recognizing this, he unleashes an emotional torrent from the anxious boy:

…When I was fancying you had a great contempt for me for being in such a hurry to show off…for a moment I quite hated you for it, and began talking like a fool. Then I fancied — just now, here — when I said that if there were no God he would have to be invented, that I was in too great a hurry to display my knowledge, especially as I got that phrase out of a book. But I swear I wasn’t showing off out of vanity, although I really don’t know why…Oh, Karamazov, I am profoundly unhappy. I sometimes fancy all sorts of things, that every one is laughing at me, the whole world, and then I feel ready to overturn the whole order of things.

“Tell me,” he asks, “am I very ridiculous now?”

Alyosha responds passionately:

Don’t think about that, don’t think of it at all! And what does ridiculous mean? Isn’t everyone constantly being or seeming ridiculous? Besides, nearly all clever people now are fearfully afraid of being ridiculous, and that makes them unhappy. All I am surprised at is that you should be feeling that so early, though I’ve observed it for some time past, and not only in you. Nowadays the very children have begun to suffer from it. It’s almost a sort of insanity…

He goes on to reassure Kolya and commend him for his candor.

You are like every one else…that is, like very many others. Only you must not be like everybody else, that’s all…you be the only one not like it. You really are not like every one else, here you are not ashamed to confess to something bad and even ridiculous. And who will admit so much in these days?

…

Apparently even in nineteenth-century Russia, amid political and social turmoil and widespread poverty, people were driven by the same psychological needs and fears as we are in affluent twenty-first century America. How could I be so stupid? The shame and the fear of exposure as ultimately inferior and laughable is perhaps universal to human beings, and not just a luxury for the idle rich.

The way Alyosha effectively disarms this powerful motivating force is by identifying it, not with sharp criticism or venom, but with lovingkindness. He gives Kolya a safe space in which to let down his already considerable defenses. And the walls come a-tumblin’ down.

At the end of this exchange a bashful Kolya observes, “Do you know, Karamazov, our talk has been like a declaration of love.” He no longer has to fear being or seeming ridiculous, at least not with Alyosha.

What a different world we might live in, if we could all give one another that safe space.

It seemed apropos, after all, on a warm spring day, when everything is budding and filling the air with strange nectars, and all of nature is participating in its most lascivious display of fecundity, to talk about both the Feminine and appetite. Not to mention that the authors of these books have made me feel somewhat less crazy (see Being an Alien, Baby) by assuring me “It’s not you, it’s the rest of the culture!”

Like Caroline Knapp, I’ve always been unhappy with the shape of my body (getting the ubiquitous message since before puberty that only the wasp-waisted deserve to be desired), but unlike her, love food too much to have ever been able to exist on one bagel or one yogurt a day. Like Carol Gilligan’s subjects, I know what it is to be shamed (within and without my family) for having inordinate or inappropriate feelings and desires, and to be effectively silenced by the alternate, less “emotional” version of interpersonal interaction given by some of the (straight) men in my life. Often I have found myself wondering if it might be necessary to kill off everything that feels alive in me simply to be able to exist successfully in the world.

So here’s a book review for all us crazy bitches.

…

Let Her Be Filled:

Two books on women that begin to untangle “this knotted place in our souls”

Reading Freud’s famous analysis of Dora in college, many of my fellow students and I found it disturbing how little the good doctor appeared to actually listen to his “hysterical” young patient. For a man who asked the famous question “What do women want?” he seemed all too keen on replacing her words with his own.

The late Caroline Knapp, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Drinking: A Love Story, undertakes the illumination of the shadowy territory that is women’s desire in her introspective final book, Appetites: Why Women Want. With her elegiac prose, Knapp describes her own struggles with anorexia and alcoholism, and addresses the root issues of hunger, privation, and control.

“I’m so hungry,” she explains with the despairing logic of the anorexic, “I will never be fed.” Unlike the robust bathing goddesses of Renoir, whose images open the book, women in contemporary Western culture who exhibit too much appetite risk being seen as bad, out of control, gluttonous. She notes that every women’s magazine invariably boasts an article about becoming or staying thin, and how to please a man in bed — but what is this silence, she wonders, about what pleases oneself?

It is the swallowed and stifled longings and cravings of women driven underground, she asserts, that manifest themselves as these self-destructive compulsions.

So what do these out-of-control women crave? Knapp’s speculations are so simple as to seem deceptive: only what other human beings crave. Joy, beauty, self-determination, love — the pleasures of being and feeling fully alive.

If only Knapp had lived to see the publication of Carol Gilligan’s controversial new book, The Birth of Pleasure. Gilligan, best known for her women’s studies classic, In a Different Voice, expands her research on women and “voice” to explore how women’s loss of voice in adolescence facilitates the suffocation of authentic love relationships. The cultural mandates of hierarchical, patriarchal “reality,” she theorizes, which separate the mind from the body, and valid knowing from emotion, require dissociation from and denial of the reality of felt connections and intuitive knowledge — the stuff of love. The author finds the same refreshing honesty in preschool boys (who are still on the cusp of initiation into the enforced silences of traditional masculinity) as she does in preadolescent girls, who do not hesitate to say what they see, feel, and know.

Using the myth of Psyche and Cupid, Gilligan draws a map through the wilderness of standard tragic narratives, where love’s voice is denied and silenced, to a possible alternate destination where a child — a daughter named Pleasure — may be born. Like the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a contemporary of Freud and his ideological opposite, Gilligan envisions love as the setting for revolution, and women as its incendiaries.

Both of these beautifully written and thought-provoking books provide today’s embattled women with much-needed understanding and comfort, but they also present a challenge: to be not only the barometers of an ailing and oppressive culture, but the resistance.

…

Wow, that sounds heroic, doesn’t it? I told you I had delusions of grandeur.

I had been talking with her about my own terror of “falling through the cracks,” of winding up pushing a shopping cart if I dared to leave the secure (if low-paying and dead-end) job that offered me health benefits and a bus pass.

I had been living independently, paying my own rent and eating Ramen, since the age of nineteen, and had struggled on in genteel poverty for years since graduating college. Returning “home” was not an option; I had vowed (even under threat of homelessness) never to come crawling back there like the Prodigal Daughter to relinquish my identity. Feeling burdened by the debt of my student loans, I saw myself as one misfortune away from sleeping in a refrigerator box.

But my counselor was telling me that I had something in common with other single women, regardless of background or circumstances: the inner bag lady.

This observation has since been backed up by a good friend of mine who has worked with a number of unattached women on their career and financial issues. One way or another, this fear surfaces. His own ex-wife, who currently brings in a six-figure income as a company vice-president, went into bag lady panic contemplating her status as a newly divorced woman. What was going to happen to her? How would she take care of herself? Would she wind up shivering on a grate somewhere?

Whence came ye, o inner bag lady?

Well, it’s not like there’s no historical or statistical basis for our fears. Anita Petry of the InterPress Service reported in October 2007 that according to World Bank estimates, women represent roughly 70 percent of the world’s poor. Furthermore

The U.N. Population Fund notes that worldwide, women on average earn slightly more than 50 percent of what men are earning, while women and girls are often the last to eat, and women’s health problems are considered less important than other family priorities.

Not exactly encouraging news. Persistent global undervaluing of women has to have an impact on our psyches. Even if we aren’t ensconced in burkas or prohibited from going to school ourselves.

A recent article in Chicago’s Daily Herald about women and retirement actually mentions the ‘bag lady’ fear as a common one. Some statistics cited:

• Of the 59 million women currently earning a salary nationwide, less than half, 47 percent, have a retirement plan, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s new Women’s Bureau.

• Nearly half of all women work in jobs without retirement plans or 401(k)s, said the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement.

• A retired woman’s median income in 2004 was $12,080, compared to $21,102 for men, according to the institute.

• On average, a woman’s monthly Social Security benefits check is $824, compared to $1,195 for a man, according to AARP.

So we don’t earn as much as men, and often don’t have a 401K. Our Social Security income isn’t even livable. Not so good, ladies.

But then, at least we’re earning. Around the time of the Great Depression (when everyone’s worst fears about poverty came true), Virginia Woolf was writing passionately and persuasively (in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas) about the prosperity of one sex versus the poverty of the other. Why had it been so difficult, for instance, for women to raise the miserable thirty thousand pounds it took to start a women’s college that had few amenities and prunes for dinner? But it really wasn’t that long before, in our country or hers, that female independence from father, brother, or husband was unthinkable — unless perhaps a lady opted to engage in the oldest profession (which couldn’t, for obvious reasons, be a viable long-term career choice). Even now women face this cultural stricture in third world and fundamentalist-run countries.

We may have come a long way, baby, at least in the West, but there’s still some serious financial disparity, globally and locally, and we women are cognizant of it on a core level. The weight of our collective history may in fact be dragging down our aspirations, and the statistics themselves create something of a glass ceiling.

So it makes sense that even a man who lives extravagantly on his female partner’s income could be seen as an asset, in the light of our apparent lesser value and lesser power as an earner.

All this is not to mention the Cinderella-esque cultural expectations with which many of us were raised, even in the late twentieth century. In my case, both parents were highly traditional religious conservatives whose gender roles came straight from Father Knows Best. My mother stayed at home with us and cleaned house; my father brought home the (admittedly lean) bacon. It was always tacitly assumed that I would grow up, get married, and rely financially on my husband, whether or not I decided to have some cute little job on the side. Neither parent ever taught me a thing about handling money. In my late teens, I decided: screw all that, I would be self-supporting if I had to live on beans and rice, and that if I married at all, it would be for love and not for money or security.

But I still expected to be living on beans and rice. And so far I have definitely met my expectations.

Seriously, though, this crap is a lot for us chicks to overcome. But the first step is to recognize what’s going on. To own our inner bag lady. To know where she comes from. She’s trying to protect us, in her way. Maybe she’s telling us that we need to learn to manage our money better. That Prince Charming is no substitute for understanding our own financial affairs. Ignorance is not always bliss. Sometimes ignorance means waking up at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat, dreaming of shivering on a grate.

Or maybe she just wants us to aim higher.

You will probably hear me say more than once that I may not know my hiney from a hole in the ground — but (like Judge Stewart and pornography) I know the real thing when I see it. Or when I experience it myself.

How do I know? Well, grab a stale generic cookie out of the snack canister and put your mats in a circle, kids, cuz it’s time to hearken unto the Word of the Lord! (I have to cite the King James Version for this, because the prose is just so wonderfully roundabout, redundant, and purple.)

I Kings III, 16-27

16 Then came there two women, that were harlots, unto the king, and stood before him.
17 And the one woman said, O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house; and I was delivered of a child with her in the house.
18 And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also: and we were together; there was no stranger with us in the house, save we two in the house.
19 And this woman’s child died in the night; because she overlaid it.
20 And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me, while thine handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom.
21 And when I rose in the morning to give my child suck, behold, it was dead: but when I had considered it in the morning, behold, it was not my son, which I did bear.
22 And the other woman said, Nay; but the living is my son, and the dead is thy son. And this said, No; but the dead is thy son, and the living is my son. Thus they spake before the king.
23 Then said the king, The one saith, This is my son that liveth, and thy son is the dead: and the other saith, Nay; but thy son is the dead, and my son is the living.
24 And the king said, Bring me a sword. And they brought a sword before the king.
25 And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other.
26 Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it.
27 Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof.

You gotta love a phrase like her bowels yearned upon her son. We just don’t talk like that anymore. And yet doesn’t it say volumes more, and with more accuracy, than the more modern, paler, less visceral translation “she yearned with compassion for her son?” Where’s the last place in your own body you felt overwhelming emotion? Why does terror or excitement make some people spontaneously eject their breakfast, while others find they desperately need to expel it from the other end? Her bowels yearned upon her son. That is literally where it’s at.

OK, where was I…so did you notice the attitude of the maternal pretender? “Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it,” she says. She’s completely consumed with the desire to have her own way, and would rather destroy the object of her so-called love — out of what appears to be nothing more than vindictive spite — than give up her own “satisfaction.” The other woman has already forfeited her claim! If both women get only half a child, neither has the child any longer (obviously), because his wholeness, and thus his life, has been sacrificed. Perhaps fake mommy sees an opportunity to use the child as a fuck-you to her current rival. This way, nobody wins the “prize.” As if he were an inanimate object.

Consider for a minute how much overwhelming cultural encouragement is given, whether in our books or our celluloid dramas or our media, to grievance and demand in relationships, to insistent exactions about what I feel is “fair” to me, what I am owed. Give me what is rightfully mine, we might as well be saying, let me have my way, or I will withhold from you, hurt you, vilify you, reject you, even leave you. The other person, the ostensibly loved one, is no longer even seen; he is the forest that was lost for the trees.

When other people become no more than the means to an end, as the supplier, instrument, or even merely the symbol of what one wants and needs, what room is there for genuine, much less selfless, concern about their integrity and well-being? Yet this is so often the scenario that receives the dubious appellation of “love.”

Now look at the real mother in this story. When the threat of disintegration hangs over the being she loves most in the world, suddenly nothing else is more important than her boy, not even her “rightful” claim to him. Her bowels yearn. She is willing to let an impostor take him home; she is willing to surrender him for the sake of his own life and wholeness, even if it means her own heartbreak. She is definitely not focused on what she can get, achieve, or “win.”

Solomon makes the right call. He can tell who has her priorities straight, and where the child belongs. We should all be so wise, eh.

In 2008, the book’s retro ideas may be seen as ridiculously outdated by all but hardcore Christian conservatives, but the modus operandi of playing a predetermined role and pushing the right buttons doesn’t appear to have gone out of fashion. The major difference in today’s postfeminist universe is that too much appreciation of your intended will get you nowhere, and may even be detrimental to your goals. To borrow from the new millennium’s manifesto on manipulation, The Rules, one must present oneself as “a creature unlike any other.” Keep the focus on you, not him. And above all, be a special commodity in high demand.

In economic parlance, scarcity is the condition of human wants and needs exceeding production possibilities, or (in layman’s terms) availability. This drives up the value of a desired thing, which is why we pay so much for strawberries in January. They become a special, high-demand commodity when wants and needs exceed supply.

A psychological version of such scarcity is, I’ve concluded, the principle behind a wildly successful self-help book like The Rules, in which women are instructed to be strategically unavailable to their desired mate, and to cultivate an air of mystery. It’s also, incidentally, behind the winning routine of a male pickup artist who actually calls himself “Mystery,” and who advises otherwise schlubby men to deliver subtle insults to desirable women on first meeting, then to quickly move on.

If I could condense this sexual/romantic strategy into a single dictum, it would be make them chase the carrot. The proverbial carrot on the stick, that is, perennially just out of reach. Give them the tantalizing bait and withdraw; keep the scarce supply in demand.

Why does such a strategy work?

I imagine it’s thanks to our almost universally frustrating childhoods, in which certain needs were, unavoidably, not met by otherwise well-meaning parents and caretakers. Somehow those who withheld (or seemed to withhold) their attention, approval, or affection from us became, by default, the authority and measure of our worth. Yet we believed all along in our young hearts that if only we could get them to recognize us, then we would be whole, complete, happy at last. Scarcity created value, and the elusive dispensers of validation became the arbiters of our own value. If we could just catch the carrot! Everything could be finally be wonderful!

What works with diamonds works with people. Whatever you do, don’t flood the market. “In men who are hard,” wrote Nietzsche a hundred years ago, “intimacy involves shame — and is precious.” Same idea. If you’re a woman, say the Rules girls, “Don’t call him, and rarely return his calls.” My own mother cautioned me “Don’t be too available.”

During my predominantly sheltered adolescence, I had the opportunity to try out the strategy for myself. At the time I had a terrible crush on a boy in my youth group — he was a year older, and vaguely resembled Luke Skywalker. As has been the case all my life, the sheer tidal force of my emotions and hormones prevented me from being calculating around him; I was completely tongue-tied, if not visibly trembling, most of the time. Among the church boys my own age, however, for whom I felt only a mild filial affection, I became almost perverse as I experimented with totally constructed feminine roles, offering and then withdrawing my vivacious and counterfeit attentions. I was shameless. I even played them against each other, courting their jealousies, showing favor to first one and then the other. I learned how to make them chase the carrot — even though I had no romantic interest in them whatsoever. I was a junior bitch-in-training. I was learning how to be a Fascinating Woman Nouveau.

Of course, at that “long terrifying damnation” that is middle school, and around the boy I liked, I felt completely powerless; around these hapless peers I felt utterly powerful. It was a new and heady feeling, a rush. But when one of them, a strapping Korean boy built like a wrestler, threatened to become violent, I got scared and realized I may have gone too far.

I dropped the Fascinating act about a year before I dropped the religion. I could only endure so much soul-numbing dishonesty.

But I have seen amazing things done by FWNs. In college a quite average-looking, somewhat overweight woman I knew managed to bed a great many attractive, often younger, men. She was a power coquette. A carrot-dangler extraordinaire. And one of the most popular people in my senior class. As Mystery’s nebbishy acolytes will readily tell you, looks aren’t everything.

Nowadays I possess about the same level of finesse with the opposite sex as did economic whiz John Nash (Mr. “Beautiful Mind”), without the excuse of his genius. I’m about as mysterious as a brick in the face if I want you. “You are irresistible. Let us copulate.”

OK, maybe I don’t sound like one of the Coneheads, but that’s the gist of it. Thanks to the scarcity principle, it flies about as well as a lead kite. On the other hand, I have consistently found that when I’m sincerely uninterested, there are invariably would-be suitors I can’t shake no matter how fast I flee in the other direction. Unless I change my mind. That’s always a fun experiment, to turn the tables. It’s like charging at a charging dog. Then it turns into See Dick Run. Run, Dick, run!!!

Either way, AlienBaby gets no Dick.

Here’s me versus the kind of woman who can expect to get “results:”

FWN: You’re going to wear that shirt?
AlienBaby: You always look so good.

FWN: By the way, I ran into my ex at Starbucks.
AlienBaby: I don’t want anybody but you.

FWN: I may have some time a week from next Tuesday.
AlienBaby: Can I come over now?

This boneheaded, if ingenuous, directness has really only ever worked twice in my four decades on the planet. The first time, the man in question was a much older guy who was probably flattered that a young thing like me was interested in his surly old ass. It was a very brief affair. The other man I loved madly, and continue to love madly, although I do realize he can’t rectify my feeling ignored by my dad. He thinks my writing “blows the doors off,” even when I write crazy tell-all love missives. If he were a woman, I’d want him as one of my bestest girlfriends. So where is this gentleman now, you ask?

Rumor has it he’s off running after a carrot. Whether or not this is so, I must admit it’s taken everything I’ve got not to join in the chase.