(“The Kindest Cut” by Larissa MacFarquhar in the July 27, 2009, issue of The New Yorker.)
New Yorker: The opening paragraphs describe (in typical New Yorker style) a 40-year-old man with strong convictions about giving back. “He believed that if his needs were met and he found himself in possession of a surplus… he was obliged to share it” (p. 39)
The other donors the reporter describes have similar spiritual values. One guy is kind of a fuck-up who can’t make child support payments, but realizes that he could actually do another human being a great deal of good. Two other donors profiled are women whose lives have been more explicitly devoted to giving back—one is a missionary and pastor, the other decides to donate a kidney in honor of her grandmother, a Korean immigrant who has always helped those less fortunate.
TD: I can relate to their urges to give back and to do something that has concrete value in terms of committing myself to the Human Body Project. For me, the project came as an inspiration, a calling. These people describe similar feelings of rightness, of deep knowing that they are doing something that has to be done.
New Yorker: The parameters of MacFarquhar’s discussion are American. It is illegal in the US to pay for a kidney. The people in this article registered on a five-year-old controversial website MatchingDonors.com to offer a kidney. None of them were paid, although at first the child support guy was looking for that possibility. (She also talks about stranger donor evidence more generally in ways that indicate that many of the donors are like these specific ones).
The article deals with the emotionality of this kind of kidney donation. Turns out there are incredibly strong reactions. MacFarquhar describes the different emotional processes of each donor-donee relationship, but first I want to discuss some of the outside reactions she describes and some of the questions she asks.
TD: While my project certainly doesn’t have the reach or impact of directly saving a life, I believe that because I use my body and because I act “against” self-interest, the reactions I get and go through are quite similar and related to the reactions reported here. I also believe that in some ways I’m working on the same principle, I do what I do because it is the right thing to do and because I am able to do it. It’s in the world’s interest and whatever is in the world’s interest is in my interest. These people are doing it because of the rightness and because doing something good makes them feel good.
New Yorker: Her questions: “Do you find the idea of donating a kidney to a stranger noble? Or freakish? If the latter, is it the extremity of the act that baffles you? Does it seem crazy, giving something that precious to someone for whom you have no feeling, and whom, if you knew him, you might actually dislike?” (p.40)
TD: Is standing around naked and vulnerable a noble thing to do? Is it freakish? Is it extreme? Why do it for all the fuckheads who are out there?
Many people think I’m noble and way more think I’m an extreme freak. I find both reactions difficult. I would like people to understand that I’m modeling something that I hope we can all do in our own ways to move humanity forward/make the world a better place/create world peace. In a way, it’s really not a big deal, but many people make it so.
New Yorker: MacFarquhar explains that for the donor, the operation is pretty easy and recovery is relatively swift. The main worry about only having one kidney left in your body is the possibility of losing one in an accident. If a person gets kidney disease later in life, it would affect both kidneys anyway.
TD: The idea of donating a kidney to a stranger does not call to me. I am still too afraid to even donate blood. It’s not rational, but there it is. But I don’t find the idea of someone else doing it repellent. It’s amazing how much projection and difficulty people have with it, though. See left column for reactions.
p.s. Since writing this yesterday, I made an appointment to donate blood tomorrow.
New Yorker: -Paul Wagner: reads about a lady on the website decides to give a kidney to her; his partner, sister and father don’t want him to do it (p. 39)
-Rob Smitty: loser/child support fuckup guy, first hoped for pay but after finding out it was illegal still wanted to donate; the recipient’s (Bob Hickey) surgeon refuses to do operation when he reads about the fact that the kidney was found online; Hickey intends to file suit and it becomes a news story; 2 days later operation happens; 8 days later Smitty is jailed for nonpayment and is disappointed that the judge didn’t show more lenience; a man reads about his case and helps him out with money; many media stories vilify him as an opportunist, though the man helped him out after the deed (p. 42-43)
-Bob Hickey becomes a kidney transplant activist; he believes that UNOS (Untied Network for Organ Sharing) which manages the cadaver kidney waiting list “intimidates transplant centers into rejecting Internet donors” (p. 42); UNOS position is that MatchingDonors.com ‘exploits vulnerable populations and undermines public trust in the equitable allocation of organs’ (p. 42)
-MacFarquhar reports at length about studies regarding living donors who were suspect even though they were family members; the medical/psychiatric establishment reactions are summed up in these sentences: the “surgeons and psychiatrists went to heroic lengths to draw out the conflicts and ambivalence that lay hidden beneath donors’ supposed willingness to undergo surgery. If the potential donor’s motivation appeared inadequately healthy, they turned him down.” (p. 43)
TD: She provides specific instances that are heartbreaking in the invasive psychological diagnoses by the outsider physicians and the outsider physicians’ arrogant ability to project motivations on the donors.
MacFarquhar brings up the emotional messiness of kidney donation, whether it be from a family member, a person found on the Internet, or an anonymous donor. The medical/psychiatric establishment clearly sees itself as some kind of proper arbiter of that mess. But I find it interesting that a profession known for the gigantic egos of its members mirrors their own egotism in their judgment of donors and, not only that, sees themselves as the people who can best decide about emotional consequences.
One reaction I often get from people is that I am doing the Human Body Project for attention. I find this really fucking irritating. One of my art teachers said, “You must have felt a lot of power.” Like that was my point!!! I am embarrassed, not so much by being naked, but my passion about it and commitment. It’s so “uncool.” When I send out press releases and put up posters, I feel I’m doing due diligence. Others see it as self-promotion. Holy fucking projection! It’s like they can’t get around their own twisted egos to see that there might be a sincere reason for me to do something fairly extreme and risky. I see this as mirroring the medical establishment’s reaction and the easy vilification in the media of the nonpayment dad.
New Yorker: MacFarquhar’s article reveals many examples of the difficulties of the donor-donee relationship. One young woman (the one with the Korean grandmother) hoped she would meet rock stars and become famous after donating to a rock musician. When she found out he didn’t really know Mick Jagger and he basically didn’t stay in touch, she was very offended (p. 46-47). MacFarquhar cites some examples of doctors not allowing certain relatives to donate: because a wife of a man who wanted to donate to his brother didn’t like the idea and the doctors thought the man was doing it to get away from her; or a mother wishing to donate to her daughter got severe nervous symptom during testing (p. 43).
TD: So fucking what?!!! This idea that the doctors know best about how people should lead their lives is very disturbing to me, especially this idea that messiness can simply be avoided. The young woman was still proud of what she did. We don’t know what happened to the brother and the mother; presumably if their loved one died, that couldn’t have been better than not donating!
New Yorker: I am particularly inspired by the last donor MacFarquhar describes, Kimberley Brown-Whale, a missionary who donates a kidney without needing to know for whom it is intended: “Most people who donate their kidneys to strangers say it’s not for everyone, but Kimberley Brown-Whale disagrees, ‘I don’t see why not,’ she says. ‘People used to say the same thing about the mission field: ‘I could never do what you do.’ Well, why not? You pack up some stuff and you go. Give it a try. We can do more than we think we can. If you’re sitting around with a good kidney you’re not using, why can’t someone else have it? For a couple of days of discomfort, someone else is going to be freed from dialysis and be able to live a full life. Gosh, I’ve had flus that made me feel worse.’” (p. 52).
TD: I’m kind of saying the same thing, we can all let ourselves be more vulnerable than we presently allow ourselves and by doing so, make the world a more peaceful place. It’s kind of matter of fact and not actually that hard. Reading this piece has solidified more for me the need for teaching actual ways of thinking about how we can use ourselves and our abilities to intentionally create a better world. Many people say, well there never has been world peace and there never will be. We have to at the very least teach the possibility of peace rather than that stagnant stance of cynicism.
Ecofeminist, inconvenient prophet, artist, activist, cancer survivor, mother. Radical vulnerability on behalf of the collective. Using nakedness—literal+figurative. Processing my pain.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Monday, July 27, 2009
A Mother Poem
Desperation still resides in me
Residue
A repository even
Happily married, regular sex even
But that dry reservoir of joy
My friend's brother killed himself this weekend
"My brother took his life"
48
David Foster Wallace, 46
Diane Arbus, 47
Frida Kahlo, 48
Tasha Diamant, 47
I went to that place tonight, for a moment
Sometimes I go there
Something about knowing, like really deeply and viscerally knowing, how things are connected and
So what?
The so what grinds me up
Something about ancient ancient ancient loss
Who mothers the mothers?
And then
The little one climbs on top of me and falls asleep
And the older one rolls against me and puts her hand on my arm
And I feel their weight and their breath
And they hold me down with their themness, their hereness, their selfness
And I remember
I am a mother, their mother
The miraculousness
How can the world not know?
How can I not grieve such ignorance?
Such atrocity
My homies, gone
But I am a mother, their mother
And they help teach me to be mother to myself
And I am learning
Residue
A repository even
Happily married, regular sex even
But that dry reservoir of joy
My friend's brother killed himself this weekend
"My brother took his life"
48
David Foster Wallace, 46
Diane Arbus, 47
Frida Kahlo, 48
Tasha Diamant, 47
I went to that place tonight, for a moment
Sometimes I go there
Something about knowing, like really deeply and viscerally knowing, how things are connected and
So what?
The so what grinds me up
Something about ancient ancient ancient loss
Who mothers the mothers?
And then
The little one climbs on top of me and falls asleep
And the older one rolls against me and puts her hand on my arm
And I feel their weight and their breath
And they hold me down with their themness, their hereness, their selfness
And I remember
I am a mother, their mother
The miraculousness
How can the world not know?
How can I not grieve such ignorance?
Such atrocity
My homies, gone
But I am a mother, their mother
And they help teach me to be mother to myself
And I am learning
Sunday, July 12, 2009
A Story About Karma (another M Ed assignment)
I first met my first husband, Robert, without actually meeting him. I both admired and avoided him from afar.
To backtrack, I had started doing yoga in the early 90s. I kept getting a message in my head: Do yoga. (Karma.)
Before I got this message, I had dismissed yoga as idiotic. I didn’t get the point of it. I was all about exercise for some result: a) goodness, as in moral superiority; b) appearance, as in I was interested in appearing morally superior to anyone who knew that I was running or going to aerobics class or whatever; and c) most importantly, skinniness, which is, of course, a key visual signifier of moral superiority, and also the only way to look to get a man.
So I got into yoga, not in any way through my intellect or my understanding of how things worked, but somehow somewhere in my being something was telling me: do yoga. I was the poster child for yoga. I became an excellent yoga teacher (I think of myself as exactly the yoga teacher I would like to have) mostly because of my complete initial retardedness. I learned everything from scratch; I had almost no connection between my head and my body so everything the teacher would say had to be translated and questioned.
“Do you put your feet right beside each other or can there be space between them?”
“Should I be feeling a stretch in my hips even though we’re stretching our legs?”
“Is this how I should be breathing?”
As a former top student in school, I was very interested in getting it “right.” I drove my first yoga teacher a little nuts.
The more I did yoga the more I knew I needed to do yoga. Again this realization was not intellectual. Something in my being was continually drawn to yoga. I tried new classes; I tried different yoga videotapes. I traveled a lot to do my art and did yoga in Venice, on Greek islands, in my brother’s 200-sq-ft New York “apartment.”
One day in the spring of 1996 I was in yoga class in Toronto and I saw a notice for a weekend yoga retreat. I was broke (I was always broke) but I knew I had to go. I got someone to cover my waitressing shifts and off I went to somewhere in non-urban Ontarioland.
The instructors had come from a place called Kripalu Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. As soon as they walked into the room, these words came into my head: I’m going to that place.
In November of that year I did. I signed up for a month-long yoga and service intensive at Kripalu. I walked into Kripalu, put my suitcases in my room, and went to my first evening yoga session at the place where I would end up living and working for more than two years. Robert was the teacher that night.
He had a long, lean body, a sad face, beautiful brown eyes, a soft New York-accented voice, and a shy, sweet manner. I loved the way he led yoga. Like me, Robert leads yoga by sharing his own practice. Like me, he is very at home teaching yoga. His yoga felt very nurturing. Besides me, he is still me favourite yoga teacher. My roommate, Holly, said: “That Robert is pretty attractive.”
Even though I hadn’t met him, I said: “He is a very damaged guy. You should stay away from him.” I just knew. That whole month, I made a point of going to all of his classes but I didn’t try to get to know him. The main chapel of Kripalu where yoga is held is pretty big and the yoga teacher is at the front like a performer on a stage or a professor or a preacher. He was kind of a star to me.
After my month, I went back to Toronto to organize moving to Kripalu for a longer period. I came back the following February to do a program where you get room, board, and spiritual development opportunities in exchange for working. I walked in the door and ran into a friend. We went to dinner together in the cavernous, austere dining hall (Kripalu was once a Catholic seminary; the building, built in the 50s, looks like any university or institutional building of that era). She said, “I want you to meet my friend Robert.”
This is how I felt: I am about to meet Robert! Robert is joining us! After my month of going to his classes and making him into a kind of star, I was really excited that I was going to be sitting with this handsome guy with the New York accent who seemed so sensitive, whose yoga felt so good. I remember I was charmed by what he had on, a green and purple striped turtleneck.
It was a really fun dinner. Robert is very witty and irreverent and he made me laugh a lot. It was the time of the OJ Simpson trial and we were both interested in the allegory of it. I hadn’t exactly forgotten my words to Holly or changed my mind about my assessment, I just enjoyed myself. It began a friendship that still exists to this day with a lot of extremely painful, hellish shit in between when we tried to be lovers and spouses.
My relationship with Robert—how it came about, the stuff that happened, the complete non-rationality of it—taught me and helped me understand the concept of karma. Robert is actually a deeply damaged guy who prefers to live like a hermit and is not very able to function in the world. Kripalu was a great place for him to be. He paid a minimal rent to live in one of the private rooms. He worked very part time hours as a yoga teacher and he was, along with any other man who entered the place, in demand. Women outnumbered men about eight to one.
I was a deeply damaged woman in her mid-30s, really lonely, desperate for a relationship, but utterly ill-equipped for a healthy one. The sensible part of me knew not to get involved with guys who seemed as damaged as Robert. Here’s a piece of karmic evidence, though: every day I would run into this hermit who barely exited his room.
“Can you fuckin believe that Johnny Cochran?! Getting OJ to try on the glove, that was inspired!”
We started having lunches and dinners together. In a fit of what I thought of as bravery and directness, I asked if he had a girlfriend. He allowed that he was “seeing” some woman from the town. “She thinks she’s my girlfriend,” he said with hilarity and contempt. Red flags all over the place.
One day in Robert’s yoga class I was near the front. I was in child pose and Robert came over and placed his hands on the small of my back, an assist, in the parlance of yoga teachers. Such a simply kind and simple act. But what amazing consequences! I had an experience of what I can only describe as God in that moment. (The yogis call it shakti.) I felt myself and my body as a pillar of white light extending from earth to “heaven.” While I have had other shakti experiences, I have never had that God feeling before or since.
I knew I loved Robert and had to tell him. I went from being in one of those lame, pretend flirtations that go nowhere to the real thing. I sat him down in the office that I worked in, closed my eyes, and explained my feelings, “I just love you.” I said I didn’t need him to respond or expect anything from him. But he was moved by my feelings and we soon began a relationship that was so extra-doomed from the start it wasn’t funny.
Maybe some hermits don’t mind being dragged out of their caves, but Robert did. For him, the stress of considering the needs of someone else was simply too much. For me, the idea of letting go was simply too much—inexplicably (karmically), he felt like home to me. Always instigated by me, we did a dark and destructive dance of on again-off again for more than six years. I spent many of those years sobbing and curled up in the fetal position and begging and crying to friends and trying everything I possibly could to get him to show up.
“I’m damaged goods,” he would sometimes admit. Or, “I’m not boyfriend material.” In his own way, he was honest.
When Robert took up with another woman for a while and ignored me, as in, he would literally pretend not to see me, I inappropriately told everyone I could think of about his transgressions, including the person who hired the yoga teachers and Robert's sister, in a 12-page letter. In my brain, I knew I was crazy. In my heart, I loved him and couldn’t release myself. It was a razor’s edge of awareness, living in and knowing I was living in pure fucked up shit—totally NOT a place of this makes any kind of sense. The most painful thing about it was how much I hated myself for not getting out.
By late 1999 or 2000, I was determined not to contact him anymore. I had moved into my parents’ basement in Calgary, tail between my legs, no money, no ideas, depressed, 38 years old (my friends called me Costanza), saved only by my beloved dog Swampy and the tolerance of my parents. Robert was in Lenox. We didn’t speak for a year.
Then one day, without admitting what I was going to do to anybody, not even my cherished therapist, I watched my hand press the buttons on the phone. I said: “I still want to be with you.”
In short order, he moved to Calgary, we got married, our families tried to be happy for us, we conceived Claire on our wedding night, and we had a few good months. I realized, in a deeper sense than I was allowing myself to believe hitherto, that I would be the one to support our family and in May 2001 we moved to Lethbridge where I got a job.
During my pregnancy I found out that Robert was using Internet porn at the same time that he was clearly uninterested in having sex with me. Do it baby, one more time! I was constantly getting my heart broken. It was textbook victim asking for it material or an opportunity to work on loving myself or both. 9-11 happened around the same time. Poor Claire. I was deeply distraught during my last trimester.
Then she was born! What a miracle! What a beauty! I understood love in a way that I had never felt before. Loving my child, this was love. Nothing was more important than caring for her. Robert and I both loved her so much. For a while, I got so much energy out of loving her and being with her and caring for her.
But looking after a 54-year-old baby didn’t work as well as it had. Well, of course, it had never, ever “worked,” but the demands of a real baby trumped the demands of living with my damaged husband. Our relationship exhausted me and made me ill. I actually felt like I was dying. And we fought in front of Claire. When Claire was a year and a half, I left and skipped down the hallway of my new little house. I was finally done! I was finally done!
I admit that I still got caught up in our shit for a while after we split but eventually I was able to not engage. Once I really realized that I couldn’t depend on him, I was grateful for what he could do and does do. He is a loving father and like a brother to me. It took me so long to accept on a full, embodied level, what was in my face for so long: he is a beautiful, damaged person, not able to be a real partner to me. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t something I did wrong that I had to fix.
I believe that Robert and I came into each other’s lives to work out some deep karma. I was able to work out a lot of rejection issues, to go from experiencing Robert’s actions as rejection, to accepting that what I needed from him was beyond his capabilities.
And we both got Claire out of the deal. I believe it was Claire who called up my pillar of light and Claire who called Robert back after a year and over thousands of miles. Claire wanted to be born. Her birth took my life in a brand new and miraculous direction. I am grateful for following my tormented heart. (Karma.)
To backtrack, I had started doing yoga in the early 90s. I kept getting a message in my head: Do yoga. (Karma.)
Before I got this message, I had dismissed yoga as idiotic. I didn’t get the point of it. I was all about exercise for some result: a) goodness, as in moral superiority; b) appearance, as in I was interested in appearing morally superior to anyone who knew that I was running or going to aerobics class or whatever; and c) most importantly, skinniness, which is, of course, a key visual signifier of moral superiority, and also the only way to look to get a man.
So I got into yoga, not in any way through my intellect or my understanding of how things worked, but somehow somewhere in my being something was telling me: do yoga. I was the poster child for yoga. I became an excellent yoga teacher (I think of myself as exactly the yoga teacher I would like to have) mostly because of my complete initial retardedness. I learned everything from scratch; I had almost no connection between my head and my body so everything the teacher would say had to be translated and questioned.
“Do you put your feet right beside each other or can there be space between them?”
“Should I be feeling a stretch in my hips even though we’re stretching our legs?”
“Is this how I should be breathing?”
As a former top student in school, I was very interested in getting it “right.” I drove my first yoga teacher a little nuts.
The more I did yoga the more I knew I needed to do yoga. Again this realization was not intellectual. Something in my being was continually drawn to yoga. I tried new classes; I tried different yoga videotapes. I traveled a lot to do my art and did yoga in Venice, on Greek islands, in my brother’s 200-sq-ft New York “apartment.”
One day in the spring of 1996 I was in yoga class in Toronto and I saw a notice for a weekend yoga retreat. I was broke (I was always broke) but I knew I had to go. I got someone to cover my waitressing shifts and off I went to somewhere in non-urban Ontarioland.
The instructors had come from a place called Kripalu Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. As soon as they walked into the room, these words came into my head: I’m going to that place.
In November of that year I did. I signed up for a month-long yoga and service intensive at Kripalu. I walked into Kripalu, put my suitcases in my room, and went to my first evening yoga session at the place where I would end up living and working for more than two years. Robert was the teacher that night.
He had a long, lean body, a sad face, beautiful brown eyes, a soft New York-accented voice, and a shy, sweet manner. I loved the way he led yoga. Like me, Robert leads yoga by sharing his own practice. Like me, he is very at home teaching yoga. His yoga felt very nurturing. Besides me, he is still me favourite yoga teacher. My roommate, Holly, said: “That Robert is pretty attractive.”
Even though I hadn’t met him, I said: “He is a very damaged guy. You should stay away from him.” I just knew. That whole month, I made a point of going to all of his classes but I didn’t try to get to know him. The main chapel of Kripalu where yoga is held is pretty big and the yoga teacher is at the front like a performer on a stage or a professor or a preacher. He was kind of a star to me.
After my month, I went back to Toronto to organize moving to Kripalu for a longer period. I came back the following February to do a program where you get room, board, and spiritual development opportunities in exchange for working. I walked in the door and ran into a friend. We went to dinner together in the cavernous, austere dining hall (Kripalu was once a Catholic seminary; the building, built in the 50s, looks like any university or institutional building of that era). She said, “I want you to meet my friend Robert.”
This is how I felt: I am about to meet Robert! Robert is joining us! After my month of going to his classes and making him into a kind of star, I was really excited that I was going to be sitting with this handsome guy with the New York accent who seemed so sensitive, whose yoga felt so good. I remember I was charmed by what he had on, a green and purple striped turtleneck.
It was a really fun dinner. Robert is very witty and irreverent and he made me laugh a lot. It was the time of the OJ Simpson trial and we were both interested in the allegory of it. I hadn’t exactly forgotten my words to Holly or changed my mind about my assessment, I just enjoyed myself. It began a friendship that still exists to this day with a lot of extremely painful, hellish shit in between when we tried to be lovers and spouses.
My relationship with Robert—how it came about, the stuff that happened, the complete non-rationality of it—taught me and helped me understand the concept of karma. Robert is actually a deeply damaged guy who prefers to live like a hermit and is not very able to function in the world. Kripalu was a great place for him to be. He paid a minimal rent to live in one of the private rooms. He worked very part time hours as a yoga teacher and he was, along with any other man who entered the place, in demand. Women outnumbered men about eight to one.
I was a deeply damaged woman in her mid-30s, really lonely, desperate for a relationship, but utterly ill-equipped for a healthy one. The sensible part of me knew not to get involved with guys who seemed as damaged as Robert. Here’s a piece of karmic evidence, though: every day I would run into this hermit who barely exited his room.
“Can you fuckin believe that Johnny Cochran?! Getting OJ to try on the glove, that was inspired!”
We started having lunches and dinners together. In a fit of what I thought of as bravery and directness, I asked if he had a girlfriend. He allowed that he was “seeing” some woman from the town. “She thinks she’s my girlfriend,” he said with hilarity and contempt. Red flags all over the place.
One day in Robert’s yoga class I was near the front. I was in child pose and Robert came over and placed his hands on the small of my back, an assist, in the parlance of yoga teachers. Such a simply kind and simple act. But what amazing consequences! I had an experience of what I can only describe as God in that moment. (The yogis call it shakti.) I felt myself and my body as a pillar of white light extending from earth to “heaven.” While I have had other shakti experiences, I have never had that God feeling before or since.
I knew I loved Robert and had to tell him. I went from being in one of those lame, pretend flirtations that go nowhere to the real thing. I sat him down in the office that I worked in, closed my eyes, and explained my feelings, “I just love you.” I said I didn’t need him to respond or expect anything from him. But he was moved by my feelings and we soon began a relationship that was so extra-doomed from the start it wasn’t funny.
Maybe some hermits don’t mind being dragged out of their caves, but Robert did. For him, the stress of considering the needs of someone else was simply too much. For me, the idea of letting go was simply too much—inexplicably (karmically), he felt like home to me. Always instigated by me, we did a dark and destructive dance of on again-off again for more than six years. I spent many of those years sobbing and curled up in the fetal position and begging and crying to friends and trying everything I possibly could to get him to show up.
“I’m damaged goods,” he would sometimes admit. Or, “I’m not boyfriend material.” In his own way, he was honest.
When Robert took up with another woman for a while and ignored me, as in, he would literally pretend not to see me, I inappropriately told everyone I could think of about his transgressions, including the person who hired the yoga teachers and Robert's sister, in a 12-page letter. In my brain, I knew I was crazy. In my heart, I loved him and couldn’t release myself. It was a razor’s edge of awareness, living in and knowing I was living in pure fucked up shit—totally NOT a place of this makes any kind of sense. The most painful thing about it was how much I hated myself for not getting out.
By late 1999 or 2000, I was determined not to contact him anymore. I had moved into my parents’ basement in Calgary, tail between my legs, no money, no ideas, depressed, 38 years old (my friends called me Costanza), saved only by my beloved dog Swampy and the tolerance of my parents. Robert was in Lenox. We didn’t speak for a year.
Then one day, without admitting what I was going to do to anybody, not even my cherished therapist, I watched my hand press the buttons on the phone. I said: “I still want to be with you.”
In short order, he moved to Calgary, we got married, our families tried to be happy for us, we conceived Claire on our wedding night, and we had a few good months. I realized, in a deeper sense than I was allowing myself to believe hitherto, that I would be the one to support our family and in May 2001 we moved to Lethbridge where I got a job.
During my pregnancy I found out that Robert was using Internet porn at the same time that he was clearly uninterested in having sex with me. Do it baby, one more time! I was constantly getting my heart broken. It was textbook victim asking for it material or an opportunity to work on loving myself or both. 9-11 happened around the same time. Poor Claire. I was deeply distraught during my last trimester.
Then she was born! What a miracle! What a beauty! I understood love in a way that I had never felt before. Loving my child, this was love. Nothing was more important than caring for her. Robert and I both loved her so much. For a while, I got so much energy out of loving her and being with her and caring for her.
But looking after a 54-year-old baby didn’t work as well as it had. Well, of course, it had never, ever “worked,” but the demands of a real baby trumped the demands of living with my damaged husband. Our relationship exhausted me and made me ill. I actually felt like I was dying. And we fought in front of Claire. When Claire was a year and a half, I left and skipped down the hallway of my new little house. I was finally done! I was finally done!
I admit that I still got caught up in our shit for a while after we split but eventually I was able to not engage. Once I really realized that I couldn’t depend on him, I was grateful for what he could do and does do. He is a loving father and like a brother to me. It took me so long to accept on a full, embodied level, what was in my face for so long: he is a beautiful, damaged person, not able to be a real partner to me. It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t something I did wrong that I had to fix.
I believe that Robert and I came into each other’s lives to work out some deep karma. I was able to work out a lot of rejection issues, to go from experiencing Robert’s actions as rejection, to accepting that what I needed from him was beyond his capabilities.
And we both got Claire out of the deal. I believe it was Claire who called up my pillar of light and Claire who called Robert back after a year and over thousands of miles. Claire wanted to be born. Her birth took my life in a brand new and miraculous direction. I am grateful for following my tormented heart. (Karma.)
26 Good and Bad Qualities of Human Nature (an M Ed assignment)
1. Fun: Good if it’s about spontaneous delight and joy. I’m thinking about children and their endless capacity to be curious and react to and enjoy their surroundings. Bad if it’s about forced enjoyment. I’m thinking of my drinking days when drinking was the only way to create spontaneity but the fun was tempered with frequently harmful mindlessness.
2. Struggle: Good because it’s about learning and growing as a human being. Bad because it can be really difficult and painful.
3. Sex: Good because it allows us to experience our bodies and our partners in a very pleasurable and connected way. Bad because it can often be a place where people experience deep shame and/or dysfunctional obsession. It can be used like a harmful substance.
4. Mother: Good if she is loving and nurturing and open and accepting and available. Pretty damaging if she is unable to embody those quintessential mothering qualities. In our culture motherhood is not particularly valued or supported, so the mothers are not mothered, and so how can they mother? Motherhood is fraught with difficult emotions.
5. Peace: Good. Inner peace, world peace, these are qualities to strive for in a world of turmoil and pain and disconnection. Peace is harmony, connection, love, joy, acceptance, tolerance. We’ve got a long way to go.
6. Education: Good if it is about creating a loving, open, curious, resilient human being. Bad if it is about control, squashing of creativity, perfectionism, measurement. Sadly, I see our education system more in the realm of bad than good.
7. Authenticity: Good. I don’t see a way forward without truth, acknowledging what is real and dealing with it accordingly, rather than hiding from and ignoring what is difficult. Bad, in the sense that there is a danger that being authentic can be hurtful because of a hidden agenda on the part of the truth-teller. Real authenticity requires ruthless honesty.
8. Christianity: Good if it is about creating more love in the world and using the life and works of Jesus Christ to inspire love. Bad, if it is about rules and dogma and cliqueyness. I have real difficulty with the closed, non-metaphorical statement, “Jesus is my lord and saviour,” and the giving up of personal agency and responsibility such a statement implies to me.
9. Aesthetics: Well, mine are good and many other people’s are bad! On an honest level, this is how I feel even if I try to rationalize otherwise. This is a truly thorny area of human existence isn’t it? My reaction to, “Jesus is my lord and saviour,” for example, is largely aesthetic and I react to aesthetics viscerally. If I see/hear/experience something that is aesthetically pleasing for me, among other reactions, I feel a kind of resonance and comfort (which can include a comfort with certain kinds of discomfort) in my body.
The Jesus statement makes me squeamish. I feel at home with openness and open-endedness and colour and organic shapes and not knowing all the answers. My aesthetics reflect that. “Jesus is my lord and saviour,” speaks black and white and fixedness to me. For me, Jesus was a guy who was exactly not about being a lord and saviour, but about teaching us that we can all be our own lord and saviour by his modeling of honesty, loving, and dealing with the mess of it all.
But words are close to useless to express spiritual matters. I am sure when I talk about openheartedness and connection, for instance, those words are aesthetically displeasing to many.
The Beegees sang that words are all we’ve got. I would offer that we actually have our bodies and our visceral sense of who we are and what love is. This is one of the reasons that work that is visceral is of the utmost importance to me. If we can access our loving hearts, this is where we can connect beyond aesthetics and move forward. Jesus, by the way, was all about that.
10. Holistic: Good. We are more than words and intellect and what car we drive. We are dynamic, creative beings made up of body, mind and spirit, and we are connected to the earth, other beings on the earth, and to the whole universe. Any aspect of human life that acknowledges this is helpful to individual and global health.
11. Creativity: Good. The ability to be curious and make connections and be in the moment and have fun and interact with surroundings/people/life in a fluid and generative way. In some languages, the word for human is “creative being.” Our culture has done much damage to creativity; we have separated the concept of creativity and the permission to be creative from everyday life. This is something we as humans must heal from to move forward.
12. Art: Bad and good. I always think of my cousin Peter’s statement. Years ago when I was in university, I went on my first visit to New York: my friend and I stayed with my Greek relatives. She told them she was in art history and Peter said: “Art! I hate art!” (Sounded more like: Awwht!!! I hate awwht!!!—spoken very loudly). He didn’t understand modern art and hated it for not understanding it. Much contemporary art has become even more oblique.
Good art is good. Bad art is bad. I’m an artist and I don’t love art. Too much bad art. Too much bullshit art. Difficult to find a happy medium here. I will argue again for visceral work that reaches the heart and body as directly as possible. I will also argue for the nurturing and encouragement of creativity (a word, by the way, not allowed to be used in art school—how fucked up is that?).
13. Teacher: Good teachers are caring, nurturing, sensitive, intelligent, firm, facilitating, flexible, open-minded, always learning and changing, etc…. in their own ways. Good teachers can be very organized and strict or disorganized and loose—there is no formula. Bad teachers are uncaring, inflexible, dull, insensitive, close-minded, hurtful, etc.
14. Adult: Adult = damaged child (epitomized by Michael Jackson). I don’t know one adult who isn’t. Sad. Not bad or good, just is. A clear, responsible adult = good. The messiness of most adults and where they are at = something to keep working on.
15. Child: The ultimate “Good.” Child = close to his/her heart, close to God. I don’t know one who isn’t going to be a damaged adult. I feel less sad than I do about the adults. Many of their adult mentors have moved forward from the past to acknowledge on a deeper level the agency of children. But we still have such a long way to go to really respect the beauty and power of children.
16. Heart. If your heart can love = good. If your heart is closed = something to keep working on.
17. Love. A state of being at one or connected to that which is loved. Clear love (requires love of self, first); love that is “easy” = good. Love that is based on requirements and duty = something to keep working on.
18. Sacred. What is most valued and held in high esteem. Good if what is held in ultimate value is good for self and others. The valuing of appearance, materialism, celebrity, dogma, status, etc. is damaging.
19. Depth: To look beyond the given, to be willing to look at what is below the surface; this is at the basis of honesty and sensitivity and it is good.
20. Kindness: On a deep level, we know when we are being kind and when we are being treated with kindness. Kindness may be gentle, it may be firm; it is always sensitive and sincere. Kindness starts with self. Kindness is good.
21. Sensitivity: To be able to feel and understand nuances of feeling. Good, if you can handle it. Bad, or at least difficult, if you live in a society that sees feeling as subversive, babyish, and/or of no utility.
22. Mark: A measurement of how well you have done on an assignment. How using this relates to encouraging the growth of a human, creative being beats me. Retarded.
23. Resistance: How I feel most of the time. I resent the many external demands I am forced to deal with that make no sense for who I am but are part of the “rules,” e.g. having to get an M Ed prescribed by a bunch of people who think their way is better. Good because it makes me think and act. Bad, because it would be nice to just surrender and take the path of least resistance.
24. Karma: Life path as chosen by a timeless, higher self. Good = life has purpose. Bad = difficulties along the way.
25. Purpose: reason for living. Good to have one; helps me stay alive.
26. Tasha: complex, complicated, creative, loving, heartful, scared, intelligent, impatient, struggling, sexy, cranky, open-minded, busy, mother, artist, teacher… Good = working on loving myself. Bad = too bad I don’t love myself.
2. Struggle: Good because it’s about learning and growing as a human being. Bad because it can be really difficult and painful.
3. Sex: Good because it allows us to experience our bodies and our partners in a very pleasurable and connected way. Bad because it can often be a place where people experience deep shame and/or dysfunctional obsession. It can be used like a harmful substance.
4. Mother: Good if she is loving and nurturing and open and accepting and available. Pretty damaging if she is unable to embody those quintessential mothering qualities. In our culture motherhood is not particularly valued or supported, so the mothers are not mothered, and so how can they mother? Motherhood is fraught with difficult emotions.
5. Peace: Good. Inner peace, world peace, these are qualities to strive for in a world of turmoil and pain and disconnection. Peace is harmony, connection, love, joy, acceptance, tolerance. We’ve got a long way to go.
6. Education: Good if it is about creating a loving, open, curious, resilient human being. Bad if it is about control, squashing of creativity, perfectionism, measurement. Sadly, I see our education system more in the realm of bad than good.
7. Authenticity: Good. I don’t see a way forward without truth, acknowledging what is real and dealing with it accordingly, rather than hiding from and ignoring what is difficult. Bad, in the sense that there is a danger that being authentic can be hurtful because of a hidden agenda on the part of the truth-teller. Real authenticity requires ruthless honesty.
8. Christianity: Good if it is about creating more love in the world and using the life and works of Jesus Christ to inspire love. Bad, if it is about rules and dogma and cliqueyness. I have real difficulty with the closed, non-metaphorical statement, “Jesus is my lord and saviour,” and the giving up of personal agency and responsibility such a statement implies to me.
9. Aesthetics: Well, mine are good and many other people’s are bad! On an honest level, this is how I feel even if I try to rationalize otherwise. This is a truly thorny area of human existence isn’t it? My reaction to, “Jesus is my lord and saviour,” for example, is largely aesthetic and I react to aesthetics viscerally. If I see/hear/experience something that is aesthetically pleasing for me, among other reactions, I feel a kind of resonance and comfort (which can include a comfort with certain kinds of discomfort) in my body.
The Jesus statement makes me squeamish. I feel at home with openness and open-endedness and colour and organic shapes and not knowing all the answers. My aesthetics reflect that. “Jesus is my lord and saviour,” speaks black and white and fixedness to me. For me, Jesus was a guy who was exactly not about being a lord and saviour, but about teaching us that we can all be our own lord and saviour by his modeling of honesty, loving, and dealing with the mess of it all.
But words are close to useless to express spiritual matters. I am sure when I talk about openheartedness and connection, for instance, those words are aesthetically displeasing to many.
The Beegees sang that words are all we’ve got. I would offer that we actually have our bodies and our visceral sense of who we are and what love is. This is one of the reasons that work that is visceral is of the utmost importance to me. If we can access our loving hearts, this is where we can connect beyond aesthetics and move forward. Jesus, by the way, was all about that.
10. Holistic: Good. We are more than words and intellect and what car we drive. We are dynamic, creative beings made up of body, mind and spirit, and we are connected to the earth, other beings on the earth, and to the whole universe. Any aspect of human life that acknowledges this is helpful to individual and global health.
11. Creativity: Good. The ability to be curious and make connections and be in the moment and have fun and interact with surroundings/people/life in a fluid and generative way. In some languages, the word for human is “creative being.” Our culture has done much damage to creativity; we have separated the concept of creativity and the permission to be creative from everyday life. This is something we as humans must heal from to move forward.
12. Art: Bad and good. I always think of my cousin Peter’s statement. Years ago when I was in university, I went on my first visit to New York: my friend and I stayed with my Greek relatives. She told them she was in art history and Peter said: “Art! I hate art!” (Sounded more like: Awwht!!! I hate awwht!!!—spoken very loudly). He didn’t understand modern art and hated it for not understanding it. Much contemporary art has become even more oblique.
Good art is good. Bad art is bad. I’m an artist and I don’t love art. Too much bad art. Too much bullshit art. Difficult to find a happy medium here. I will argue again for visceral work that reaches the heart and body as directly as possible. I will also argue for the nurturing and encouragement of creativity (a word, by the way, not allowed to be used in art school—how fucked up is that?).
13. Teacher: Good teachers are caring, nurturing, sensitive, intelligent, firm, facilitating, flexible, open-minded, always learning and changing, etc…. in their own ways. Good teachers can be very organized and strict or disorganized and loose—there is no formula. Bad teachers are uncaring, inflexible, dull, insensitive, close-minded, hurtful, etc.
14. Adult: Adult = damaged child (epitomized by Michael Jackson). I don’t know one adult who isn’t. Sad. Not bad or good, just is. A clear, responsible adult = good. The messiness of most adults and where they are at = something to keep working on.
15. Child: The ultimate “Good.” Child = close to his/her heart, close to God. I don’t know one who isn’t going to be a damaged adult. I feel less sad than I do about the adults. Many of their adult mentors have moved forward from the past to acknowledge on a deeper level the agency of children. But we still have such a long way to go to really respect the beauty and power of children.
16. Heart. If your heart can love = good. If your heart is closed = something to keep working on.
17. Love. A state of being at one or connected to that which is loved. Clear love (requires love of self, first); love that is “easy” = good. Love that is based on requirements and duty = something to keep working on.
18. Sacred. What is most valued and held in high esteem. Good if what is held in ultimate value is good for self and others. The valuing of appearance, materialism, celebrity, dogma, status, etc. is damaging.
19. Depth: To look beyond the given, to be willing to look at what is below the surface; this is at the basis of honesty and sensitivity and it is good.
20. Kindness: On a deep level, we know when we are being kind and when we are being treated with kindness. Kindness may be gentle, it may be firm; it is always sensitive and sincere. Kindness starts with self. Kindness is good.
21. Sensitivity: To be able to feel and understand nuances of feeling. Good, if you can handle it. Bad, or at least difficult, if you live in a society that sees feeling as subversive, babyish, and/or of no utility.
22. Mark: A measurement of how well you have done on an assignment. How using this relates to encouraging the growth of a human, creative being beats me. Retarded.
23. Resistance: How I feel most of the time. I resent the many external demands I am forced to deal with that make no sense for who I am but are part of the “rules,” e.g. having to get an M Ed prescribed by a bunch of people who think their way is better. Good because it makes me think and act. Bad, because it would be nice to just surrender and take the path of least resistance.
24. Karma: Life path as chosen by a timeless, higher self. Good = life has purpose. Bad = difficulties along the way.
25. Purpose: reason for living. Good to have one; helps me stay alive.
26. Tasha: complex, complicated, creative, loving, heartful, scared, intelligent, impatient, struggling, sexy, cranky, open-minded, busy, mother, artist, teacher… Good = working on loving myself. Bad = too bad I don’t love myself.
Friday, July 10, 2009
A Response to Reading Edward Said's 1984 Essay, "Reflections on Exile"(in which I begin to argue that we are in a global paradigm of exilethat we need to work through in order to move forward--to embracevulnerability is to begin to work through this paradigm)
ES: Exile is “the unhealable rift forced between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted."
TD: I feel self-conscious saying this because I have never suffered the terror of war or displacement from any actual shelter. By world standards, I have always lived in affluence. Yet, those words completely describe how I feel in the world.
I had a nervous breakdown in 1998. Around that time I was walking my dog and walked by a native man also out walking. He was good looking. He had long hair, a long black coat. He didn’t look like he was having a nervous breakdown or like he was poor or under the influence of some substance. We simply walked past each other. But at that moment I knew in a visceral sense that he and I were both exiles. That’s when I began to use this word to describe myself.
Later I began to realize that the damage our society wreaks on native people, we also wreak on ourselves. It’s just that white people don’t come into the world with an inherited worldview that is squashed (like native people). We don’t have their worldview so our squashing is readymade. Many people don’t notice.
ES: “We have become accustomed to thinking of the modern period itself as spiritually orphaned and alienated, the age of anxiety and estrangement.”
TD: He wrote this in 1984, before the ubiquitousness of serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
ES: “Nietzsche taught us to feel uncomfortable with tradition, and Freud to regard domestic intimacy as the polite face painted on patricidal and incestuous rage.”
TD: I love the volumes this sentence speaks.
ES: He argues that our modern Western culture has been the work of “exiles, émigrés, refugees," citing Steiner who wrote that in this time of “quasi-barbarism, which has made so many homeless,” it is fitting that the writers and poets themselves are refugees.
ES: There have always been exiles but the difference between then and now, “it bears stressing: scale.”
TD: The scale is even more devastating today. I believe that I am connected (all of us are connected) to global energy and my feelings of exile are directly related to what goes on for those poor souls who really live it: as humans we do not care for each other. I just allow myself to feel it more deeply than most people.
ES: He is writing against a kind of heroism, or romanticizing, of exile as a way to understand the human condition.
TD: And yet, I need to read this piece to understand and see mirrored my own feelings of exile.
ES: He argues that exile is caused by other human beings (brutal politics and wars); “it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography.”
TD: I have never felt that nourishment on a deep level although I come from kind parents and lived in the same city in a tolerant, safe country for all of my childhood. In modernity or post-modernity, we have to rely on home in the heart. This is what I am continually working on for myself.
ES: Said advises: “You must first set aside Joyce and Nabokov and think instead of the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies have been created.”
TD: Yes. Again, I will not equate Joyce’s or Nabokov’s (or my) sufferings with those “for whom UN agencies have been created,” but I will argue that Joyce and Nabokov (and me) do represent the global beingness or thingness or theme or paradigm of exile.
ES: “the interplay between nationalism and exile is like Hegel’s dialectic of servant and master, opposites informing and constituting each other”
TD: No kidding. Nationalism is fairly meaningless to me (although I am grateful for this tolerant-by-world-standards country, Canada). It’s meaningful to those who want to hold the power. On one extreme, there are the Taliban and the crazy North Korean guy, but corporate capitalism uses nationalism to its advantage too. I’m interested in connection and openness. So anyone willing to expand the circle, those are my people. There’s an argument by Seth Godin on TED that human tribes are reconstituting on the internet (http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_we_lead.html). Makes sense to me. I’m fucking scared of lots of those other tribes. I do feel like I am a warrior in a battle. Ironically, I use my vulnerability (in my Human Body Project and other writing) as my “weapon.” I also keep getting braver about speaking up. But, oh my God, I wish I were cleverer about the balance between force and persuasion. I am so impatient and so “in it” I can’t quite believe others are not.
What do the post-nationalist, heartful, globally connected, tribe members need to do to achieve post-nationalism? I can’t do better than Gandhi’s “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
ES: Said’s interpretation of Israel and Palestine’s side by side exile stories: “It is as if the reconstructed Jewish collective experience, as represented by Israel and modern Zionism, could not tolerate another story of dispossession and loss to exist alongside it;" the Palestinians have “for 46 years … been painfully reassembling a national identity in exile.”
TD: Sad to read from 1984… 46 + 25 = 71 years now. Looks like an established paradigm, no?
ES:“The pathos of exile is in the loss of contact with the solidity and the satisfaction of earth: homecoming is out of the questions.
TD: I believe that when we truly understand our connection with all humans and the whole earth--this requires the vulnerability of openheartedness--our exile will end. The earth will be our home.
ES: “Exiles look at non-exiles with resentment.”
TD: I am mostly uncomprehending of why this paradigm of exile works for so many in our culture (serotonin reuptake inhibitors?). I don’t feel resentment; am lonely though.
ES: Exile originated with banishment, “refugee” = bewildered herds, “exile” = more spiritual and solitary.
TD: I see our society as a bewildered herd—they are refugees from generations of struggle and war who are still stuck in concerns of materialism and external appearance—and myself as an outsider in that.
ES: Georg Lukacs, Theory of a Novel, argued that the novel is THE form of ‘transcendental homelessness’; epics came from stable life, novel from the “opposite experience."
ES: Exiles as willful, exaggerators, overstaters, stubborn
TD: Oh my God, if this was a Facebook quiz I would be 100% exile!
ES: “How is it that the literature of exile has taken its place as a topos…?”
TD: I am arguing that it is a paradigm of contemporary life because humans have not yet learned the teachings of Christ and Gandhi (and others); the scale of it, the paradigm of it—will we finally learn the lesson?
ES: Simone Weil: ‘To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.’
TD: I argue that love is a form of rootedness and love for self, created in the child by filling her early life with loving interactions and nurturing of mind-body-spirit, will create love for self. But who has had this upbringing?
ES: Said discusses the exile’s tendency to join various parties, national movements, etc
TD: Not a worry for me. My state of exile is not one relating to my nationality. But I am the daughter of a more or less exiled Greek who came to this country rather than struggle pretty desperately at home and a farm girl who came to the city. I grew up with connection to materialism and looking good to the neighbours. These were my roots. TV and other media, this is my culture.
ES: Theodor Adorno uses the term I wrote above! He “saw all life as pressed into ready-made forms”—everything is a commodity even what we say and think, “To refuse this state of affairs is the exile’s mission.” ‘It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.’
TD: How great to have my own words, my moral outrage, and sense of purpose reflected back to me here.
ES: Adorno also notes that our only available home is in writing.
TD: I would expand on that: living authentically (i.e. openheartedly, i.e. vulnerably).
ES: “We take home and language for granted; they become nature, and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy.”
TD: And family, and tradition (as in Nietzsche and Freud above)—i.e. taking these gifts for granted has devalued them from their sacredness… I think of the comedian Louis CK and his widely watched youtube video “Everything is amazing, nobody is happy” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETv3NURwLc) in which, for instance, he speaks about plane travel (amazing!!!) and the passenger who upon getting cut off from highspeed internet while flying (a technological advance that has only just come into being—I remember being totally thrilled in the early ‘90s using a friend’s mobile phone from a car and phoning another friend: “Hey, I’m calling you from a car!” I felt like James Bond.) yells, “This is bullshit!” The tyranny of convenience.
ES: “Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.”
TD: Definitely a byproduct of my own exile.
ES: I must think on this, Hugo of St. Victor, a 12th C monk: “The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.’
TD: This is similar to Buddhist philosophy of non-attachment, to be with it all, type of thing. I am in the “strong man” phase; I believe we need to love “all places” or we won’t have any place, i.e. we are physical, feeling beings and our loss of reverence for this miracle is our downfall.
ES: Hugo says strong or perfect only comes about by “working through attachments” not by rejecting them.
TD: I love it when the Christians and the Buddhists intersect; I detest the commonly disseminated oversimplified views of Christianity.
ES: Said says that “loss is inherent” in the idea of home, “Regard experiences as if they were about to disappear.”
TD: To go beyond the idea of home and place; to acknowledge life and heart and physicality as a gift rather than a difficulty to be rejected and eased by “home” where loss is inherent; to live owning that loss = openheartedness and vulnerability; I feel that I am in the forefront of an energetic movement of people learning how to do this; my exile is my gift to “work through” my attachments.
ES: “Only someone who has achieved independence and detachment, someone whose homeland is ‘sweet’ but whose circumstances make it impossible to recapture that sweetness, can answer these questions. (Such a person would also find it impossible to derive satisfaction from substitutes furnished by illusion or dogma).” “’Seeing the entire world as a foreign land’ makes possible originality of vision.”
TD: In a way, I am that person. Except that I still have such a yearning and hope for that sweetness. I find it interesting that he uses that word. I believe our refugee culture is addicted to sugar for this exact reason--desperate need for that sweetness of home. Home is myself. It’s not sweet yet; I’m not there yet. But I get it.
ES: Last two sentences: “Exile is life left outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew.”
TD: Sounds like my life. But who are these people who live orderly lives? How do they manage it? In my understanding, they do it by keeping things tight, controlled, understandable. It’s for survival, I get that. I would do it if I could but some karmic decision on my part led to an ability to be open to the energy of the world. After reading this piece and thinking on it, I get that this paradigm of exile is part of the energy that is shifting from static (the word state is in there) and nationalist to global and dynamic/flowing/generative. But what an uncomfortable and difficult and dramatic shift. I am and have been living it in my body and being. I wish I were more: “It’s all good.” But I struggle.
TD: I feel self-conscious saying this because I have never suffered the terror of war or displacement from any actual shelter. By world standards, I have always lived in affluence. Yet, those words completely describe how I feel in the world.
I had a nervous breakdown in 1998. Around that time I was walking my dog and walked by a native man also out walking. He was good looking. He had long hair, a long black coat. He didn’t look like he was having a nervous breakdown or like he was poor or under the influence of some substance. We simply walked past each other. But at that moment I knew in a visceral sense that he and I were both exiles. That’s when I began to use this word to describe myself.
Later I began to realize that the damage our society wreaks on native people, we also wreak on ourselves. It’s just that white people don’t come into the world with an inherited worldview that is squashed (like native people). We don’t have their worldview so our squashing is readymade. Many people don’t notice.
ES: “We have become accustomed to thinking of the modern period itself as spiritually orphaned and alienated, the age of anxiety and estrangement.”
TD: He wrote this in 1984, before the ubiquitousness of serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
ES: “Nietzsche taught us to feel uncomfortable with tradition, and Freud to regard domestic intimacy as the polite face painted on patricidal and incestuous rage.”
TD: I love the volumes this sentence speaks.
ES: He argues that our modern Western culture has been the work of “exiles, émigrés, refugees," citing Steiner who wrote that in this time of “quasi-barbarism, which has made so many homeless,” it is fitting that the writers and poets themselves are refugees.
ES: There have always been exiles but the difference between then and now, “it bears stressing: scale.”
TD: The scale is even more devastating today. I believe that I am connected (all of us are connected) to global energy and my feelings of exile are directly related to what goes on for those poor souls who really live it: as humans we do not care for each other. I just allow myself to feel it more deeply than most people.
ES: He is writing against a kind of heroism, or romanticizing, of exile as a way to understand the human condition.
TD: And yet, I need to read this piece to understand and see mirrored my own feelings of exile.
ES: He argues that exile is caused by other human beings (brutal politics and wars); “it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography.”
TD: I have never felt that nourishment on a deep level although I come from kind parents and lived in the same city in a tolerant, safe country for all of my childhood. In modernity or post-modernity, we have to rely on home in the heart. This is what I am continually working on for myself.
ES: Said advises: “You must first set aside Joyce and Nabokov and think instead of the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies have been created.”
TD: Yes. Again, I will not equate Joyce’s or Nabokov’s (or my) sufferings with those “for whom UN agencies have been created,” but I will argue that Joyce and Nabokov (and me) do represent the global beingness or thingness or theme or paradigm of exile.
ES: “the interplay between nationalism and exile is like Hegel’s dialectic of servant and master, opposites informing and constituting each other”
TD: No kidding. Nationalism is fairly meaningless to me (although I am grateful for this tolerant-by-world-standards country, Canada). It’s meaningful to those who want to hold the power. On one extreme, there are the Taliban and the crazy North Korean guy, but corporate capitalism uses nationalism to its advantage too. I’m interested in connection and openness. So anyone willing to expand the circle, those are my people. There’s an argument by Seth Godin on TED that human tribes are reconstituting on the internet (http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_we_lead.html). Makes sense to me. I’m fucking scared of lots of those other tribes. I do feel like I am a warrior in a battle. Ironically, I use my vulnerability (in my Human Body Project and other writing) as my “weapon.” I also keep getting braver about speaking up. But, oh my God, I wish I were cleverer about the balance between force and persuasion. I am so impatient and so “in it” I can’t quite believe others are not.
What do the post-nationalist, heartful, globally connected, tribe members need to do to achieve post-nationalism? I can’t do better than Gandhi’s “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
ES: Said’s interpretation of Israel and Palestine’s side by side exile stories: “It is as if the reconstructed Jewish collective experience, as represented by Israel and modern Zionism, could not tolerate another story of dispossession and loss to exist alongside it;" the Palestinians have “for 46 years … been painfully reassembling a national identity in exile.”
TD: Sad to read from 1984… 46 + 25 = 71 years now. Looks like an established paradigm, no?
ES:“The pathos of exile is in the loss of contact with the solidity and the satisfaction of earth: homecoming is out of the questions.
TD: I believe that when we truly understand our connection with all humans and the whole earth--this requires the vulnerability of openheartedness--our exile will end. The earth will be our home.
ES: “Exiles look at non-exiles with resentment.”
TD: I am mostly uncomprehending of why this paradigm of exile works for so many in our culture (serotonin reuptake inhibitors?). I don’t feel resentment; am lonely though.
ES: Exile originated with banishment, “refugee” = bewildered herds, “exile” = more spiritual and solitary.
TD: I see our society as a bewildered herd—they are refugees from generations of struggle and war who are still stuck in concerns of materialism and external appearance—and myself as an outsider in that.
ES: Georg Lukacs, Theory of a Novel, argued that the novel is THE form of ‘transcendental homelessness’; epics came from stable life, novel from the “opposite experience."
ES: Exiles as willful, exaggerators, overstaters, stubborn
TD: Oh my God, if this was a Facebook quiz I would be 100% exile!
ES: “How is it that the literature of exile has taken its place as a topos…?”
TD: I am arguing that it is a paradigm of contemporary life because humans have not yet learned the teachings of Christ and Gandhi (and others); the scale of it, the paradigm of it—will we finally learn the lesson?
ES: Simone Weil: ‘To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.’
TD: I argue that love is a form of rootedness and love for self, created in the child by filling her early life with loving interactions and nurturing of mind-body-spirit, will create love for self. But who has had this upbringing?
ES: Said discusses the exile’s tendency to join various parties, national movements, etc
TD: Not a worry for me. My state of exile is not one relating to my nationality. But I am the daughter of a more or less exiled Greek who came to this country rather than struggle pretty desperately at home and a farm girl who came to the city. I grew up with connection to materialism and looking good to the neighbours. These were my roots. TV and other media, this is my culture.
ES: Theodor Adorno uses the term I wrote above! He “saw all life as pressed into ready-made forms”—everything is a commodity even what we say and think, “To refuse this state of affairs is the exile’s mission.” ‘It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.’
TD: How great to have my own words, my moral outrage, and sense of purpose reflected back to me here.
ES: Adorno also notes that our only available home is in writing.
TD: I would expand on that: living authentically (i.e. openheartedly, i.e. vulnerably).
ES: “We take home and language for granted; they become nature, and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy.”
TD: And family, and tradition (as in Nietzsche and Freud above)—i.e. taking these gifts for granted has devalued them from their sacredness… I think of the comedian Louis CK and his widely watched youtube video “Everything is amazing, nobody is happy” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETv3NURwLc) in which, for instance, he speaks about plane travel (amazing!!!) and the passenger who upon getting cut off from highspeed internet while flying (a technological advance that has only just come into being—I remember being totally thrilled in the early ‘90s using a friend’s mobile phone from a car and phoning another friend: “Hey, I’m calling you from a car!” I felt like James Bond.) yells, “This is bullshit!” The tyranny of convenience.
ES: “Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.”
TD: Definitely a byproduct of my own exile.
ES: I must think on this, Hugo of St. Victor, a 12th C monk: “The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.’
TD: This is similar to Buddhist philosophy of non-attachment, to be with it all, type of thing. I am in the “strong man” phase; I believe we need to love “all places” or we won’t have any place, i.e. we are physical, feeling beings and our loss of reverence for this miracle is our downfall.
ES: Hugo says strong or perfect only comes about by “working through attachments” not by rejecting them.
TD: I love it when the Christians and the Buddhists intersect; I detest the commonly disseminated oversimplified views of Christianity.
ES: Said says that “loss is inherent” in the idea of home, “Regard experiences as if they were about to disappear.”
TD: To go beyond the idea of home and place; to acknowledge life and heart and physicality as a gift rather than a difficulty to be rejected and eased by “home” where loss is inherent; to live owning that loss = openheartedness and vulnerability; I feel that I am in the forefront of an energetic movement of people learning how to do this; my exile is my gift to “work through” my attachments.
ES: “Only someone who has achieved independence and detachment, someone whose homeland is ‘sweet’ but whose circumstances make it impossible to recapture that sweetness, can answer these questions. (Such a person would also find it impossible to derive satisfaction from substitutes furnished by illusion or dogma).” “’Seeing the entire world as a foreign land’ makes possible originality of vision.”
TD: In a way, I am that person. Except that I still have such a yearning and hope for that sweetness. I find it interesting that he uses that word. I believe our refugee culture is addicted to sugar for this exact reason--desperate need for that sweetness of home. Home is myself. It’s not sweet yet; I’m not there yet. But I get it.
ES: Last two sentences: “Exile is life left outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentered, contrapuntal; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew.”
TD: Sounds like my life. But who are these people who live orderly lives? How do they manage it? In my understanding, they do it by keeping things tight, controlled, understandable. It’s for survival, I get that. I would do it if I could but some karmic decision on my part led to an ability to be open to the energy of the world. After reading this piece and thinking on it, I get that this paradigm of exile is part of the energy that is shifting from static (the word state is in there) and nationalist to global and dynamic/flowing/generative. But what an uncomfortable and difficult and dramatic shift. I am and have been living it in my body and being. I wish I were more: “It’s all good.” But I struggle.
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