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Philosophical Musings

May 12, 2008

Habits vs. Routines vs. Accomplishments, and the Overriding Significance of Goals

Last week someone emailed me a story from the NY Times, and when I read it, I happened to look at the list of "most popular emailed stories." Near the top was something titled Unboxed: Can You Become a Creature of New Habits? Which was a question I wanted to read about and have answered.

One of the reasons I continue to value my Mormon upbringing was the whole goal program I grew up with. There was this official church curriculum for teenagers, which presented them with six specific areas of well-rounded humanity--physical health, spiritual development, social interactions, personal ethics, I don't remember them all--and we were expected to set and complete two goals in each area every year while we were in junior high and high school. If young women completed the program satisfactorily, they got a really ugly necklace. I don't remember what young men got. Maybe a merit badge; their version of the program might have been tied up in scouting, which the church has sort of commandeered.

I used the goal program to great advantage, collecting a slew of virtuous habits such as thrift and punctuality. I made running three miles every school-day morning a habit--albeit one I hated--and the fact that I managed to do that for a full year helped me acquire that necklace I never wore once. I wasn't in it for the necklace, you see: I was in it for the habits and the accomplishments themselves.

And yes, I didn't just focus on habits; I also set goals for specific accomplishments: prepare a bassoon solo for regional Solo & Ensemble competition. Be valedictorian of my crappy high school, just like my big sister--which included all sorts of habits for how I dealt with school work: listen in class, take good notes, attend to assignments promptly, complete them thoroughly, keep them organized so I could find things when I needed them, etc.

I still have all those habits--or rather, their equivalents in the adult world--and I don't want to relinquish them; they've served me well. I can find stuff when I need it. I don't bounce checks or get parking tickets or library fines or any sort of late fees. If I'm given a specific project to complete, I pretty much get it done on time.

And yet, I can feel a laxness and laziness and tiredness in the way I approach my habits. Now that I'm in my 40s and have been keeping an elaborate to-do list since I started grad school (my to-do list as an undergrad wasn't so elaborate, but I certainly had one), it's not really a habit; it's more an element of my character.

My goals these days are almost always about accomplishments, rarely about habits. I think this is a problem. Because while some of the habits I worked hard to cultivate have become an integral part of my personality, other habits I've acquired are more like the absence of intentional habits--just lazy routines.

One the thing I like about academia is that on the days I don't teach--and if I'm lucky enough to get a schedule were I don't have to be in a classroom until after noon, even on the days I do--I don't have to set an alarm clock. This means I habitually go to bed and get up whenever. Admittedly, I have sleep issues, and having to set an alarm is sort of anxiety-inducing for me; and yet, given that I usually wake up around 8, I would hope I'd be able to create a more structured, although still not rigid, approach to retiring and getting up.

Then there's what I do when I get up: I habitually sit down at my computer and read the news until I A) run out of news or B) get bored. I could devise a schedule; I could also say that other things would take precedent over reading on-line newspapers every morning. But it's a morning-appropriate task, and my brain isn't always ready for something for strenuous first thing in the morning....

I don't entirely know where I'm going with this, and that's part of the problem--not for this entry, but for my life. I want some new habits, but the thought of pursuing them seems vaguely uncomfortable--which is precisely what I should be seeking. I found the NY Time article really compelling for statements like this:

brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try ­ the more we step outside our comfort zone ­ the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.

I have been trying to step outside my comfort zone in the last few days, in small ways. Friday I spent a good deal of time in the car, and I forced myself to listen to my least favorite of the radio stations I can tolerate: NPR. (I know I seem like the kind of person who should love NPR, but prefer music to talk on the radio.) I've been setting my alarm clock for 8 a.m. and making sure I'm in bed by 11:30 p.m. I even did yoga yesterday! Now there's a habit I'm sorry I lost: poses I used to be able to hold for a good long while I couldn't even get into in the first place when I tried them last night. I lost that habit--which I loved, which sustained and enriched me--for a variety of reasons: I moved away from Iowa City, where I had a house with a big expanse of bare floor perfect for plopping down a yoga mat at a moment's notice, plus a yoga teacher I adored who would teach me new stuff every week; and I got cable.

But I don't just want to do something new and different, once or twice--or something old abandoned so long ago that it feels awkward and difficult. Yes, I would love to take a ceramics class--I've wanted to do that for a long time. But I don't know if throwing pots would become a habit for me, and I want some new habits.

But what? I guess I could start crocheting more and knit less. I could follow Benjamin Franklin's template, provided in his autobiography, for "the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection":

1. Temperance
Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.

2. Silence
Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

3. Order
Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

4. Resolution
Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.

5. Frugality
Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself, i.e., waste nothing.

6. Industry
Lose no time; be always employed in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.

7. Sincerity
Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

8. Justice
Wrong none by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

9. Moderation
Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

10. Cleanliness
Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.

11. Tranquillity
Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

12. Chastity
Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.

13. Humility
Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

But to be honest, that was part of my model back when I was a teenager, so even though I'm not as successful in some of the areas as I once was, they all seem pretty familiar....

I could resolve to blog every morning, or every other morning.... I could resolve to be a more faithful, regular commenter on my favorite dozen blogs or so. (That means your blog.)

Is anyone willing to help me out with this? Having had a few posts lately that garnered a lot of comments, I am reminded again that there's just no predicting what people will feel like responding to, and I also think that asking for comments is sometimes the surest way not to get them. But I'm taking the risk. Gentle readers, what are the habits you find most useful and or/enjoyable in your own lives? What are the habits you would most like to cultivate?

Posted by holly at 8:23 AM | Comments (10)

March 5, 2008

Good Grief (as Opposed to Bad)

Here's an article I found really annoying and trite, despite--or rather, because of--the fact that its goal is to complicate the way we see depression. Written by some British psychiatrist, it decries "the assumption that depression is a disease," an assumption "reinforced and perpetuated by biologists, psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies, all of whom have a vested interest - consciously or unconsciously - in the clinical perspective." He also laments the fact that "Most of the time, depression is hidden from view because of the stigma attached to it."

I've already written about what I think was one of the greatest benefits of Prozac: that it made it so much less shameful to be depressed or to seek treatment for it. So I'm a bit surprised to read a passage like this one:

The disease model may also be engendering a sense of powerlessness in those with depression or ex-sufferers. What so commonly goes along with this perspective is the implication that the condition is due to some unusual constitutional weakness. The only solution, therefore, is chemical.

What? What the fuck? I mean, yeah, the disease model has its drawbacks, many of which I think this guy fails to address, but the idea that "the condition is due to some unusual constitutional weakness" was MUCH more destructive under the previous way of seeing depression, because the "constitutional weakness" was moral rather than physical. I mean, one of the main things now recommended (in, for example, the studies I mentioned last week) for mild depression is exercise, something to get blood moving and alter brain chemistry etc, etc, whereas before the main recommendation was to "just get over yourself and improve that lousy attitude, you weak-willed, weepy little snit."

I tried very hard to find a decent bio of Dr. Keedwell; I realize it's dangerous to speculate about things like age based on a tiny photo on a webpage, but Dr. Keedwell looks pretty young, and I seriously wonder if he is old enough to have had much experience with the way depression was viewed before the development of Prozac.

I am also irritated by the fact that the good doctor fails to address an issue of semantics. "Depression" IS a disease, which is not to say that grief or despair are diseases--they are not, because those are not the names of a disease. However, "depression" is a disease because "depression" is the clinical name for a condition or set of conditions that doctors treat. Doctors do not treat grief or despair; friends, family, counselors and clergypeople treat grief and despair.

In other words, all these words may be names for essentially the same ontological condition, but "depression" is the only one doctors deal with.

I'm a fact-checker--I think the impulse that makes me one is part of the same set of personality traits that made me so susceptible to depression in the first place--in other words, a refusal to take things at face value, to accept someone else's authority just because, without looking into the facts and causes as well as I can myself. So I'm also indignant that the doctor doesn't even bother to fact-check something like the year of John Stuart Mill's birth. Thus, he writes, "The precocious philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote his famous work, Utilitarianism, [as if Utilitarianism was his only famous work--what about On Liberty or The Sujbection of Women? Does this guy not know how to use commas?] in 1861 at the age of 19 and became depressed at the age of 21," which meant that the newspaper had to print this correction: "We exaggerated the precociousness of John Stuart Mill in saying he wrote his famous work Utilitarianism in 1861 at the age of 19 in the article below. He was 55 at the time."

Many years ago I came across an idea called "depressive realism," best stated, in my opinion, in an amazing article entitled "A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder" by Richard P Bentall and published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. You can read the abstract here, but this passage sums it up pretty well:

It has been shown that happy people, in comparison with people who are miserable or depressed, are impaired when retrieving negative events from long-term memory. Happy people have also been shown to exhibit various biases of judgement that prevent them from acquiring a realistic understanding of their physical and social environment... (and) give unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their unrealistic opinions about themselves, and show a general lack of evenhandedness when comparing themselves to others. Although the lack of these biases in depressed people has led many psychiatric researchers to focus their attention on what has come to be known as depressive realism it is the unrealism of happy people that is more noteworthy, and surely clear evidence that such people should be regarded as psychiatrically disordered.

(I really recommend this article; it's absolutely deadpan, quite informative and insightful, and still hysterically funny. Find a copy if you can.)

So there's a long history of attention to the ways in which "depression" or "melancholy states" or "grief" offer states of being superior to happiness; one of the best discussions of this matter from the 20th century is from William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, particularly the chapters on "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness" and "The Sick Soul." Comparing "healthy-mindedness" to "morbid-mindedness," James writes

It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite from from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

In other words, James is trying to grapple with the spiritual and intellectual meaning of suffering, a question at the heart of Buddhism, after all. But Keedwell reduces this complex issue to the glib sentence, "Depression can lead to great insights and achievements."

And OK, that sentence is a transition, not merely the summation of his thesis--he goes on to elaborate and give examples of what he means. But still, it's "depression" again. The clinical condition again. He complains about the fact that "depression" is seen so often through "the clinical perspective," but that's the only perspective he seems able to have on it. He even goes so far as to wonder "why depression has not been 'bred out' through Darwinian natural selection."

There's something incredibly wrong with that, though it will take me a while to figure out everything that's screwed up there. What leaps to mind is the idea that the question is possible ONLY if you see "depression" as clinical, avoidable state rather than one intrinsic to consciousness (because even animals get depressed). Can you imagine wondering why happiness or love or anger or contentment or poor time-management skills or plain old STUPIDITY have not been 'bred out' of us through Darwinian natural selection? As if dumb people or people who go through periods of profound sadness can't procreate.

Anyway. I could continue arguing with this thesis, and I probably will, but I think I've said enough for today.

Posted by holly at 10:46 AM | Comments (2)

January 5, 2008

Sartre Was Right

You know my last entry, the one about my New Year’s Resolution to convince myself that “a stranger’s a friend I just haven’t met yet”? Well, I’ve already revised that resolution, because I’ve already seen the limitations of that attitude. And it all has to do with travel, with the fact that getting back from Chicago was as stressful and difficult as getting there in the first place.

I didn’t go into the whole rigamarole here, because it was painful and not that interesting, but it took 48 extra hours to get to Chicago. Mercifully it was the first leg of my journey that was canceled or delayed each time, so I just ended up leaving two days late, sleeping in my own bed each night. This is what you get when you travel so close to the holidays, I thought, and vowed to avoid it again in the future if I could. I thought about canceling the whole trip, but I’d made my plans and had stuff to do, and anyway, I wanted to go. Given how much fun I had, I’m really glad I did.

But then there was the trip home.... I left on schedule, got to Detroit on time, sat down to wait for my connecting flight which was scheduled to depart at 10:10 p.m., and was informed at 9:30 p.m. that it was canceled.

There was one agent at the gate to rebook flights for every last passenger on a completely full flight; it took her 25 minutes to deal with the first stranded passenger, a young mother with a very unhappy, tired baby. No one begrudged the fact that this woman was taken care of first--that poor baby was really tired--but we all resented the fact that no one else showed up to help the rest of us too. Some of us called the 1-800 number, because spending 20 minutes on hold was still quicker than waiting in that line, and learned that there was not another available seat for the next 48 hours, not on any flight into the airport closest to home, or, for that matter, into any surrounding airports.

So my choices were: spend two days in the Detroit airport, or do something like fly to Atlanta on standby then fly to LaGuardia on standby then fly to Buffalo on standby and rent a car. Yeah. And then a woman in line near me said, “I guess my husband and I will just rent a car here, because we’ve got to be back tomorrow--he’s a doctor and he has to see patients. It’s not that far to drive; just four hours.”

At that point I turned to the woman next to me, who was trying to get home for her grandmother’s funeral. “Want to split the cost of a rental car?” I asked.

She paused. “Sure,” she said. “If you drive.”

Then the woman married to the doctor said, “Maybe we could all go together, if you don’t mind riding with our daughters.”

And that’s how I ended up sharing a minivan with five strangers on a four-and-a-half hour trip through some very bad weather. It beat the alternatives, I admit that. I was glad to get home. And I was also glad I’d thought carefully about how I wanted to interact with strangers.

Everyone, including me, was really nice at first. The husband took care of renting the car and also volunteered to drive. That left me time to chat with the daughters, who, at age 9 and 13, were the same age as two of my nieces and even reminded me of them in some ways. The youngest had a fearless curiosity I found charming, in part because I’m not really bothered by snoopy questions: Where were my children? If I didn’t have children, did I at least have a husband? How old was I? Wow, I was a year older than their mother. What did I do all day, since I didn’t have a family to take care of? The older one was excited to learn that I was an English professor and talked about her plans for college.

The weather was awful, and the younger one had this thing about black ice. She was fine as long as the road was so covered with chunky white snow that the rest of us were gripping our arm rests and wondering when it would be safe to exceed 30 miles an hour, but as soon as the road cleared a little and her father resumed the actual speed limit, she shrieked, “Daddy, slow down! It’s black ice! It’s dangerous! I hate it when you drive too fast, just like I hate it when you drink too much!”

Then the older one took off her shoes and socks. Her feet smelled TERRIBLE, which I know as well as anyone because she kept putting them on the back of my head rest. That was upsetting, but more upsetting was the younger one complaining, “Mommy, Sister took off her socks! Her feet really stink!” Then the farting began, silent, deadly farting.... Yes, the older one had a gas problem, and it was profoundly unpleasant, much worse than the foot odor problem. But equally unpleasant was the younger one yelling, “Mommy, Sister farted on my Nintendo!”

And then there was the Nintendo! Why do these electronic gadgets come with sound events?! Why does there have to be a dreadful repetitive jingle while you play some stupid game? Why can't people who play the stupid game hit the mute button?

And there was an argument about whether Topaz was the birthstone for November or December, and what it even looked like, and the older one was wrong, insisting that Topaz was a blue stone and the birthstone for December, but even though everyone told her that her information was incorrect, she refused to accept the possibility that she might be wrong. And then she insisted Carnegie Mellon was in Cleveland.... it’s in Pittsburgh, but at 1:30 a.m. in the middle of a blizzard, who freakin’ cares, which is one of the reasons I didn’t say a word. And then we got a spelling competition: the older one wanted to show that she was smarter than her younger sister, so they’d spell words like “hydrogen” and “nitrogen” and “dioxide” and the father would say who spelled it right.

I’ve only hit some of the highlights here--the drama was pretty much constant from the moment we got onto the interstate until the girls finally fell asleep about 2 a.m. (Though falling asleep does not tend to interrupt farting--if anything it can make it worse.) Every so often the mother would say, “Girls, no more talking. Only grownups can talk. Go to sleep. You have school tomorrow.” And the older one would say, “I don’t want to be quiet, and I can't sleep in the car.” And only after three hours did either parent say, “OK, that’s it: when we get home, you’ll get a time-out.” Which wasn’t much of a threat since we were going to get home at 3:30 and at that hour, a time-out is the same as going to bed, which is pretty much what you want to do.

And I thought, Sartre was right: hell is other people. To be stuck in that minivan forever could serve very well as a form of eternal torment, perhaps not the worst one ever devised, but still effective. I kept telling myself, It will end; it will end; I will get home, and then I will never have to see these people again as long as I live. They’re not new friends; they’re just strangers who have kindly helped me out; and I’m grateful and I wish them well, but I really want to spend the rest of my life as far away from them as possible.

The whole thing was so traumatic that I hardly left my house the next two days. I am not sorry I got into that minvan, because it beat the alternatives, but still, it sucked. I am only now starting to recover. And I have also remembered something from Fight Club about single-serving friends, people with whom you have brief, unrepeated pleasant encounters. I like that terminology. Some strangers turn out to be life-long friends; some turn out to be single-serving friends, some turn out to be people you interact with as long as you need to and not a second longer; and some turn out to be assholes you avoid at all costs. This family fell into the “interact with as long as you need to” category; they weren’t assholes, just not very good at accommodating outsiders introduced to their family circle. Still, had we met under different circumstances, I might have liked them all very much--or rather, I might have continued to like them all as much as I did when I first met them. But the situation played an significant role, and that’s important to remember too. It’s more fun to meet people at parties than in a long line at the airport, and I hope a long time will pass before I have to do that again.

Posted by holly at 1:14 PM | Comments (3)

December 6, 2007

I’m Glad I Didn’t Tell That Joke, Because It’s Still Not Funny

It’s 4:30 a.m., I’ve been crying for hours and the medication I took to combat my insomnia isn’t working, so my judgment isn’t the best. This entry is overwrought and earnest and I hope it’s not too annoying but it’s one of those things I have to post because it really matters right now. I just I hope I don’t sound too ridiculous and unproofread later.

Monday during an appointment to have my teeth cleaned I picked up the newspaper to read while I waited for my dentist (whom I love--he’s both a good dentist and a very nice man) to check my teeth after the hygienist cleaned them, and read an item about how South Dakota (who knew?) is the least depressed state in the country, while Utah is the most depressed. (There are also only six states in which people commit suicide more readily than in Utah.) I laughed. “Of course it’s Utah,” I said aloud to no one in particular, shaking my head. I wrote down the details of the study in the notebook I always carry with me so I could find a link to it later, thinking I would write a glib, funny blog entry about how appropriate it is that Utah is not only the most depressed but the most depressing state in the country, filled as it is with miserable Mormons.

And then yesterday I read this account on Young Stranger of a young man’s desire to kill himself because he is both gay and Mormon, and I lost all enthusiasm for mocking the misery an actual human being experiences when his life is in conflict with his religion.

I’m going to do that incredibly maudlin 80s thing and quote a Smiths song, “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore,” which always makes me weep when I think seriously about the lyrics:

You should know
time’s tide will smother
and I will too
when you laugh about people who feel so
very lonely
their only desire is to die
well I’m afraid
it doesn’t make me smile
I wish I could laugh
but that joke isn’t funny anymore
it’s too close to home
and it’s too near the bone
more than you’ll ever know

The main reason I didn’t blog much in November was because I was traveling, and one of the things I traveled to was a conference, where I presented a paper on religious trauma, in which I finally found a way to make damnation intelligible to a secular audience. I’m not going to go into the details of that now, because if one wants to publish one’s scholarly work in journals one doesn’t explain it on the web. But suffice it to say, believing you are damned really, really sucks, and although it is outside the range of many people’s experience, it is not outside the experience of people who are devout Mormons and desire nothing so much as to live a virtuous, spiritually meaningful life sanctioned by god’s approval, but who feel that, for whatever reason, something about their core self or primary identity or most cherished concept of human ethics and responsibility or whatever somehow prohibits or violates true virtue and is beyond god’s approval.

I felt that. I felt it about my mission. I felt that my impulse to let people choose their own paths, to say sincerely “That’s a perfectly acceptable choice,” when they said, “I want to be an ethical person according to these principles and beliefs, and I don’t feel I really want or need to be Mormon to a good person,” put me outside the realm of god’s love.

It sucked.

But this suicide thing..... It reminds me of Puritanism, for which I felt a profound affinity when I finally studied it in grad school. I’m not the only person to write about the similarities between Puritans and Mormons, which go beyond a certain sexual reticence--after all, the 19th century form of New England Puritanism was Congregationalism, with which Joseph Smith was extremely familiar, and one of my favorite elements of Mormonism, the emphasis of careful reading of texts and of writing a journal in order to turn one’s life into a text to be read for evidence of god’s workings upon the soul, was inherited straight from the Puritans.

But the Puritans had a very dark side: The theology required people to imagine damnation if they weren’t up to par, to confront "the imaginative impact of the idea of being loathed and daily victimized by an all-powerful deity” (John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination) and to write about the experience of doing so. No wonder, then, that they were prone to despair, to the point that they killed themselves far more readily than other people. In fact, as I said in my paper,

the frequency with which puritans committed suicide was used by others as evidence that the religion’s adherents weren’t among the saved. It might also help you understand why the Puritans had such a propensity to call people witches, imagining dark rituals in which people celebrated their hatred of a god who hated them. It might also help explain why there aren’t many Puritans around today: the theology was too brutal and punishing to last.

Mormonism is fairly brutal and punishing in its own way, and yet it thrives. It thrives, as does the misery and despair it engenders when someone doesn’t measure up to its rigid demands. It thrives, even as it prompts people to write eloquent suicide notes, eloquent explanations of why suicide is a morally and theologically justifiable choice for a person who is gay/ an artist/ single/ infertile/ whatever.

Myself, I wrote my first (and still unpublished) book as the defense I would offer at the final judgment, explaining why I stood by the ethical choices I made, and I could well imagine the look of revulsion and contempt on god’s face as he rejected my defense and opened a trap door to send me straight to hell.

I don’t still believe in a god who would do that to me--I don’t still believe in any god, really. But you don’t write a text like that if you don’t care A HELL OF A LOT about religion and spirituality and ethics. Which brings me to my next point: Mormonism often punishes most those who invest in it most.

But that goes for religion in general, doesn’t it. I’m thinking of Karen Armstrong, and her amazing admission at the end of Through the Narrow Gate. Unable to to acquiesce quietly to the intellectual helplessness orthodoxy encourages (or to deal with ways the faints caused by her undiagnosed epilepsy are contemptuously dismissed as a moral and spiritual failing), she suffers a breakdown, and after a few months, is forced to admit that the life of a nun is not for her. While waiting for the dispensation that will release her from her vows, she listens one day to the choir sing the prayer of Saint Ignatius, which reads

Take and receive, O Lord, all my liberty; my memory, my understanding, and my will. All that I have, all that I am, Thou hast given me, and I give it all back to Thee to be governed according to Thy will.

All I ask is Thy grace and Thy love. With these I am rich enough and I do not ask for anything else.

Armstrong details her response to the prayer; she writes

It was the last words that stung. I did want things other than God’s love. I wanted human closeness, beauty, freedom of mind. I probably wouldn’t get them but I wanted them. God’s love should have been enough. It was in one sense everything. But I did ask for other things, and if I stayed I’d be grabbing at little unworthy human satisfactions [and she gives an example, as when sisters fell in love with a cat because they could not devote any affection to another human being].

The prayer left an aching sadness. That perfect self-giving. That image of God as Everything that still couldn’t satisfy me. How could I be happy when I’d rejected Everything?

Mormons who cannot overcome or dismiss their homosexuality often feel they have rejected Everything. Mormons who cannot overcome or dismiss their sense that certain human choices outside of Mormonism are entirely valid often feel they have rejected Everything. Mormons who want human closeness, beauty, freedom of mind in addition to god’s love often feel they have rejected Everything.

And yet we are entitled to human closeness, beauty, freedom of mind, and to be who we are, and I believe that in some fundamental way, rejecting Everything is really the only way to go: because saying that you want those things is a way of saying you are willing to lose your eternal life, to risk damnation. And as the scriptures also tell us, s/he who will save his life shall lose it, and s/he who will lose his life shall find it. And I don’t think that’s a religious truth; I think that’s a spiritual truth, explaining the fact that, as posters in so many adolescent bedrooms have explained, if you let something go and accept that it is not yours to keep, it often comes back to you and stays with you.

But losing your life is not the same as taking your life. Dear god, dear god whom I don’t even believe in but invoke because nothing else has quite the power of that word, please let that young man not take his life. Please let no one else in Mormondom ever take their life because they believe they do not please you.

I don’t know what else to say. My heart aches for Young Stranger’s friend, and I don’t even know him. I have burst into tears at least a dozen times while thinking about him over the past day. I’m up because I’m thinking about him--and about my dear friend R, whose husband has been in the ICU since Saturday and will probably never walk again because, of all things, a tree fell on him while he was working in the woods around their house--and I feel hopeless and powerless and utterly betrayed yet again by the spiritual training of my youth, which I still somehow continue to value, because it gave me things I cherish, like my love of autobiography and journal-keeping, or my marvelous sense of self-tied-up-in-place.

Anyway. I should go back to bed. It’s so late it’s early and my judgment is clouded--insomnia and the medication I take to counteract it often do that to me--and when I am fully awake and sober and it’s daylight, I may regret posting this, but what the hell.

Posted by holly at 4:30 AM | Comments (6)

July 19, 2007

Dare to Dream

So, I have this unusual skill, though I don't use it very often or very well: I can control my dreams.

I started being able to do this seven or eight years ago, when I was finishing up grad school. It's not like I set out to acquire this particular skill; I just discovered one night that I could do it. But it didn't come to me out of nowhere: partly because I wasn't always that interested in the work I was supposed to be doing for grad school, and partly because I suffered from an array of mild but chronic maladies I wished would go away, and partly because I wanted to become more ethically and spiritually deliberate and aware, I started pursuing all these activities that would help me develop my spiritual and intuitive faculties and give me more control over my body and mind.

If you've done any new age exploration, you know the basic program: yoga, meditation, reiki, chanting, hypnosis, visualizations, scrutinizing and releasing old trauma, analyzing patterns in your life for the slightest bit of meaning, keeping a dream journal, undergoing lots of therapy with a really smart therapist who never lets you off the hook, having your astrological charts done, as well as practicing a little aromatherapy and performing the occasional colon cleanse, etc--stuff to help you identify and focus your intentions and your will, so you can release yourself from the effects of karma and lack of enlightenment, and be a more joyous, generous person who makes the world a better place, blah blah yada blah.

I'm making light of it to acknowledge that most of the world thinks this stuff is a load of hooey, but it was actually very meaningful and helpful for me, and it did have positive affects, like granting me the ability to control my dreams.

For instance: in one dream I remember controlling very easily and naturally, I dreamed I lost my wallet at the airport, which meant I couldn't board my plane because I didn't have ID. I kept searching in the area where I thought I'd lost the wallet, but to no avail, and I was about to miss my plane. So I said, "I know! I'll just dream that I find it." And instantly, there my wallet was. I grabbed it and started sprinting toward the gate, clear on the other side of the airport, but I knew I wouldn't make it in time. So I said, "I know! I'll just dream that I'm magically transported to the gate!" And there I was, at the end of the line to board, but still in time for departure. And I got on my plane and it flew off and I felt happy, both in the dream and in my cognitive mind.

This skill, of recognizing when you're dreaming is called lucid dreaming, and being able to control your dreams is called, logically enough, dream control. Supposedly being able to do this means you've achieved a certain level of mental acuity and control. But as I think about the dreams I've manipulated, I notice that they all have one thing in common: they're really frustrating.

Very early this morning, for instance, when it was still dark and you don't want to be awake, I dreamed that I parked my car in some huge parking garage, and then couldn't remember where I'd parked it. I wandered the garage, which was as dark and dank and icky as parking garages usually are, but didn't recognize my car anywhere, and I couldn't go off without it. I thought, "I should dream I just find the car." But then I thought, "Why? Why bother to find the car? Why am I dreaming this in the first place? This has been a stupid, tedious dream since it started, and finding the car isn't going to make it interesting. I'm just going to turn it off, the way I'd turn off a boring, annoying TV show." And I did. I got up and peed, and that was way more interesting than the dream.

And yeah, I'm glad I can do that. But it occurs to me that a still more useful skill would be to control the beginning of dreams, and make them about happy things, from start to finish: I could dream about being reunited with loved ones, or achieving stellar success in the career of my most ambitious fantasies, or how to finish a piece of writing I'm struggling with, or even having lots of really great sex with really interesting partners.

Because dreaming that you find your wallet beats dreaming that you don't find it, but dreaming that you have to overcome some monumental frustration is really, well, frustrating.

Posted by holly at 9:54 PM | Comments (3)

January 31, 2007

Difficult, Important Questions

OK, the thing is, realistically, barring illness or accident, I have 30 years of fairly sensible, satisfactory consciousness left to me. If I'm lucky, I have 40 years. And if I'm really lucky, like my awesome redheaded great-aunt Stella, I have 50 years of consciousness left to me. Fifty years in which I can (like Aunt Stella did, even when she was 90 years old) drive myself to my hair appointments or the grocery store. Fifty years before I start weeping and begging god to let me die because the pain from the horrible terminal illness I've got is worse than the thought of eternal unconsciousness or even never-ending suffering in hell. (Stella, the star, the beautiful, upright, generous devout Mormon I will admire till I die myself, succumbed to a ghastly, grisly struggle with esophageal cancer the day after Easter 1994, at which point she was 93, almost as old as the twentieth century, having greeted the world a few months after it did. Before she died, she was weeping in agony of spirit and body, wondering, "Why won't God let me die? Am I not good enough for him to let me into heaven?")

So, what the fuck am I doing with the consciousness I've got left? Whether it's 30 years or 50 years, what am I doing with it? How am I going to spend it? I like you all quite a lot, really I do; but I just got a new Frank Sinatra cd (it's playing as I type) and what is a better use of my time, really: writing blog entries about eight people will read, or listening to Frank, thoroughly, carefully, devotedly?

This is the thing. I'm smarter than a hell of a lot of people I've met in my life, but I'm not going to solve any of the major mysteries of the universe. Still there are times when I want to ask myself basic questions like, "Why is there something rather than nothing? And why, for god's sake, does the something that exists rather than not existing, include me? Why am I here?" There have of course been times when I've said to myself, "THAT is not a useful question. That is not, to use the language of the Buddha, a skillful question. Go formulate a skillful question and come back to me when you've got one that won't embarrass me."

A long time ago, when I was less crushed by the weight of my own ambition and the price I'd paid for it, a student wrote on an end-of-semester course evaluations one of my favorite things ANYONE has ever said about me:

I don't know what to say. The woman is an enigma. She asks difficult, important questions.

Yes: Used to be, the questions I asked were difficult AND important. Now it seems they're only difficult.... not particularly skillful, just difficult. Oh, and embarrassing to boot. Way embarrassing, at least to a sober person. But that's the thing about alcohol: your embarrassment threshold falls right through the floor, so far it's not even in the basement but another 40 million yards below it. That's right: a friend stopped by around 6:30 p.m. and we enjoyed queso and tequila. And the effects of the tequila have hung around much longer than the cheese.

So right now, at an hour just shy of midnight, when I'm thinking about all kinds of things, including the death and demise of people I loved and admired, I'm not embarrassed to ask the unskillful, difficult question important to no one but me: WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING WITH MY CONSCIOUSNESS AND IS THERE ANYTHING I SHOULD I BE DOING WITH IT INSTEAD.

Last week I went to see a psychic in the hopes that she could give me a decent answer to this question, or maybe help me reframe it. She could not. She could purport to tell me, for instance, that my paternal grandmother, who has been dead since 1936, watches over me. But she could not avoid boring the neon green snot out of me nor convincing me that however able she might be to hear the whisperings of spirits and angels, she can't tell when a living person sitting four feet away from her is bored as all get-out and doesn't want to hear another fucking word about her favorite tv show. And really, when it was all said and done, she should have paid me forty-five dollars for sitting still and listening to her politely for an hour instead of the other way around.

Because honestly, I could have told her myself that I'll be moving in the next two to three years, that I'm destined for better things than what I'm dealing with right now, and that at some point I'll get so fed up I make some changes, quickly, quickly, without the slightest provocation or warning.

So whatever.

My cat is on my lap, calm and purring and marvelous, and my stereo has stopped playing not only Frank, but anything at all, for reasons I can't discern without disturbing my cat: a problem that creates a further problem. I really don't want my cat to get out of my lap, but I want to know what's going on with my stereo downstairs.

Life is fucking like that.

OK. I haven't solved a fucking thing but I'm feeling annoyed, trouble AND self-indulgent, so can I just say that I love all of you who have been my faithful friends for any length of time (as in, even a few cyber weeks), and that I still HATE Scott B, the mean-spirited self-loathing miserable FUCK with an unflattering nose-job (courtesy of his equally self-loathing father, the very expensive NY plastic surgeon who hated his son's semitic profile and thus performed free cosmetic surgery) who broke my heart in ways no one else has ever broken it, a decade ago on Super Bowl Sunday 1/26/97 when, let's see, Green Bay beat New England?

So if you're not Scott, thanks for reading this. And if you are Scott, hey mother-fucker! You still suck! What have you done with your life since not finishing your PhD?

p.s. Happy Birthday, Spike, since I know that's happening today.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM | Comments (5)

January 16, 2007

My Space and Everyone Else's

Yeah, I'm back--back in Pennsylvania, back in the blogosphere. I've been away for a long time but I had stuff to do--some of it important, some of it pleasant, some of it not.

I've found it hard to start blogging again, not because I haven't missed it--I have, and some of you have been nice enough to tell me you've missed me too--but you know how it goes when you get out of the habit: you lose the rhythm and it seems marvelous and incomprehensible that people can come up with something to say almost every day, and that moreover, I was one of them! But I'm going to try to pick it up again.

As a way of easing myself back in, here's something I first drafted months ago in a conversation with a friend about public/private space.

I guess my relation to place is probably different from many people's, because I grew up someplace rural, and aside from those eight years in Iowa, I have spent most of my time in the west, where space is just dealt with differently, in part because it looks and feels different: the dry air means the sky is wider and feels further away, even when buildings press close.

I need wide open vistas, I need them, in ways other people need a lot of social interaction. I can feel a touch claustrophobic in places that might make others feel they're lost in some endless barren terrain. I'm not saying I can't function in some urban setting, but my skin starts to crawl and my head feels crowded if I don't get a dose of a horizon bereft of buildings from time to time (John Ruskin wrote, "It does not need much to humiliate a mountain; a hut will sometimes do it" though I think the very expensive homes in Sedona do a decent job of humiliating that landscape too) and I prefer to commune with said horizon on my own. Nothing ruins a nice view like someone else's head. I am not so rugged and woodsy that I have to go hiking in someplace remote and inaccessible--I like well established trails just fine--but the idea of barbequing in a crowded picnic area or swimming on a crowded beach holds little appeal for me.

As for city scapes and building areas in them, well, a mall is a different kind of public space than a street with shops. Universities are a kind of public space, and parks are another kind. Hmm--do specific shops count as public spaces? Of course they do.... but they're regulated and patrolled in ways streets and malls and campuses aren't.

I really hate crowds. I prefer public spaces when most of the public has decided to be elsewhere. When I lived in the dorm (a semi-private space, I guess), I LOVED the fact that we got really cheap tickets to football games because absolutely everyone on my wing would go to the games, leaving me blissfully alone with the laundry facilities and the really long, deep, perfectly sloped bathtub nobody but me and my sister would use anyway, because everyone else took showers. I remember spending a lot of time in London in small parks along the river that were too far away from anything significant for most people to mess with them. But that was precisely why I liked them. And I sought such places out because they were special places, in and of themselves. I would go there to be THERE, and away from other people.

As for my private space, I focus on routine and comfort and security, and I don't think about it once it's how I like it, though I know that when I clean my house thoroughly, I always feel happier and like my house better. Actually sometimes I don't always think about it when it's not quite how I like it. I noticed again while I was staying in various houses that weren't mine, and then returned to my own, that people are able to get used to things in their own homes that bother them a lot when they encounter something similar in other people's homes: paint peeling in a corner of the kitchen ceiling due to water damage from the bathroom above it; a broken front door knob that can only be opened with just the right touch, so that whenever someone who isn't used to the door knob wants to go outside, they have to ask to be let out. (I found it dreadfully inconvenient but supposedly it's really good for keeping adventurous three-year-olds out of the street.)

I think I have the sense that I am interacting with space most immediately and unmediated-ly when I'm in a certain kind of public space, because I've gone there because I want to be IN that space. I want to be in the park; I want to sit on a bench and watch the river or the sky or something. Whereas when I'm home I'm mostly thinking of it as an extension of me, instead of a space I inhabit.

Posted by holly at 6:05 PM | Comments (7)

September 12, 2006

An Obvious Compound Word

Today one of my students gave me a poem built in part on questioning something I apparently said about heartbreak.

When I first got home from my mission I was suffering from what I would eventually come to call religious despair. On my mission I was suicidally depressed, though I lacked the initiative and the energy to do anything about my grief. I could not eat or sleep. I wept uncontrollably for nine weeks, so bereft that I could not stop my tears even in public.

And then I finished my mission, went home, and went back to work on my undergraduate degree. I was young and pretty and from a middle-class family. I liked wearing bright blue mascara and clean clothes. I still attended church. My suffering did not involve addiction or physical violence.

And so no one believed me when I talked about my unhappiness. God forbid I try to write a poem about the despair I had experienced! I remember a middle-aged gay male bartender responding with undisguised loathing to a poem I submitted in class attempting to describe the young, chaste, female trauma I'd endured. How dare I, he proclaimed! How dare I believe I knew anything of heartbreak!

And now that I am middle-aged, a young man is saying basically the same thing, because.... I can pay my own mortgage? Because there's still no addiction and physical violence in my life?

OK, I don't know a thing about heartbreak. I know nothing of it. I relinquish any claim to so dignified a word. What I know--all I know--is grief's assault on the rest of the body. If you want to talk about suffering rooted in and expressed through phlegm and bile and blood and bowels, then hey, I have something to say about that.

Posted by holly at 11:59 PM | Comments (5)

July 10, 2006

Utility and Worth

Here's a strange little reflection I found on page one of a journal I started about two years ago. I avoided writing in it because it wasn't the format I generally prefer for a journal: heavy lined 8.5 by 11 loose leaf notebook paper. But for reasons I explain below, I finally started using this journal as well. I'm currently on page 13.

I have had this little book since before I graduated from high school in 1981. What the hell have I saved it for all these years? Good god, it's now 2004 and this book is still empty, unused-- not quite wasted (because it still has potential) but almost, since it is a thing that has a purpose and that purpose is going unfulfilled. And if that purpose is never fulfilled, well, then the thing is wasted.

Everything has a purpose, but we don't get to decide what those purposes are, necessarily-- only the purposes of the things we make. The purpose of a cow is not to be eaten, but to be a cow. However, the purpose of beef is to be eaten, and it would be wrong to waste beef. Once the sacrifice has been made, once a thing has been killed, then it's wrong to let it go to waste.

I'm thinking about issues of utility and worth-- I don't want to exploit things, and I also don't want to waste resources--

and that's it.

Posted by holly at 3:44 PM | Comments (4)

July 5, 2006

FYI

All I've ever really wanted, really and truly, is a lifetime of connection to transcendent beauty.

Really now, that's not too much to ask, is it?

There have been times when I've been willing to accept substitutes, like enlightenment and serenity, and I sought them diligently. But now I see what shoddy substitutes they are, and I seek them no more.

P.S. I'm not kidding.

Posted by holly at 9:19 AM | Comments (7)

June 14, 2006

Where or When I Was

Early this morning I had what is for me a very rare experience: I awoke with absolutely no idea where or when I was. At first I thought, "Am I nine? Is this my parents' house?" And then I thought, "Am I in our summer cabin on the mountain? Is that why everything is so dark and simultaneously familiar and a little bit out of the ordinary?" But the ceiling was more than two feet from my face and I couldn't see any exposed two-by-fours (I got to sleep in the loft, which I loved, because it was solitary and strange and I had to climb a ladder to get to it) so I knew that wasn't the case. Next I had to figure out that I wasn't in a college dorm or a hostel in Europe. (The one period of my life I never thought to imagine I was revisiting was anything having to do with my mission or Asia.) I then asked myself, "Do I still live in Iowa?" And I actually worded it like that, with the still, which meant I was figuring out that if my consciousness had me still living in Iowa, it wasn't doing its job properly. Then I thought, "Am I on a boat? Because I was on a boat, pretty recently." And then it all came back, that I'd been traveling but was home now, waking up for the first time in a good while in my little house in the rust belt.

The thing is, I felt no distress or discomfort while I was figuring all this out. I was too asleep to discern immediately where I was, but I was awake enough to feel my mind working, and I was distanced enough from both sleep and wakefulness to stand back and simply watch my mind figure out this situation, and that was kind of fun. I felt fortunate as I cycled through various periods of my life and realized that there had been all these places in the world where I'd slept safely and awakened in the morning to go do interesting things. And I was especially comforted to discover that I was in my own bed in my own house and that I wouldn't have to get up in a few hours and get off a boat or on a plane, and that made it really easy to go back to sleep.

Posted by holly at 6:55 PM | Comments (3)

May 21, 2006

What's a Materialist to Say about Categorical Errors?

In an email message to me a couple of days ago, Spike noted that comments on various threads had revealed certain categorical errors. He said he'd try to find time to respond to the comments himself, and I said, "Look, you write such interesting, insightful stuff; I don't want it buried deep at the end of a thread, especially since I have the feeling these issues might come up again. If you're going to write an analysis of this, why not write something I can post as an entry? I'm really busy right now and could really use a guest blogger, if you wouldn't mind...." And it turns out, he didn't mind at all, and very graciously agreed to write a post for me.

So here it is: my very first guest post, courtesy of Spike.

In the comments to From the Perspective of a Man and Carnival of Feminists XV, two criticisms of Holly's statements made the error of confusing physical properties with culture. Timothy was concerned that while the thread of the comments under "From the Perspective of a Man" emphasized the importance of not damning a whole category of people when insulting a particular individual, this concern ran against the grain of what he felt was Holly's critique of "straight white men." Holly's response has already made the point that criticizing the dominant perspective is not the same as criticizing a group of people. What interested me was the way Timothy collapses a cultural or ideological category (the dominant perspective of the straight white male) with a biological category (men).

In the discussion of the Carnival, a similar, but slightly more complicated error led Jay to question Holly’s use of a Chinese character in the design of her web page: he was concerned about the appropriation of Asian culture by non-Asians. It seems to me that Jay’s concern also rests on a conflation of a cultural or ideological category with, here, a geographical one. This mistake is a bit less obvious than Timothy’s so I should explain why I think Jay makes it. Jay suggested that it was ironic that Holly included a link to Jenn’s piece Unbound Feet in the Carnival, when Jenn had also posted a little rant (Jay’s term) about Western appropriation of Asian culture, since it would appear from the top right of Holly’s page that she’s a white woman but she includes a Chinese character. (Holly and Jay have already had an exchange about this over the issues of etiquette and the reason Holly has the character on her blog so I won’t belabour these points.)

Now it may be a bit unfair for me to discuss Jenn's writing here – it's not her blog, I don't even know if she's reading this – so I will stress this qualification: I am not attributing any intent to Jenn, I'm only commenting as a reader. I have read both of the posts that matter here. The first thing to be noted about the "rant" is that it is a rant. It is not a thoughtfully crafted argument about the point she wants to make – unlike the elegant piece she wrote on "unbound feet," which is a careful and powerful argument. Now ranting is quite important and I would encourage more of it. But I suspect that the tone of the rant is part of the reason Jay felt he had license to question Holly's use of the Chinese character: the rant reads like a defence of the integrity of Asian culture against Western power. It would be possible – but I believe it would be very ungenerous – to suggest that this goes against the argument made in "unbound feet," which is a powerful claim for feminist resistance to female identities imposed by Asian American men on Asian American women.

So the problem that lies under Jay's use of the rant from Reappropriate is this: what is "Asian culture," that has some kind of identity that needs to be defended? Asia is a big place, with lots of language groups, many different religions, different rates and forms of urbanization, different histories…one could go on. These forms of diversity even mark a single country like China.

And Asian nations and cultures have fairly fraught relations with each other due to the region's long historical experiences with conquests and empires. Consider the experiences of Chinese, Korean, or Filipino immigrants in Japan. Or consider the attempted colonization of Korea by Japan and by China. Or China's occupation of Tibet, or its invasion of Vietnam in the late 1970s. Asia does not look like a homogeneous entity from a cultural, political, social, or economic perspective. Asia is a geographical term, not a cultural entity. Indeed, to the extent that we can even refer to a notion like "Asian culture," it is the product of orientalism: a colonial project to construct an "other" to secure "Western" identities.

I said that I think a notion of "Asian culture" would stem from an ungenerous reading of Jenn's writings cited here because I think both pieces, in different ways to be sure, are demands to be allowed to make of herself the person she would be autonomously. So to the extent that Jay would have no problem with Jenn's autonomy before pressures from "deranged and cranky" Asian American males ("DACs"), he ought not have had any issue to raise with Holly's autonomy. The problem for Jay comes up because "Asian," as a subordinate identity within the West, and Asia, for a couple of hundred years a subordinated region internationally, come to feel like something to be asserted and defended as a way of redressing these injustices. I get that, but I also suspect that as a political project it is doomed to fail because "Asia" can be no less an artificial unity, imperially papering over important cultural and political differences, than "the West" is. These geographic entities only become cultural unities through acts of domination.

Why do these category errors matter? There are a lot of reasons I could give: for example, I'm very interested in philosophical materialism. I have been trying to work out a way to think about consciousness that situates it in relation to and as a part of the material world without the kinds of reductions that I see in Timothy's and Jay's assertions. But I think there is also a larger political stake here. Holly's student in "From the Perspective of a Man" asked Holly simply to invert her perspective – if he could see the world from the point of view of a woman, could she try to see it from a man's perspective? That would be equality, right? Well, no it wouldn't, as Holly points out, because she has to see the world from a man's perspective all the time: the dominant perspective contributes to domination by making itself appear natural and inevitable. The subordinate perspective is, please forgive me for saying so, the Freudian repressed: it cannot go away but it cannot easily be expressed.

When we reduce culture or consciousness to geography or biology, we make the cultural forms or ways of thinking appear to be natural. And by becoming "natural," dominant perspectives define nature and, in turn, justify themselves through category errors: biology or geography become destiny. So it's not just a matter of giving "equal time" to subordinate points of view. The dominant ideologies have to be denatured in order to be overthrown.

Posted by holly at 3:13 PM | Comments (9)

May 10, 2006

Piraha, Dependent Clauses, and Counting to Ten

Big fat disclaimer: I sent a link to this story to a colleague; she told me that the guy featured in the article, Daniel Everett, administered her comprehensive exams and is not British as he claims but "American, a member of the Summer Institute of Linguists (an evangelical group who brings Bible translation to remote places; they have done amazing linguistic research), and the former chairperson of the linguistics dept. at U.Pitt - who had to flee the country for embezzling funds from Pitt!" Also, "His story about the murder plot has been suspect for a long time." Which gave me pause about posting this, but it's still pretty interesting, and you can make up your own mind what you think about it all.

Read this amazing article from Spiegel International about a small group of Brazilian natives whose language--Piraha-- "departs from what were long thought to be essential features of all languages."

The language is incredibly spare. The Pirahã use only three pronouns. They hardly use any words associated with time and past tense verb conjugations don't exist. Apparently colors aren't very important to the Pirahãs, either -- they don't describe any of them in their language. But of all the curiosities, the one that bugs linguists the most is that Pirahã is likely the only language in the world that doesn't use subordinate clauses. Instead of saying, "When I have finished eating, I would like to speak with you," the Pirahãs say, "I finish eating, I speak with you."

Equally perplexing: In their everyday lives, the Pirahãs appear to have no need for numbers. During the time he spent with them, Everett never once heard words like "all," "every," and "more" from the Pirahãs. There is one word, "hói," which does come close to the numeral 1. But it can also mean "small" or describe a relatively small amount -- like two small fish as opposed to one big fish, for example. And they don't even appear to count without language, on their fingers for example, in order to determine how many pieces of meat they have to grill for the villagers, how many days of meat they have left from the anteaters they've hunted or how much they demand from Brazilian traders for their six baskets of Brazil nuts.

Not only do these people have no numbers, because they have never had to intellectualize counting or any form of math, they can't be taught to count to ten. It's not that they're stupid--the article makes the point that "Their thinking isn't any slower than the average college freshman," some of whom also have trouble with basic math and subordinate clauses. They just have no way of accommodating ideas for which they have no set of linguistic structures.

Daniel Everett, the linguist who's worked with the tribe, argues that "the language is created by the culture." These people live in the here and now and they don't need to know how many beans are in a can, so they've never created a language that helps them figure that out. This simple assertion has really put Noam Chomsky's knickers in a twist, because it contradicts his widely accepted theories, "according to which all human languages have a universal grammar that form a sort of basic rules enabling children to put meaning and syntax to a combination of words."

The article continues:

Whether phonetics, semantics or morphology -- what exactly makes up this universal grammar is controversial. At its core, however, is the concept of recursion, which is defined as replication of a structure within its single parts. Without it, there wouldn't be any mathematics, computers, philosophy or symphonies. Humans basically wouldn't be able to view separate thoughts as subordinate parts of a complex idea.

And there wouldn't be subordinate clauses. They are responsible for translating the concept of recursion into grammar. Renowned US psychologist Pinker believes that if the Piraha don't form subordinate clauses, then recursion cannot explain the uniqueness of human language -- just as it cannot be a central element of some universal grammar. Chomsky would be refuted.

But it freaks me out too because on my mission I had this weird experience:

I was startled one day about two months into my mission [yes, missionaries learn languages very quickly--immersion and "the gift of tongues" help with that] to realize that I understood enough Chinese to follow a conversation without mentally translating everything I heard back into English. One part of my mind got over the surprise very quickly and went on with the discussion, but another part remained astonished that suddenly there was something instantly apprehensible in the sounds and structures of Chinese; I recognized it as simultaneously a foreign language and a familiar idiom. But I was even more astonished a moment later to realize that while my comprehension had grown to include Chinese, my expression hadn't. My mind was no longer operating in translation mode, and that meant I couldn't talk. If I had stopped, commanded my mind to form my thoughts in English, to translate them into Chinese, and then spoke, I could have said something, but my thoughts were coming too rapidly and in some form that was neither English nor Chinese. The investigator said something to me, I opened my mouth to respond--my muscles, like my mind, knew I was having thoughts, and prepared to express them--but NOTHING came out. I knew I was having thoughts, but they weren't in any language that could be articulated--and once I realized that, it was all I could do not to cry, because I felt so bereft and lonely.

That was in, let's see, September 1985; in June 1986

another missionary sought me out because my skills as a speaker of French were required. Two Parisians had shown up at our chapel, two French Catholics who had come to the Mormon Church looking for the Taichung Confucian Temple, and I was enlisted to talk to them since they spoke neither English nor Chinese. I understood everything they said to me, but every time I opened my mouth to answer, the first few words out of my mouth were in French, after which the sentence finished itself in Chinese.

It was as if my brain only had two modes: Native Tongue and Foreign Language, and the default drive on the Foreign Language was Chinese. I thought out in English what I wanted to say, translated it into French in my head to reassure myself that I indeed still knew the French, then spoke: "Follow this street till it ends, then turn left, and the temple is just ahead on your right." I started out competently enough in French: "Venez au fin de cette rue et tournez a gauche" but that was as far as I got before the rest of the speech spilled out in clipped Chinese syllables: "kung fudz dyan hen jin, dzai nide you byan."

The French couple was patient and polite and quite distraught when, after a few attempts, I gave up trying to speak French and simply started to cry. I walked with them in silence down the street until the temple was visible, then walked back, alone, to the chapel.

Ever since my mission I've been skeptical of the idea that all thought involves language--make that, I KNOW there are thoughts that don't involve language; otherwise, we couldn't LEARN a language, since we don't come into this world already fluent in any speech. But I've felt on a visceral level this strange thoughts-beyond-language state, and I felt it in a very weird and disconcerting way. But of course, these thoughts I was having that weren't in any language were perhaps thoughts I was ABLE to have because I had already acquired a language that made such thoughts possible, even if they didn't have an articulate-able (articulable?) verbal dimension...?

I don't know. It's very interesting. And if you follow a chain of links, beginning with this one, you'll eventually get to a very long paper on whether or not learning a second language changes your personality--I won't link directly to it myself because it's a massively huge pdf file and trying to access something so large always freezes my poor little computer, which is connected to the internet via dialup. (I know, I know, I'm the last person in the country to use dialup. But it's free, and I'd rather buy expensive shoes than fast internet connection.)

Thanks, Spike, for sending me the link to the story.

Posted by holly at 8:38 AM

May 4, 2006

I Am Suddenly So Freakin' Homesick

Woke up this morning well before 5 a.m., not particularly rested, all freaked out about mortality again.... I haven't written much about, because I lately haven't much inhabited, the spells of profound despair I'm sometimes subject to.... Sometimes I just worry. I bolt awake in the middle of the night, heart heavy and fast, tears already in my eyes, because the ice caps are melting and all the polar bears are going to die. Read a couple of days ago that all these new species, including the hippopotamus, have been added to the list of endangered species, and it pretty much bummed me out. "Entropy," I thought. "This is fuckin' entropy: everything reduced to the lowest common denominator, as boring and uniform as human beings can make it before they die out too."

And I also think about the fact that I'm 42 and probably about half way through my life. I sorta believe in reincarnation, and I wonder what I'll come back as.... I'm not announcing suicidal tendencies or anything--no need to worry about me--but there are times when I think, "Yeah, it wouldn't be so very bad to start all over again...."

And then I read something like this or this from Chris Clarke, which tears my heart in ways I can't fathom or describe. I realize that those of us who love the desert romanticize it terribly, and it's not because we don't know there are other places that are really beautiful. It's because, hell, I don't know.... In some ways the best thing I ever heard anyone say about the desert was T. E. Lawrence's response (at least, Peter O'Toole said it, in the movie version of T. E. Lawrence's life) when asked why he likes its so: "It's clean."

It's clean. You get dirty there, but the desert itself is somehow clean.

I spent most of my Christmas break in east Tucson at the home my parents recently purchased two doors down from my brother and his family, and one of the things I did while I was there was go for walks and look at the Catalinas, the strange mountain range to the North. The Catalinas are amazing: they're so weirdly bumpy and irregular, and they are perfectly situated to capture shadows created by the sun as it travels across the sky: the Catalinas change more than any other mountain range I've ever seen.

Like I said, there's something about all this I can't fathom or describe. The air seems clean (not that it really is these days) and clear and I just have this sense of... the sublime? Intimations of mortality? I'm just so aware of how the landscape I grew up in shaped my sense of... life as something bright and harsh. Of the world as something that doesn't much give a shit whether we manage to live in it or not, but is incredibly beautiful--and somehow knows that--whether we notice it or not. I've never not felt this sort of awe and despair and gratitude and certainty inspired by this deep visceral language-less knowledge the desert communicated to me the first time I look around and said, "Huh. So this is home."

I doubt this is making sense. Plenty of things I feel I can describe adequately. My love for my home and the reasons why the desert moves me--that I can't describe.

Posted by holly at 6:24 AM | Comments (7)

December 6, 2005

Just Freakin' Say No Already

This is something I wrote back in August. I was unwilling to post it at the time because the person it was about was reading my blog. But he's gone, so at long last the post gets posted. It begins with a long quotation from Isak Dinesen's essay "On Mottoes in My Life":

The family of Finch Hatton, of England, have on their crest the device Je responderay, "I will answer.''...I liked it so much I asked Denys... if I might have it for my own. He generously made me a present of it and even had a seal cut for me, with the words carved on it. The device was meaningful and dear to me for many reasons, two in particular. The first...was its high evaluation of the idea of the answer in itself. For an answer is a rarer thing than is generally imagined. There are many highly intelligent people who have no answer at all in them...Secondly, I liked the Finch Hatton device for its ethical content. I will answer for what I say or do; I will answer to the impression I make. I will be responsible.

One thing that drives me crazy is people who can't say no, not in the Ado Annie from Oklahoma! way, but in the general sense of not being able to risk disappointing someone. This affliction affects every segment of the population, but Mormon women seem to have an especially bad case of it. I notice it every year when I go to fill up panels for Sunstone: I'll start gathering names of people I could invite to participate, then email or call them. There's always at least one Mormon woman who simply can't tell me no, though she desperately wants to. She clears her throat, she dodges the question (always invoking an obligation to her family--she's just so busy with the kids!), not wanting to give me a straight answer because she's afraid it will hurt my feelings.

What I want to know is this: why is being led on, strung along, forced to interpret vague clues of resistance, somehow kinder, nicer and more tactful than simply being told, "I'm really sorry, but I have neither the time nor the inclination for what you're proposing, so I'll have to decline your generous offer. I heartily wish you the best of luck in finding someone who's interested"?

One of my friends told me that when he came out of the closet to his mom, the conversation went like this:

My Friend: Mom, I'm gay.

His Mom: Did you take some hamburger out of the freezer? Because if we don't start defrosting it now, it won't be thawed enough in time for dinner if we want to make spaghetti.

I'm having one of those conversations right now. I keep trying to talk about the big pink elephant sporting a grass skirt, carrying an ukulele and dancing the hula in the middle of the room, and the person I'm trying to talk to keeps saying, "Did you take some hamburger out of the freezer?" Or else he says nothing at all.

Circumlocutious, evasive and oblique are not among the words most people would use to describe me. Candid, forthright and honest are. Not only am I not circumlocutious, evasive or oblique, but I don't trust or respect people who are.

Just freakin' say no already!

Posted by holly at 6:59 AM | Comments (4)

November 15, 2005

Hopeless Cases and Lost Causes

This is something I wrote during the summer, about a relationship I knew was doomed but still wasn't ready to abandon--I was so not ready to abandon it that I couldn't even acknowledge the real subject matter in the piece. I read it now and its intensity strikes me as strange, but then again, although there are situtions in my life I wouldn't describe as optimal, right now there's nothing I feel I should quit. Anyway, I came upon this piece and thought it might be better to post it when I don't feel all overwrought than when I do.

***

How many times do I have to say "I give up" before I believe it and mean it?

Or,

Why do I say "I give up" before I believe it and mean it?

One of my lessons in this incarnation must certainly be how to give up. I SUCK at it. We had all these lessons and lectures at church on "Enduring to the End," but what I really needed was some training in the fine art of judicious giving up, knowing when to quit, cutting my losses, calling it a day.

I knew within ten minutes of saying good-bye to my parents at the Missionary Training Center that I had made the biggest mistake of my life by going on a mission. But did I call my parents at that point and say, "Uh, yeah, Mom and Dad, I was wondering if I could catch a ride back to Arizona with you?" NO! I not only endured all freakin' nine weeks of the MTC, that "saccharin-coated hell-hole," as I had the good sense to call it at the time; I stayed on a mission for 18 and a half goddamn months, becoming more and more miserable, more and more ill, more and more damaged--but hey, I endured to the end of my mission and got a freakin' honorable release. It took me another three years to admit that I could not remain a Mormon, three years of struggle and failure and despair.

So why didn't I give up?

Because I didn't want to seem like a quitter.

That's a big reason I stayed in grad school and finished my dissertation: I didn't know how not to endure to the end.

I admit I'm happier with the PhD than the certificate of release signed by my mission president.

A therapist once told me that in the case of most marriages that end within three years, the people involved know BEFORE the wedding that it's a mistake, but it takes them three years of suffering and misery to admit it.

Why is it so hard?

Supposedly Saint Jude, who was martyred along with Saint Simon by being clubbed to death in Persia, is the patron saint of Lost Causes and Hopeless Cases. My book on patron saints states that "Because his name--Judas--is identical to that of the infamous disciple who betrayed Christ, this Saint was long neglected by the Faithful as an object of veneration. Consequently, he was available to take interest in even the most impossible, hopeless, or desperate cases."

I think he must be mine.

But who, WHO is the patron saint of cutting your bleedin' losses?

Posted by holly at 7:48 AM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2005

Taunt the Gremlins and They'll Taunt You Back Part II

Read Part One

"Omigod," I said when she told me this. "Omigod."

"Are you going to stay on campus and wait for them?" she asked.

"I don't have any choice," I said. "I don't have my car keys to drive home, or my house keys to get in my house even if I got a ride from someone else. I don't have my wallet or my coat or my umbrella--if it weren't raining so hard, I'd just go look for the cop. But everything is in my office."

"Do you have a cell phone number where I can call you in case I get through to someone?"

"I don't have ANYTHING," I said, "except the clothes I'm wearing, which includes a skirt with a couple of great big blood stains on it. The whole reason I left my office was so I could go to the restroom and deal with the fact that I had bled all over the back of my skirt. Which is why I wasn't thinking clearly enough to grab my keys, because I pretty much never do things like this."

Which is true. In the past 20 years I've locked myself out of my house a grand total of once. In my entire life I've locked my keys in my car a grand total of once. It's precisely this kind of thing I'm trying to avoid by "just checking" everything, and I usually do pretty well. So I'm blaming this on the gremlins. I wrote those provocative entries last week about how to outsmart them, and they found a way to outsmart me, waited until I was distracted, then moved my keys out of my line of vision so I'd leave my office without them. Keyless, I wandered the halls in my bloody skirt for 40 minutes, gratefully attempting any solution my colleagues offered, though the main thing they did is talk about how weird it was that no one was available to open my office for me, since they'd locked themselves out of their offices at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning or 10 p.m. on a Saturday night and had no problem getting someone over in five minutes or less with a key to unlock their doors and give their lives back to them.

Finally someone from maintenance arrived and let me into my office; there, huddled in an undignified lump in the middle of my desk, were my keys. I stuffed them into my pocket, then called campus security again. The receptionist and I had become good friends; I'd called her half a dozen times to see if the cop had begun answering his pager. "This is the woman who was locked out of her office," I said, "and I just wanted to let you know someone from maintenance unlocked my door, and I also wanted to say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for spending forty minutes on the phone tracking down someone to help me."

Then I called my Buffy colleague--whom I'll call Spike--to tell him I'd be late; then I went home and changed out of my bloody clothes. For those of you who don't know, blood stains are notoriously hard to remove from clothing; it helps a lot if you can rinse the stain while it's still damp, but these had (of course) dried in the meantime. The main thing you must NEVER do to a blood stain is wash it in hot water; hot water cooks the proteins and sets the stain, so that you'll never get it out. I am happy to say that after a good long soak in cold water, the stains disappeared.

Dressed in black pants so that if I bled on them, it at least wouldn't show, I went to pick up Spike. We had originally planned to go to a nice, quiet coffee shop so we could concentrate, and eat healthy sandwiches and drink herbal tea so we could stay focused and alert. "Would you mind terribly if we went someplace that serves alcohol?" I asked. "The past hour or two has been totally shitty and I am not in the mood for healthy and wholesome; I want a reuben overstuff with corned beef and sauerkraut, a greasy side of fries, and a pint or two of Guinness." Mercifully, it was not a hard sell.

Because Spike and I are brilliant people and Buffy is an incredible show, we came up with some great things to talk about in our panel this weekend, even in an Irish pub with celtic-flavored rock and roll wafting from the speakers. And I was glad I'd done something to redeem the day instead of staying home and sulking, which is what I came close to doing--I almost canceled. But I think I have learned my lesson, which is this: If you are going to lead a life of vigilant "just checking" in an attempt to outsmart the gremlins, DON'T TELL THEM, BECAUSE THEY CONSIDER IT TAUNTING. And if you taunt them, they'll taunt you back.

Posted by holly at 12:16 AM

October 25, 2005

Self-Portrait as Cultural Creative, Whatever the Hell That Means

A few week agos, Jana took this quiz designed to gauge your world view and posted her results on her blog. A few days later her husband John took the same quiz and posted his results, and not so long ago Wayne followed the links in my webroll to one of those places and took the quiz himself, though he didn't post his results on either his first or second blog. Instead, he read me his results over the phone, and told me to take the quiz. So I did. Turns out I'm a Cultural Creative, and

Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.

I didn't just score highest in the Cultural Creative category; I scored perfectly in it. I don't particularly know what the term means or how long it's been around, but I guess I really truly am one, if I buy into it 100%. I'm rather glad that "new ager" is not a category; I appreciate quite a few new age ideas, but there's so much annoying posture that goes along with being new age. As for the other terms, many of them don't mean to me what they seem to mean to the creator of this quiz, so I'm not sure how revealing the results are. To me, a Romanticist is someone who studies early 19th century British poetry (not many of those around these days) and a Modernist is what I almost became, someone who specializes in British and American lit written between the two world wars, and a postmodernist is a silly person who writes badly whose work you have to read in graduate school. At least I'm absolutely NOT a fundamentalist (which I would have predicted but am glad to have confirmed nonetheless). Anyway, here are my results:

Cultural Creative 100%

Idealist 94%

Postmodernist 69%

Existentialist 63%

Materialist 38%

Romanticist 38%

Modernist 19%

Fundamentalist 0%

If you take the quiz yourself, let me know how you score.

Posted by holly at 7:57 AM | Comments (6)

October 24, 2005

Self-Portrait as Modest Desires

When I was finishing up my first master's degree, I saw a career counselor who told me I should figure out what I would want if I could have any kind of life at all. My desires were modest: I wanted to live alone in a pleasant house with lots of windows. I wanted to spend most of my day writing, alone. In the evening I wanted to get together with friends and eat pasta out of big pretty bowls, and then I wanted to go home alone. I didn't care whether or not I was rich or famous; I just wanted to be comfortable. I also wanted all of this to take place in Italy. And wouldn't you know I got it all, six years later, except that as far as the place goes, all the universe got right was the first letter: it happened in Iowa, not Italy.

What if I had wanted something grander, more elaborate? Why didn't I want something grander, more elaborate? One reason is, I think, that I was tired. Life had been pretty stressful up to that point and I wanted some peace. I wanted less to be expected of me.

At this point I'd like to want more. I want more to be expected of me and I expect more of me and I expect more of the universe. What, after all, am I allowed to want? That has been part of my thinking all along: If you have this, you can't want that. If you are a Mormon you can't want a life full of drugs and orgies. If you have even a certain level of enlightenment you can't want the ease of living a stupid, unenlightened life. Furthermore, if you want certain things, then you can't really want other things. If you want to eat whatever you want whenever you want no matter how many calories it has or what it does to your liver or your pancreas or whatever, then you can't really want to be thin and healthy. If you want to smoke then you can't really want to breathe well. If you want to be nasty to your neighbors then you can't really want to be enlightened. If you want to be a writer then you can't really want to be not a writer. If you don't really feel like writing then you must not really want to be a writer.

Some of those probably hold true and some probably don't. I want to want everything I can possibly want. I want to want so many things that I get at least some of them, even if they are contradictory.

Posted by holly at 8:45 AM | Comments (1)

October 21, 2005

Outsmarting the Gremlins Part II

Read Part One.

The biggest things Mormons plan for, of course, is the Second Coming and the Apocalypse that will precede it. Gotta be righteous, so you don't get burned with the heathen! Also must stock up on a two-years' supply of raw wheat (don't forget the hand-cranked grinder so you can still grind it when the power goes out), a two-years' supply of potable water, and a two-years' supply of toilet paper. Mormon pantries are a sight to behold, as are the spaces under Mormon beds: cans of dehydrated potatoes and cornmeal and god only knows what.

At some point, when the church grew large enough that its membership wasn't concentrated in the spacious intermountain West, where people could have huge basements in which to store foodstuffs well beyond the expiration date (ever walked into a basement where two dozen cans of potted beef have exploded? That stuff stinks even when it's not rancid), someone in charge said, "OK, we'll let you scale back to just a ONE-YEAR supply of all those necessities. And don't forget to rotate your canned goods!"

You may think I'm kidding, but in her attic, my mom really does have a one-year supply of toilet paper. Outside the house, my father has a ten-year supply of rotted firewood, as well as dozens of old car batteries that can be hooked up to a generator and recharged and power various special appliances he has bought because they will run off old car batteries. (He also has two old Cadillacs: a 62 with rocks in the gas tank courtesy of some nasty neighbor boy, and a 49 that still runs, which he periodically has repainted, drives for a day or two, then parks again for ten to fifteen years. In addition, he owns an ancient aluminum motor home, a piece of junk whose only virtue is that its exterior is recyclable; a small RV in which he and my mother have driven across the country a time or two; a 40-year-old green Chevy pickup, the vehicle in which I learned to drive and which we all agree Dad should keep because sometimes, you need to haul stuff; a hideous white suburban with a broken driver's seat that he refuses to sell because it might come in handy, but which never will because of the truck; and a Ford Yukon he drives every day and complains about every day because it's not a Lincoln, which is what he really wanted, but he bought that damn little SUV brand new because my brother could get him a deal on it through his job, and Dad was too cheap to fork out the cash on a Lincoln, even though he could afford it. The front of the house looks fine, but the side view.... I swear to god, it looks like the opening shot of a movie about people who leave their empty whiskey bottles under the bed and tether a goat to the lawn so they don't have to mow it. The only thing that redeems the scene is the fact that none of the cars are on blocks.)

Adults were taught to Buy in Bulk and Never Throw Anything Useful Away; as for young people, we learned about Goals! That's what the Mormon church teaches its youth: the Importance of Setting Goals! For six years, from the time I started junior high until I graduated from high school, as part of official Church curriculum, I had to set two goals every month in areas covering my spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical, social and artistic development. I was good at setting and meeting goals. "Run three miles every morning." "Earn straight A's." "Never be tardy." We were told that "a goal not written is only a wish." I guess that's why I ended up serving a mission and getting a PhD instead of marrying a nice Mormon boy: I forgot to write down the goal to get married!

Anyway, the point of all this is that I learned, well and truly, how to plan ahead--not just for things I know I'll have to deal with (like three classes full of students every Tuesday and Thursday), but for emergencies. I keep a valid passport around, even if I have no plans to leave the country, because what if I suddenly have to fly to Italy on a moment's notice? I check the ten-day weather forecast so I can plan what I'm going to wear during the next week. I change my clocks BEFORE I go to bed when the time arrives to go on or off Daylight Savings Time (which I loathe) so that when I wake up, I know as soon as I glance at the clock what time it really is. I even plan ahead with my blog, so that I always have backup material in case I am having WAY too much fun living my life to write about it. I do this because it makes my life easier and more orderly in the long run, but I also do it to outsmart the gremlins, whose purpose in life is to cause chaos in mine, and I like to keep the chaos at bay.

Posted by holly at 9:19 AM | Comments (2)

October 20, 2005

Outsmarting the Gremlins Part I

I have always been someone who spends a lot of time "just checking" things. It's not like I think the world will stop whirling frantically on its wobbly little axis if I don't look up every so often and make sure the sun is progressing across the sky in a timely fashion. But I do harbor the suspicion that if you don't rattle the knob of your door at least three time to make sure it's locked, gremlins will come along and unlock it as soon as you are out of sight.

Preparing for contingencies and anticipating consequences, that's what I believe in, because you've got to stay ahead of the gremlins! In order to do this well, not only must you Check on Things, you also have to Remember Stuff and Keep Lists and Plan Ahead.

The Remembering Stuff--well, I'm not as bad about remembering everything as I used to be; I now let myself forget things. (I also admit my less efficient memory might also be a result of aging--I'm told that memory impairment can start around, well, around 40.) I have one sister whose memory is even better than mine, though she uses it to remember political information (she was five or six during the Watergate hearings and can tell you everyone in Nixon's cabinet) and street layouts--she NEVER gets lost. Me, I use my memory to remember appointments, deadlines, obligations, significant historical dates, poems and passages of prose, what everyone has ordered for dinner when I go to a restaurant with friends, and details about other people's lives. A boyfriend once related a minor anecdote involving a bunch of people I'd never met and I questioned the details, saying, "How can that be? After all, your friend Maggie is allergic to cats."

He was driving my car (I don't really like to drive, especially not in snowstorms, and it was snowing) and became very intent on the road for a moment. "You're right," he said finally. "It wasn't Maggie. It was Melanie who kidnapped Mike's cat." He pulled up to a red light and put the car out of gear. "Damnit!" he said, slamming the steering wheel. "Your memory is so good, I can't even lie to you about anything!"

"Do you normally lie to your girlfriends?" I asked.

"Well, yeah," he said. "There's always been something I've needed to hide. And there's usually a point where I screw up the details of some story I've concocted. But normally when something I tell them doesn't add up, I can convince them that THEY are misremembering. I've never met anyone who remembers my life better than I do."

"Well, I'm glad I can be the one to help break you of this nasty, nasty habit," I said. And I did help. He's one of the exes I'm still friends with, and he's pretty damn honest these days.

The Keeping Lists part--not only do I have lists, but I have lists that are cross-indexed. I have lists of everything I've ever published, one arrange alphabetically by title of the work, another arranged alphabetically by title of the publication the work appeared in, and still another arranged chronologically by date of publication. I have three lists keeping track of unpublished work as well, including where and when I've sent it. And then there's my List of Things To Do, with headings like "Teaching" and subheadings for specific preparations for each class and activities planned for a particular day. To make this list, I have to integrate all my various course syllabi, and then add things like birthdays, doctor's appointments, social engagements. I would hate to live without it. There are other lists I could tell you about, but you get the idea.

All the lists are part of my effort to Plan Ahead. I know people who are beset by generalized anxiety about the future, but never attempt to allay that anxiety by Planning Ahead. I could have been one of those people, had I not grown up Mormon.

To be continued.

Read Part Two.

Posted by holly at 8:06 AM | Comments (2)

September 18, 2005

A Necessary Ingredient for Enjoying Art

I love Grendel by John Gardner so much I wish I'd written it.

It is, of course, a retelling of the Beowulf saga from the point of view of the monster who wrecks Hrothgar's meadhall and feasts on his men.

I love it because it's a fiercely intellectual book, concerned with truth and ultimate meaning. I love it because it has so many fabulous lines. I love it because the dragon Grendel visits is one of the best characters ever created in all of literature.

I love it because plot is never the point: if you've read Beowulf, you know how Grendel ends: Beowulf rips Grendel's arm off, and Grendel goes off to bleed to death in the woods. So you don't read it for what happens, you read it for how it happens, and why what happens matters.

I get annoyed when people refuse to know anything beyond the initial set-up of a book they want to read or a movie they want to watch. "Don't tell me! Don't ruin the end for me!" they shout, covering their ears, as if ignorance is a necessary ingredient for enjoying art. If I feel I'm getting too caught up in wondering what will happen next to appreciate things in a text like musicality of language and construction of scene, I'll read the end so I can just dispense with the suspense and concentrate on enjoying the pages before the end, rather than racing through to the end.

The best books remain compelling and worthwhile even when you know exactly how they end: you enter the world of the book and that world takes over. I've read Pride and Prejudice at least fifteen times, and every time I read it, I am as engrossed, as anxious to read the next scene, as if I didn't know the story at all--because Austen's prose is just so good, her insight into human beings so clear-eyed and astute, her narrative so breathtakingly complex and rewarding. I reread it this summer and had to stay up until 3:30 in the morning to finish it--I just couldn't put it down until I was done.

Grendel is the same way, and I love it for that; I love that its world is so compelling. I also love Grendel for the stark, empty epiphany he has as he confronts his death. He insists even in the final moments of his life that everything is a matter of chance, that nothing is fated, but at the same time, one choice is as good as another. He refuses to believe that Beowulf managed to hurt him through anything but accident, fortunate for Beowulf, unfortunate for Grendel.

I will cling to what is true. "Blind, mindless, mechanical Mere logic of chance." I am weak from loss of blood. No one follows me now. I stumble again and with my one weak arm I cling to the huge twisted roots of an oak. I look down part stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it's impossible. "Accident," I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance that I can't win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving toward it. I look down, down, into bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving in me like an ocean current, some monster inside me, deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in his cave, moving me slowing to my voluntary tumble into death.

In On Becoming a Novelist, Gardner discusses that scene and comments that while writing it, he was thinking "child thoughts of death with undertones of guilt and the ultimate moral ugliness of God." I have always loved both that phrase and that idea. I do think the idea of God, at least in his Christian form, is one of the most morally repugnant ideas humanity has ever invented, in part because God is so capricious--fate is a matter of his choices, in which one choice is as good as another: he can choose to destroy the world by flood, and then choose not to, and it's all pretty much the same as far as morality and ethics go, because he's God and gets to say so. When I still believed in such a creature, I also often felt like I was falling off the world into some endless hideous darkness.

Which maybe is another reason I don't mind knowing how things turn out.

But don't let the fact that I've provided one of the last paragraphs of the book and the idea behind it prevent you from reading Grendel yourself if you haven't already. It's so good! And since you know now (if you didn't already) how it's going to end, take your time and notice how inventive and insightful the book is, and don't worry about the plot.

Posted by holly at 9:29 PM | Comments (1)