φιλοσοφἰα, γυνἠ, part two

Continued from an earlier post, on October 18th.


I'm spending awhile explaining where I'm coming from (in case that wasn't obvious from the aforementioned post). All of this is a very long-winded way of announcing that I am planning on moving into more explicitly philosophical territory. Philosophical, as I define it. I'm explaining my interest on a more personal level, because on the surface the term "Philosophy" comes off as specialized and, frankly, elitist. But the term, and the action of the heart and mind are, I think, very different.

            Philosophy is a word for something I originally turned to out of alone-lonely.  But then I got distracted from it by sex, and found a new kind of lonely:  I call it "man-lonely."  Lots of women know this lonely.  It's not so much wanting men, as it is the discovery that you don't get to choose either to be with them, or to escape them.  It's men who refuse to leave you alone, and even being a bitch just gets you followed around and yelled at for being a bitch.  (Trust me; I experimented.)  Alas, in my desperation to make the alone-loneliness stop, I mostly failed to be a bitch and went for super-sugary-sweet-and-nice and I held onto those assholes, goddammit.

            Fast-forward several years, and several miserable relationships later.  I am in a bookstore.  There's a book with a lovely cover.  It's called Philosophy, and I think to myself, "I remember when I used to like philosophy.  Before I dated men who like philosophy.  I remember when I thought I was smart.  Before I dated men who corrected me."  And I buy the book.  Mostly because the cover is nice, the layout looks like it's meant for laypeople, and the editor's name is pretty:  David Papineau.  The number of books I've purchased for similar reasons, and then never read, is huge; so I figure this one will have friends.

            One week after said book purchase:  I got in an accident.  My beloved Vespa betrayed me, crushed my foot, and removed a noticeable portion of my epidermis.  I was unable to walk for three months.  Suddenly, I had a lot of free time on my hands.  I couldn't fill it with work or men or anything.  Mostly I alternated between crying over my broken heart (I had also just been through [what I sincerely hope will be] the breakup to end all time), and crying from the physical pain I was in.  So what was I going to do with all my time?  I mean, I'm a champ when it comes to sobbing, but even I was getting tired of it.  Hobbling around on crutches was excruciating for reasons I won't go into due to the ick factor, so I basically had a forced three-month-long reading break.

            So there was this book.  And it was pretty.

            And I felt sick.  Sick from trying to crawl away from myself — from my own intellect and creativity — in an effort to be less intimidating to the men I was sure wanted to make me happy.  After all, they kept saying so!  "All I want is to make you happy and take care of you."  I'm pretty sure I thought that if only I could crawl fast enough away from myself, some guy would finally be able to give me all the love and happiness they kept promising.

            Which leads me to the second Greek word in the title of this post.

            γυνἠ: gunē.
Woman.
Because, finally, it is beginning to sink in: no human being can simply set aside their specificity in order to engage with the upper echelons of creative and intellectual achievement. I used to believe such non-specificity was possible. As a German-American who grew up surrounded by Jews, I was desperate for non-specificity. As a white girl who briefly lived in a part of California where I was one of the only white kids, I've been shocked to discover that most white Americans don't grow up with nearly the ethnic consciousness I always had. If you are one of those white Americans, I guess you're lucky. I guess that's what we mean when we talk about privilege.
When I was at university, and anti-feminists insisted that anyone was welcome to the philosophical tradition, that anyone could engage with the Western literary canon, everyone was welcome, it was an open book available to all, if only those women/blacks/Jews/gays/Latinos/whoever would stop whining about their differences for long enough to engage with the tradition, we could all realize how much we all had in common — I wanted to believe them so badly. I did believe them. I chimed right in.
But when I was finally angry enough at the way men had treated me, angry enough at the story of boy meets girl, boy loves girl, and they get married and he takes care of her for the rest of her life, when I was finally angry enough to have not only been lied to, but to have helped build the lie, when I was finally angry enough to push back, I can tell you specificity still mattered.

So here we are. For the past year or so, I've been reading Plato. Almost nothing but Plato. And, um, why is this blog here? Oh, yeah. It was supposed to be a space for me to think out loud about what I was reading. But honestly, I haven't been thinking out loud about a lot of what I'm reading, because I keep having all these thoughts that seem — *ahem* — specific. They are specific to being a woman, and specific to a post-colonial historical moment. They are specific to being a German-Scottish-French-American, and therefore both supposedly part of the tradition by ethnic descent, and awkwardly insecure about where our rebellious, anti-aristocracy, money-obsessed colony fits in with that tradition. And maybe more than anything else, my thoughts are specific to being an uncomfortable-yet-still-devout Christian, which is so incredibly out of fashion in philosophical circles as to silence all but the most confident (or naïve) thinker and writer.
Nothing I'm saying here is exactly new. Feminists and queer theorists, at the very least, have been saying it for at least a hundred years. But after all the miserable relationships, and confused and confusing teachers, all the Hollywood movies I believed without knowing I believed them, something even better than the bookstore happened: I suddenly found several men in my life who are probably better feminists than I am. They seemed to believe in the value of my thoughts and creativity, and also (to my surprise) were pretty sure I should be pissed off at having been silenced in so many ways, some subtle, some not so much. Like, spitting venomous, fire-breathing unicorns kind of pissed off. Maybe I should have been able to get there on my own. Maybe I should have been inspired by a feminist or two. (Okay. Maybe one. Or two.) But however it happened, it happened. I got lucky. I found out that the issue with men and women in this world isn't that men are mean and women are pure and innocent victims. It's much more complicated and difficult and interesting than that.
So while it's true that nothing I'm saying here is entirely new, I think I got tired of not saying it, in my own words.

golden age or churning of the waters

            It is late Pentecost, and approaching All Saints' and All Souls', and my church is doing a pop-up blog.  The following is a piece I originally wrote in response to something in the mass — though I can't recall what it was anymore — and so I thought it appropriate to contribute it when asked if I could offer something.  The following went up today, so I thought I'd share it here as well.

golden age or churning of the waters

the peach            sliced in half            fell open

gladiolas            stuck out their tiny            purple tongues

and strawberry blossoms            by magic            became strawberries

still your doubts hover            swoop in

and out             follow

an unknown will            behind me

behind me            behind me

where oh where

                                did the fruits with

their sugar and petals go?

it was that spring            the one people talk about

but it's gone            and somehow you know

you were never there for it

up under the mind            come floodwaters in the night

dark            and rotting what they touch

get behind me

i see it coming            and suspect

i am less necessary than you

behind me            where

shall we wait            for the boats that won't come

for the turtles            lumbering and snapping their mouths

to float us            towards a different death            one followed

by a spring            we may never see

            The concept of a “golden age,” from what I’ve read of world history, seems to be nearly universal.  There is always, “back then, when everything was great.”

            I am tired of this idea.  Not because I don’t believe in a golden age, but because I believe that almost by definition it must have been before human memory as we know it.  On some level we know deep, deep in our brain, the hunter-gatherer we are, and will never be again.  All of civilization — all the beautiful architecture, all the art, all the music and poetry and mercantilism and supposed glories of the intellect — seem to me a symptom of the degradation of our species.  A falling away from what we are, what we evolved to be.

            A bleak view for a Christian, I know.  We are such optimists!  Such unrelenting believers that all will turn out well.

            I present no solution to this.  Please don't take what I am about to say as a solution.  It is entirely possible there is none.

The churning of the waters comes from another mythology:  Indian/Vedic.*  So too the turtles.  They represent a moment when the muck that came out of Shiva’s destruction was churned, and lo!  There were good things hiding in that mud!

What the good things are, I don’t know.  I suspect they don’t include me as I know myself now; I suspect they are made from my recycled innards.  But I would like the turtles to have a chance to float a new world on their backs, even if they do it on the strength of fish they ate, who in their own turn gnawed on my bones.

*  I should mention that I do not understand Indian or Vedic philosophy well enough to expound on it/them (really there are Indian schools other than Vedic, but it's the best known).  I will say that I think that poetry is a different realm altogether, and I claim full license to do whatever the hell misunderstanding I please in poetic form.  I would work much harder — and probably write something much less useful — if I were composing an essay on soma and the samudra manthan.  Which I'm not.  Yet!

φιλοσοφἰα, γυνἠ, part one

            φιλοσοφἰα
            Philosophia.  The original meaning is "love of wisdom."  That's a lovely original meaning.
            I go back and forth on the term "philosophy."  For now, I am happiest with the phrase, "the life of the mind."  Philosophy has started to sound so cold, and what drew me to the life of the mind (originally) was much, much more personal.  It was an aching loneliness, that started sometime in grade school.
            So here, for the next two or three posts, I will stories centering around two different words.
            First, a chronology.

            Long time ago:  Somebody writes the fucking book of Genesis, which is one of the better pieces of literature.  But strange once you read the really old creation myths.  In which the reader discovers that most of humanity believed that the world was created by a goddess and a serpent, and the whole dude thing didn't show up until much later.

            Approximately 1933-1945:  Shoah, or the Holocaust.  Or the really brilliant PR concept, the Final Solution.  During Shoah, probably around 6 million Jews were killed by Nazi programs in and around Germany.  If we broaden to "the Holocaust," and include in that all of the religious dissenters, homosexuals, Romani, disabled, and other lives deemed unacceptable by Germany, the number rises to about 5 million more humans, for a total of approximately 11 million people dead.

           1991:  I started attending the public junior high in Mercer Island.  I lived on Mercer Island, but until then my mom had driven me to another nearby town to go to a small Christian school there.  Because I hadn't been going to the public schools where I lived, I hadn't known much about the demographics of my own neighborhood.  One of my first discoveries was Jewish kids.  Lots of Jewish kids.  I was initially thrilled to discover that the Hebrews of the Bible had survived in the modern era.  I had thus far believed them to be extinct because we always talked about them in the past tense in church and school.
            I was, however, quickly apprised of the events of the Holocaust.  Being raised in an Evangelical home and church, with a heavy emphasis on guilt, and being mostly German American, the results were fairly predictable.  Not least because — and this itself was probably due to the historical influences on Mercer Island's ethnic composition — everyone my age was obsessed with ethnicity.  When you were meeting a peer for the first time, you would exchange names, ages, and would immediately be asked something like, "Where is your family from originally?"
            If I'd had any sense, I would have said I was Scottish.  My last name is Scottish.  But I am predominantly German, and compulsively honest.  So when the inevitable, "What ethnicity are you?" came up, I couldn't stop myself from saying "German."  The responses were less than favorable.  Usually it was just a quiet "Oh," and they would suddenly be not interested in being my friend.  Once, I got a horrified, "You're a Nazi."  Luckily even then I saw some of the silliness of this.  (Some.)  But it didn't change the fact that my family's origins shaped my whole social experience of junior high.  And, perhaps most importantly, I knew it.

            What got me interested in philosophy — probably between the ages of thirteen and fourteen — was neither the supposed topics, nor any interest in a method of questioning.  It was weirdness.  My weirdness.  Weirdness, and its requisite alienation.  It was being an outsider, having no friends to eat lunch with at school, and every time I did try to talk to my peers I was terrified by how casually they seemed to take life, and how seriously I took it.  You could call it being uptight, on my part.  And also, loneliness.

            At the church I went to in high school, the pastors were fond of expounding on "the roots of words."  These were mostly botched attempts, which frequently conflated the history of the form of a word, with the history of its meaning.  The word "sin" is a great example of this.  Or the etymology of a word — say, "woman" — would be used the prove the accuracy of the same ideology which gave rise to the word in the first place.

            Eventually, in college, men discovered me.  The supposed consolation of human companionship was mostly supposed; still, I was distracted from philosophy, from my newly discovered smarter-than-thou status, and thought I had found a cure for my isolation:  sex!
            Still the loneliness continued, and I discovered many of the real reasons so many women are suspicious of men.  And being intellectual does not help.  Most intellectual men want a woman who will "Ooooh" and "Aaaahh" to their fascinating observations, and less intellectually oriented men seem to resent the idea of a female companion being smarter than them.

            Philosophia is a beautiful word, with an important original meaning.  These days, it feels like a word for something out of reach.  Every time I use the word "philosophy," I feel like I'm in a Monty Python skit and the skies should pop open with a booming voice:  PHILOSOPHY.  I dig Monty Python, but such antics make me feel awkward and unfunny.  Not so much inspired to join in the conversation.
            But this feeling isn't an accident.  It would appear that the only way to get called a "philosopher" is to go to a university and get a doctorate.  Now that is a very, very expensive way to read books, write papers, and sit around discussing them both.  But academicians keep encouraging us to view philosophy as a highly specialized field, because why else would anyone be willing to spend that kind of money or, more realistically, take out loans they'll be paying off for the next thirty years?
            It remains to be seen if this trend will change for the better anytime soon.  I am encouraged by a lot of what I hear/read going on outside of the academy; for example, at Partially Examined Life* and at Philosophy Bites**, whose own Nigel Warburton recently left the academy because he isn't so sure it's the best place to do philosophy anymore.  But I'm not convinced this exactly heralds a sea change.  Both Philosophy Bites and Partially Examined Life focus almost exclusively on responding to the same people and topics that are dealt with in the academy.  It's not that I think the academy has it wrong about the importance of the philosophical literary tradition and its foci.  It's just that I'm not sure when we can expect to see non-academicians coming up with original, well-articulated ideas that are taken seriously enough to make it to some kind of larger discourse.  Unless/until that happens, it seems we are stuck with the academic model, both in terms of what subjects are discussed, and which interlocutors are taken seriously.




*  Which is awesome, by the way.  Totally worth checking out.
**  Which is also awesome, and much more succinct.



            

an experiment

The following was an experiment/mash-up using the very, very strange and wonderful poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, including some of the original German.  All of the words are Hölderlin's, or from the English translation by Michael Hamburger.


Fragments of the Fragments of the Later Version of Patmos, by Friedrich Hölderlin

Voll Güt' ist; keiner aber fasset
Allein Gott.

Most kind is; but no one by himself
Can grasp God.

In gloomy places dwell
The eagles, over
The chasm walk the sons
On bridges lightly built.
Give us innocent water,
O pinions give us, with minds
To cross over and to return.

So I spoke when
a Genius carried me
From my own house. There clothed themselves,
Like men,
The shadowy wood
homeland;
So, fresh,
golden haze
Quickly
fragrant,

Now, Asia burst into flower for me,
drowsy almost with flowers the garden,

O Insel des Lichts!
land of eyes,
More athletic
In ruin.
The hand of the Lord.
Rein aber bestand
Auf ungebundnem Boden Johannes.

von Cana.
A little while I shall stay, he said.
the Baptist's head,
Just picked, like script
on the platter. Like fire
Are voices of God. Yet it is hard
In great events to preserve what is great.

Johannes. Christus.
But that's
Impossible.
And now
I wish to sing.
Werden Träume. Fall on the heart
Like error, and killing, if one does not

Consider what they are and understand.
the Lord
Pronounced death, for never
He could find words enough
To say about kindness. Sein Licht war

Tod.
Alles ist gut. Thereupon he died.
as when
A century bends, thoughtfully.

The evening had come. For to
Be pure is a skill.
But much is to be avoided. Too much
Of love
Is dangerous.
und der Heimath.
beside them
Walked, like a plague, the loved one's shadow.
mightily trembled
The house and God's thunder-storms rolled
Distantly rumbling,

Tugging and Prying, in its Subtler Forms

            Thoughts on Chapter 10 of The Artist's Way.  Part ten of twelve on creativity.

            Humans (I'm told) are a social species.  I happen to be human.  Also, I'm a heterosexual and a woman (or maybe cis female would be a little more accurate), and these aspects of my social identity have contributed significantly to shaping me into someone who is nigh-on obsessed with social cues and norms.
            I've been on two silent meditation retreats now*.  Both were only five days long.  On neither of them did I achieve anything like the blissful state of calm I hear so many people describe.  I was definitely calmer by the end, but mostly that just made me realize how hopped up I am for 99% of my life.  And I have a pretty good guess what I'm hopped up on:  socialization.  Not because I like it.  I hate it.  I would almost go so far as to say I hate humans, if I wasn't afraid of alienating my readership.  (God how I aspire to having whales who would take my work seriously.)  But think about it.  This whole smile, make eye contact, then listen and talk thing is beyond exhausting.  I don't know how I manage it.  Because on both of my silent retreats, I spent the whole time on one loop:
            "Oh, no!  Should I have held the door/waited for him to take a bowl first/left my shoes outside/done my hair better/been quieter when I moved my eyeball?  They must be so irritated with me!  I'm sorry!  I'm so, so — Oh, wait!  We're in silence!  No one cares what I do!  I can relax!!"
            I relax for five seconds.
            Then, "Oh, no!  Should I have..."
            That is how I spend my life.  And I will go out on a limb and say that I suspect it is how you spend a large portion of your life, too, whether you're conscious of it or not.  Because I had absolutely no idea how I spent most of my life until I went on a meditation retreat and discovered that my universe turns on the axis of what people think of me.
            Obsessing about social cues, pressures, and norms looks different on different people.  I think it's important to realize that always pushing against the norm is still a way of defining oneself according to the norm.  Two of the many little boys in my life were recently discussing this with me.  Keshav, the elder brother, pointed out that his younger brother could be pretty easily manipulated by using reverse psychology.  Just say, "Ishaan, you better grab my car!  Or else!"  And, presto!  Ishi will stand defiantly over the car refusing to touch it for the rest of his life.  So I asked Ishi what was going on when people told him to do things.  He couldn't explain it (he's four years old, so such an explanation is probably a couple of years away), but he affirmed that no matter what, he always has to do the opposite of what he's told to do.  When I asked Keshav how he feels when grown-ups give him instructions, he got wide-eyed and a little serious and said, "Oh, I do what they say."  He also couldn't explain why; he just said that he felt like he really needed to do what the grown-ups told him to do.
            As Keshav's observation about manipulability demonstrates, Ishaan doesn't free himself by being so contrarian.  Both boys are making decisions, and the opinions of grown-ups weigh heavily in the scales.
            In Week 10 of The Artist's Way, Cameron discusses some of the most common blocks that people turn to in order to stifle their own creativity.  Two of them, erm, rang a bell with me:  relationships, and their best friend, sexuality.  I'm using the term "sexuality," and not "sex," because I'm not really talking about coitus.  I'm talking more about the mating game.  The relentless energy drain that is worrying about the bloody opposite sex/sex of interest.**
            When combined with the myriad other subtle pressures to smile, dress appropriately, not raise your voice in public anywhere ever on the West Coast, and rave about Mad Men/Breaking Bad/Walking Dead/insert popular show Leigh either despises or knows nothing about — these things add up.  As in, get heavy.  Get heavy and occupy the almost immeasurable quantities of mental energy we have, and never know we have, because they are always preoccupied with the things we're not conscious of.
            There's another trick to beware of here:  as soon as we hear the phrase "sex and relationships" we lie to/console ourselves by saying that's just a part of our life.  Like, somehow we compartmentalize sex and relationships (both the sexual and the non-) into these little, well-controlled sectors and don't let them interfere with the really important stuff.  This attitude is dangerous for at least two very obvious reasons:  it denigrates relationality/sexuality, by making them into distractions from the supposedly important stuff; and secondly, it's just not true.  You — the mass of creative, spiritual, intellectual, physical, and mental energy that you are — you are relational.  In other words, your relational and sexual qualities are not just a couple of the compartments, like intellect and physicality.  (The debate about the above list and which parts of it constitute "parts" and "wholes" will have to wait for another day.)  The you that is you is not even exclusively one you; it's a part of a whole.  By definition.
            The problem when you're talking about creativity and this relational aspect of us humans, is that frequently they directly conflict.  For one thing, there's time and energy.  Everyone in the world thinks they have a claim on your time, whether you've met them or not, and that goes about ten times over for women.  But beyond that, there's the weird, insistent tug that relationality exerts on our psyches.  You can kick everyone out of the room, for an indefinite period of time, and yet you know they will keep prying into parts of your head, the subtle desires and fears of approval and rejection, the obligations will never relent even in your own goddamn head.
            And of course, do you even want to kick everyone out of the room?  I, for one, do not.  I actually love some of those weirdos and wallflowers, and some of the rest I can even stand with measurable pleasure.
            But if I'm supposed to be writing about creativity (which I am), I have to say:  sometimes you gotta kick those guys out.  Like, everyone.  Everyone, even at the risk of making some people mad.  Even at the risk of making some people not like you, which is terrifying.  Even at the risk of kick them all out, to attempt (and fail) to clear some head space, so you can attempt to make an artifact that you will look at afterwards and know immediately:  it's a failure.
            Still, I stand by it.  Sometimes, you gotta kick those guys out.  Even the best of them.  Because not one person who has a claim on your love, affection, time, energy, interest, etc. — not one of them can live your life, can make the things you can make.  Not one can give you back that time later on so you can finally get to the work you've always been meaning to get to.




*  The silence of a meditation retreat is often called Noble Silence, and it means more than just not talking.  It means not talking, but also not listening in if/when you hear others talk, not reading or writing, and (blissfully) no eye contact.  No eye contact!!!   NO EYE CONTACT!!  That is what heaven is for me.  An eternity of being left alone.

**  Okay, so I assume heterosexuality when I say "opposite sex," and I'm not totally happy with the replacement, "sex of interest."  But for now, it's what I've got.  If someone could suggest a term that includes both opposite and same sex objects of interest and torment, please do.

A Warm and Fuzzy Post, that Isn't

            Thoughts on Chapter 9 of The Artist's Way.  Part nine of twelve on creativity.


          "Symptoms, then, are in reality nothing but a cry from suffering organs."  - Jean-Martin Charcot

            Oh, the myriad ways to come undone.  There are, of course, the "real" diseases — cancer is popular these days, and of course heart disease — and then the less-than-tangible organs make themselves known, don't they?

            Somatization disorder is a long-term (chronic) condition in which a person has physical symptoms that involve more than one part of the body, but no physical cause can be found.

            The pain and other symptoms people with this disorder feel are real, and are not created or faked on purpose (malingering).*

            Alcoholic neuropathy is damage to the nerves that results from excessive drinking of alcohol.

            The cause of alcoholic neuropathy is debated. It probably includes both a direct poisoning of the nerve by the alcohol, and the effect of poor nutrition associated with alcoholism. Up to half of all long-term heavy alcohol users develop this condition.**

            Even depression is getting its day in the sun, thanks to the invention of happy-drugs.  After all, if there's a drug to make the problem go away, it must be real (and surely must also have been accurately described by those making millions off of it).

            The chapter for Week 9 of The Artist's Way has to do with compassion.  As with many other chapters, I remain ambivalent about much of what Cameron has to say.  I should warn folks who haven't read it that Cameron is fond of telling stories about how as soon as Joe started taking his art seriously he had a million people loving his work and throwing money and opportunities at him.  So I take her with a grain of salt.  Still, the takeaway on it is simple:  being your own enemy doesn't work out too well.  For creative work, or for just attempting to be human.

            Self-loathing manifests in more ways than I care to count.  But even calling it "self-loathing" feels inaccurate.  When we say self-loathing, I think we imagine someone sitting by themselves with phrases like, "I hate myself," "I'm so worthless," and "Maybe the world would be better off without me" running through their head.  And don't get me wrong:  people do this.  Believe me.  I date them.  It's a fucking blast.

            What I'm talking about is the generally endemic self-rejection which we all engage in all the time.  To some extent, I suspect (pessimistically, I grant you) that self-rejection is necessary to socialization.  After all, there are so many emotional reactions and counteractions going on in our own heads and hearts, in any given minute of the day, that we simply couldn't interact with others if we didn't suppress some of the internal noise.  Add in a vague notion of sin/shame, a dash of consumerism, and you get America.

            And to this, Cameron has a response which I know was difficult for me, and would probably be difficult for a lot of people:  affirmations.  The Artist's Way uses or recommends the use of affirmations on a regular basis.  And while I shied away from the idea initially, Cameron makes an excellent point towards the beginning of the book:  why on earth is it considered not only normal but expected for us to regularly say hateful things to ourselves — i.e., "You're always late and you know everyone's pissed off at you for it."; "You're never going to get it together and stop incurring NSF charges, are you?"; etc. — but we think it's super weird to say something nice to ourself even if we know it's true?  What on earth is so bizarre about saying to yourself every once in awhile, "You know, sometimes I write/draw/build things I like."  Or, "Yesterday I got up on time and had plenty of time to do tons of stuff during the day.  I bet I could manage that again."  Or whatever.  Why is this weird?

            My short answer is that self-love is weird because we believe that it is 1) necessary to reject the failing parts of ourselves in order to see positive change, and 2) a sign of resiliency to be able to survive the onslaught of rejection.  Of course, we're not surviving the onslaught.  If a world characterized by young women starving/sexualizing/smiling themselves to death, and young men drinking/drugging/earning themselves to death, can be described as surviving, you and I don't live in the same world.  If the soul is dead, you have not survived.

            The mind will find a million ways to make itself, and its pain, known.  And the path back to wholeness within oneself is, I suspect, not short.  But the only way forward on it is, at some point, to give yourself a break.  All failures, all repeated dysfunctions, are one pitiful ego's attempt to protect, provide, and care for you.  It's like, the hardest working part of your whole head, and you just keep finding ways to insult and belittle it.  So my only recommendation this time around for creative health, is to give yourself a fucking break.

*  "Somatization disorder."  Medline Plus.  National Institute of Health.  Web.  12 September, 2013.

**  "Alcoholic neuropathy."  Medline Plus.  National Institute of Health.  Web.  12 September, 2013.

Postscript:  In all seriousness, if anyone's ever interested in reading a book or two about genuinely reconnecting to yourself, less from a warm fuzzy position and more from a position of calling bullshit on self-hatred, I highly recommend Sharon Salzberg's Lovingkindness: the Revolutionary Art of Happiness.  My favorite story is when she is nearly assaulted by a drunken man while traveling in Calcutta.  Afterwards, she told one of her sweet, loving, peace-filled teachers about it, and he said, "Oh, Sharon, with all the lovingkindness in your heart, you should have taken your umbrella and hit that man over the head with it!"

Hercules and the Old Maid

            Thoughts on Chapter 8 of The Artist's Way.  Part eight of twelve on creativity.


            "I hope I shall be able to tell it properly," she said anxiously.  "I fear I am very inclined to become rambling.  One wanders from the point — altogether without knowing that one is doing so.  And it is so hard to remember each fact in its proper order."  - Miss Marple, The Thirteen Problems

            "Oh! you are lying to me — you must be lying...."...

            Poirot came back, sat down in his chair, placed both hands on his knees and stared straight at his hostess.

            "The question is," he said, "can Hercule Poirot possibly be wrong?"

            "No one can always be right," said Mrs. Lorrimer coldly.

            "I am," said Poirot.  "Always I am right.  It is so invariable that it startles me."  - Cards on the Table

                            ____________________________

            Because I believe myself to be utterly fascinating (and I love to digress), I shall chronicle the contents of my writing desk at this time:

    -  Pyramid Curve Ball Blonde Ale.

    -  Voltaire's Candide, or Optimism.

    -  Simon Glendinning's Very Short Introduction to Derrida.  (The Oxford U Very Short Introduction series kicks ass, by the by.)

    -  The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, by Yukio Mishima.  No idea.  Haven't opened it.

    -  Pencils and pencil sharpener.

    -  Learn Ancient Greek, by Peter Jones.  Perfect.  So completely perfect if you're an incurable nerd with no aspirations of real mastery, such as myself.  Jones likes to make jokes, such as "κανναβις (no idea officer)."  I know!!  So funny!!!

    -  Lots of writing projects from the past year or so.  Mostly crap, but things are starting to look up.

    -  SEP articles on Plato.

    -  Crate & Barrel coupon.

    -  Plato's Theaetetus.  Also haven't opened this one.  We just glare at each other.

    -  List of the next nine movies I want to see.  I always keep this handy, because, as I never pay attention to it when I go to the rental store, I have more reasons to feel sure I am failing at life.  A whole list of them!

    -  Box of notecards and envelopes.

But the REALLY important things on my desk are:

    -  Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced, The Thirteen Problems, The Mystery of the Blue Train, and Cards on the Table.

                            ____________________________

            One of these days I will abandon all pretense at being high-brow and dedicate myself exclusively to mystery/spy novels/movies.  The title of this blog hints at it, but my love of mysteries and spy stories often threatens my other interests.  Even my interest in men, which is saying something.

            But somehow this has to do with The Artist's Way?

            The title of Cameron's eighth chapter is "Recovering a Sense of Strength."  The chapter is full of good one-liners.  "Non illegitimi te carborundum" is great.  It's mock Latin for "Don't let the bastards grind you down."
            Also, "Artists and intellectuals are not the same animal."  Which is true, but doesn't say what to do when you are both animals, trapped in a cage together.
            Cameron actually has a lot to say about intellectuals, and she dives into the subject of academia for awhile.  I appreciate this a great deal.  I've touched on it here, but I doubt that academia is where artists belong.  In fact, Nigel Warburton, one of the podcasters responsible for Philosophy Bites, not too long ago came out and openly questioned whether academia is even where philosophers belong.
            So if academia is becoming unfriendly to intellectuals, I'm certainly not going to get on board with it for artists.
            But what is the relationship between artist and intellectual?  I used to be positive they were two entirely different things, and frequently not even on friendly terms with one another.  Are they entirely separate things, and I just have to learn how to live with two different monsters inside my head?  Are they distant cousins both descended from our common ancestors Agriculture and Civilization?  Or two pieces of the same thing?  Our society's over-valuation of intellect, and over-romanticizing of artists, muddies the water considerably.  Because then you have artists with zero intellectual talent trying to pass for smart (probably in order to get one of those respectable academic jobs).  And you have college professors who are just slightly-more-creative-than-the-average-person teachers pretending to be artists and dressing funny to prove it.

            Maybe someday I will arrive in a place where I truly believe that creativity and intellect are two pieces of the same thing.  Even so, I tend to believe that if you can talk about something as two distinct items, something is going on.  Going on enough that they bear discussion.
            Which brings me to Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple.

                            ____________________________

            Poirot and Marple are Agatha Christie's two most famous detectives.  Which is to say, they solve problems.  They answer questions no one else can answer.  They disclose mysteries to their baffled communities, and in so doing, model two very different intellectual systems.

            Hercule Poirot is a former Belgian police detective forced to flee the continent by World War I.  He is short, dark, round of body, and his well-waxed moustaches proclaim his foreignness to the still mostly homogenous British world he inhabits.  He is fond of sweet liqueurs and rich French food, and on sunny days he is likely to be found wearing heavy wool overcoats, while his British friends, dogs in tow, go for long walks to "take the air".  (Monsieur Poirot practically gags at discussions of fresh air.)  Hercule Poirot is "other," though as a man I suppose it would be most accurate to say he has one foot in, one foot out.

            Which bears some resemblance to Jane Marple, the absolutely-beyond-question-most-Englishest character ever.  One foot in.  She is, however, a woman, and an old maid at that.  One foot out.  Her being an old maid makes her susceptible to being presumed either a harmless fool (at best), or an irrational witchy type (at worst).  Either way, her venerable-but-virginal status makes her potentially easy to ignore when important things come up.  She spends most of her time pottering about her ancestral village, St. Mary Mead, running errands, gossiping* a bit here and there, and knitting.
            Though Christie heaps silly characteristics upon them, neither Marple nor Poirot can be dismissed as fools, though Poirot attempts to ward off impressions of ridiculousness more assertively than Marple does.  But then, what could be more ridiculous than for a short, portly man, with a French accent no less, to be named after the half-god Hercules?  I suspect, on the one hand, that Christie meant the name in just such a joking manner.  But it is also clear from her portrayal of Poirot that she means to poke fun at the xenophobia that sees him as the fool when he is so potently intelligent and logical.  Poirot makes it a point of pride to not exert himself very much physically.  "The little gray cells," he says, do all the work.  And they do.  Poirot's little gray cells are brilliant and, of course, see what the bumbling British police miss.  Poirot is powerful, in the world Christie has crafted for him.
            While Poirot exerts himself as little as possible physically, and yet formidably in an intellectual sphere, Miss Marple spends copious amounts of time visiting friends for tea, knitting, and quietly poking around for gossip, and far less time thinking and "solving problems."  Marple consistently demonstrates that she is far sharper and more brutally rational than anyone around her, but her methods of detection are peculiar.  If Poirot is something of a computer processor, Marple seems like more of a chemical catalyst for those around her.  When the mystery has been opened up, more often than not the police detectives involved will be shown to have substantively contributed, rather than just being the heavy-footed laborers to Poirot's virtuosic genius.  Marple prods, and greases the wheels, but she herself often needs (and asks for) help in bringing about the final moment of disclosure.

                            ____________________________

            I don't want to say, "So, who are you?  Poirot or Marple?"  We could have some fun personal conversations about that, but I have been thinking of Poirot and Marple more as modes.  I go into one and out of the other, sometimes with no intention of doing so, sometimes at the behest of my current activity.
            I've started taking piano lessons, and something about reading, playing, and singing music feels like a distinctly Marple activity.  While I sing or (attempt to) sight read at the piano, I feel like my brain cells mingle in a sort of diffuse way.  And certainly singing changes my relationship to language.  I'm only sort of joking, when I say that when I talk about God, I am almost inevitably in an atheistic/nihilistic despair by the end of the conversation.  When I sing God — either to or about, whatever either of those could possibly mean when singing — the entire universe makes so much sense, I feel frightened to stop and face the world of speech.  When I try to pin down my little spoken language brain cells down and ask them a question like, "What key is this song in?", I fall apart.  If I just look at the markings on the page, though, connections almost seem to form of their own accord between my eyes and fingers.  What I'm trying to convey is that it feels like my mind is being sociable within itself.  It's not answering questions, and it's not solving problems.  How could it, when it's busy chatting amongst itself?
            When my head is working with music, or meandering through a geography of questions, or wondering in a barely-focused sort of way...  This feels very Marple to me.  It also sort of reminds me of some of the better conversations that happen in my philosophy group, although in that case the group itself is functioning as a sort of mind/brain, which ties into the essentially social quality of Marple's methods.  Whatever circle Marple finds herself in, she drinks tea and chats and listens carefully and prods those surrounding her into becoming the mind that will answer the question.

            Poirot is much different, and while it may be obvious that I have a personal bias towards Marplean methods, Poirot's are not only impressive but needed for certain kinds of questions.  (This is why Christie, like any good mystery writer, doesn't give Marple a Poirot mystery, or vice versa.)  Poirot is famous for his ability to solve a crime with almost no clues to speak of.  He relies far more on psychology than the British detectives ever feel comfortable doing, and it is here that he most reminds me of Plato's ideal philosopher:  standing alone, thinking, and thinking, and thinking, carefully shifting one piece here, then there, until we arrive at the right answer.  While I critiqued this so-called Cartesian method last month, sometimes a person can do massive amounts of work all on their lonesome by simply sitting alone and concentrating.  After all, as I'm sure we're all well aware, the world is replete with people a thousand times dumber than the worst of the detectives Poirot has to work with.  And as an intellectual, you sometimes need a certain degree of fuck-everyone to disentangle you from the foolishness called humanity.  I myself am terrible at concentrating (witness the list of my desk's contents), but I know people who are fantastic at it and accomplish things I consider nigh-on miraculous doing it.
            So go forth!  Go forth and poirot, go forth and marple, and when you've not only given both a try, but mastered the ability to switch at will between the two modes, you should let me know how it goes.  By then this blog will probably have become exclusively devoted to Lord Wimsey and James Bond because really, isn't that where my life's been headed since day one?

*  I shall note here that I don't like the word "gossip."  Its connotations are almost exclusively negative.  I'm quite certain that well over half of my conversations would fall into the gossip category (certainly most of the interesting ones), and I'm not sure how humans are supposed to learn how to be human without talking about other humans, including their successes and failures.