Archive for March, 2007

“Dukes don’t emigrate”: more OKOP/NOKOP reflections, and wincing at the use of the term “upper-class”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 22, 2007
in Class, Ethnicity and Pasadena City College
. 29 Comments

Here at Pasadena City College, we have an excellent theater department. Here’s the press release for the newest production:

Follow a year in the lives of six upper-class friends through a series of holiday-themed parties as the Pasadena City College Performing and Communication Arts Division proudly presents “The Country Club,” which opens on Friday, March 23, in PCC’s Sexson Auditorium.
Playwright Douglas Carter Beane’s comedy-drama tells the story of a young and charmingly neurotic woman who retreats from a failed marriage and decides to go back to her upper-class hometown in Pennsylvania. There, she finds love, friendships, and tragedies. The play consists of nine scenes and evolves around different holidays.

“This ‘dramady’ reflects the typical White Anglo-Saxon Protestant domain of the upper-class,” said Duke Stroud, PCC professor and director of the play. “It’s a portrait of dysfunctional relationships, which are funny and dramatic at the same time.”

(Note: I’ve explained OKOP and NOKOP here, and I now have a whole specific archive dealing with class.)

I know nothing about the play, and I doubt I’ll be able to get a chance to see it. But the press release, which I read yesterday, got under my skin instantly. You see, I hate the use of the phrase “upper class” to describe American families.

I grew up in culture that described itself as “upper-middle class”. And in the WASP circles of my youth and my family background, I certainly encountered plenty of remarkably well-to-do people. I know the world of “clubs” fairly well, and though that world holds relatively little interest for me today, it’s still quite familiar. (Or as John Bradshaw would write it, family-ar). And here’s the thing: if there’s one maxim “our kind of people” all agreed on, it was that talking explicitly and publicly about class was prima facie evidence that you lacked it. Nothing could be more more NOKOP than to describe anything, be it a social gesture or a fashion accessory, as “classy.” Once, while at a family luncheon, I used the term “classy” to describe the play of one of John McEnroe’s opponents (we had just watched a Wimbledon match on television.) From the reaction of a few of my older relatives, you would think I had dropped the f-bomb. “I think you want to say that his behavior was ‘gentlemanly’, dear” one of my elders advised me. Another suggested that “sporting” would have been an even more appropriate choice. I was about 14, and just starting to get the picture: we don’t talk about class.

And even worse than calling something “classy”? Referring to the existence of an American “upper-class.” I was raised to believe that the only authentic upper-class that exists is to be found in Europe. As one hired geneaologist famously told my great-aunt Carmen when she speculated that we had many aristocratic forebears, “Mrs. Starr, dukes don’t emigrate.” “Dukes don’t emigrate” became the standard bon mot we all used (and still do) whenever anyone speaks of an upper class in the United States. As far as we’re concerned, we maintain the satisfying fiction that almost all are middle class: there’s lower-middle, middle-middle, and upper-middle. And the less said specifically about these strata, the better.

To be really honest, I feel protective of the very sort of people the press release from our theater department seems to disparage. I’ve reread it a couple of times, and it’s not particularly offensive (save for the wince-inducing use of “upper class”). But here’s the really blunt truth: there are very few folks on this campus — faculty, staff, students — who come from a WASPy upper-middle class background. On at least one side of my family, I do. And part of me feels as if this play (about which I know zilch) is going to caricature a culture that I value. And those doing the caricaturing on stage will, on this campus that is over 80% non-white, be those who know little or nothing about the culture they lampoon.

It’s embarrassing to cop to this. Frankly, I’m prepared to believe that there’s a certain element of both classism and racism in my response. And Lord knows, despite years and years of teaching at a diverse urban community college, despite living in a glorious, successful, interracial marriage, I still struggle with my own bigotry, my own elitism. I am not proud of it, and I continue to work spiritually and psychologically to overcome whatever vestiges of prejudice remain in my soul.

The “WASPy country-club set” don’t need me to defend them. Yes, I continue to maintain quite seriously that we don’t have an authentic “upper-class” in this country. I continue to feel uncomfortable when others discuss what sort of behaviors or clothing choices are “classy” or not. But my intellectual and political training tells me that there’s no point in defending those who have had the greatest access to power and privilege in our nation’s relatively brief history. My commitment to justice and equality tells me that there is much in what I call my heritage that is ugly, oppressive, elitist, emotionally stunted and whoppingly superficial. There is also, as I’ve posted before, much that is joyous and good. (Read my “Happy WASP boy”.)

And I may have to swallow my own issues, and go see this play.

UPDATE: I’m reminded that nearly a century ago, my great-great grandfather wrote and privately published his memoirs. Speaking of ancestry, he wrote something lovely that is quoted as often as the “dukes don’t emigrate” line. A.A. Moore said in 1915:

Children, let your modest pride be this: you come of sturdy stock.

I love that. Even if I suspect it’s a reference to the fact that many of us are big-boned.

Cathy Seipp, 1957-2007

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 22, 2007
in Blogging and People
. 4 Comments

Cathy Seipp died yesterday. Her Times obituary is here. I am so sorry to see someone so young and so vital, someone with such an important (if usually incorrect) voice lose her battle with cancer.

The first thing of Cathy’s I ever read was a series of very nasty columns she wrote back in 1997 about a man I knew very well and whom I considered a dear friend, the great former L.A. Times editor Shelby Coffey III. (One such column is still online here). I was so infuriated on behalf of my friend and his family that I cursed Cathy Seipp to the high heavens, and tried to avoid reading anything else she wrote for the next few years. But her writing was too good, her views too refreshing (if still periodically infuriating). She was an important contrarian voice in the Los Angeles media world, and she will be much missed.

I note that Cathy asked for donations to the Humane Society. There’s one cause I can endorse without hesitation.

Thursday Short Poem: Heaney’s “From the Frontier of Writing”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 22, 2007
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

Back to a very well-known poet and a well-known poem this week. I’ve got most of Seamus Heaney’s work around, and back in 1999, I heard him give a terrrific reading at Cal Tech. This is one of my favorite of his poems.

I’ve driven across tightly-guarded frontiers more than once. Several years ago, I drove all over Heaney’s native Ireland on a family geneaology expedition. (Most of my roots on that island are from the North. Lots of Scots-Irish forebears in Ulster, in places like County Armagh and County Antrim. I spent lots of time looking for the graves of my Whiteside and O’Melveny ancestors.) I remember crossing the Northern Ireland-Irish Republic border several times on this expedition, and only once went through a really careful scrutiny. But the guns were pointed, and it was a lot like what Heaney describes here. (Still, it was nothing like getting pulled out of a car and roughly searched on a remote rural road in Colombia. That’s an adrenaline rush.)

I am no poet. I am no Seamus Heaney. But even in my own little musings here and elsewhere, I sense that sometimes, the best writing is about crossing borders in the face of sqawking radios, pointed rifles, suspicious faces. And sometimes, it’s really exhausting.

From the Frontier of Writing

The tightness and the nilness round that space
when the car stops in the road, the troops inspect
its make and number and, as one bends his face

towards your window, you catch sight of more
on a hill beyond, eyeing with intent
down cradled guns that hold you under cover

and everything is pure interrogation
until a rifle motions and you move
with guarded unconcerned acceleration–

a little emptier, a little spent
as always by that quiver in the self,
subjugated, yes, and obedient.

So you drive on to the frontier of writing
where it happens again. The guns on tripods;
the sergeant with his on-off mike repeating

data about you, waiting for the squawk
of clearance; the marksman training down
out of the sun upon you like a hawk.

And suddenly you’re through, arraigned yet freed,
as if you’d passed from behind a waterfall
on the black current of a tarmac road

past armor-plated vehicles, out between
the posted soldiers flowing and receding
like tree shadows into the polished windscreen.

Minor complaint in the great scheme of things

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 21, 2007
in Blogging
. 10 Comments

So my stats say that I’ve been getting more hits this week than any time since I moved from Typepad. Yet I’m getting fewer comments than normal. Maybe my posts are too danged long.

“Architects of our own adversity”: a long post about men’s complicity in their own oppression, and the difference between self-acceptance and self-love

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 21, 2007
in Addiction and mental illness, Favorite posts 2007, Marriage, Men and Masculinity, Men's Movement and Relationships
. 21 Comments

Sorry folks, this is gonna be another very long post.

Over at Alas, A Blog, Amp has a good discussion up on the old question: Are Men Oppressed as Men? Amp cites a very interesting article by Caroline New, but warning, the article is tediously jargon-laden.

One strand of feminist thinking about male oppression is that men are rarely oppressed as men. Those who advocate this stance argue that black men are oppressed for their blackness, not their maleness; Muslim men for their faith, not their sex; inmates for ther status as prisoners, not their biological equipment. They also argue that authentic oppression requires a dominant oppressing caste whose identity is distinct from those whom they are oppressing: in other words, whites can oppress blacks, but blacks can’t oppress whites because of an unequal power differential. And blacks can’t oppress blacks because the dynamics of oppression are always the dynamics of oppressing what is Different, what is Other.

New, happily enough, is smarter than that simplistic reading. Most importantly, she notes that in certain instances, the oppressed can be complicit with their own oppression. A valuable and interesting discussion follows in the comments at Alas.

I am not a theorist. I’m not an intellectual at all, really, though I’ve played the part of one for a couple of decades. (I sometimes describe myself, self-deprecatingly, as the least intellectually curious Ph.D I know.) But I do think that feminists and male feminist allies need to have these sorts of thoughtful discussions, and I’m glad that folks like Amp host and provoke them.

On a less theoretical level, I am intensely interested in the ways in which men position themselves as victims. I spend a lot of time reading the literature of many “men’s rights” and “fathers’ rights” groups. I spend a lot of time in conversation with men who are going through divorce (I am, if nothing else, an expert on starting over.) And I mentor a lot of young male students and boys from my youth group at church. And in conversations with many of these boys and men, I hear “narratives of helplessness” emerging.

From the older, angrier voices of the so-called MRAs, the narrative describes a world in which women (and their male “collaborators”) have usurped traditional male privileges for themselves. Men are at a disadvantage in the courts, in the business world, in academia. The MRAs see public space in the Western world as increasingly feminized, and they fancy “real men” (in whose ranks they invariably include themselves) to be under attack from a dark coalition of feminist activists, cowardly politicians cravenly surrendering to the cultural left, and a media that never misses an opportunity to demean and belittle traditional men. It all provides a satisfying sense of being “under attack”, which is why many — not all — men’s rights activists use, absurdly enough, the language of oppression and resistance to describe their movement.

There’s not much point in telling these men, “you know, you’re an oppressor more than you are oppressed”. The “you’ve sinned more than you’ve been sinned against” trope doesn’t go over well!. These men feel victimized, they feel exploited, they feel ignored, they feel – often — impotent. And too often, our feelings become facts. Too often, we conveniently ignore the ways in which we played the part of volunteers, not victims. Too often, we deny our own complicity in our own misery.

Many men make the mistake of equating the role of the oppressor with a sense of personal fulfillment. If they really were oppressing women, they assume, if they really were part of a dominant class, they’d experience a greater degree of happiness and satisfaction. After all, if there really was a patriarchy, isn’t it supposed to benefit men? If men really did systematically take part in the dehumanization and degradation of women, wouldn’t more men feel the tangible benefits of that oppression for themselves? In other words, they ask the plaintive question over and over again: “How can I be an oppressor when I feel unhappy and powerless?” If most men are leading lives of “quiet desperation”, then surely those same men cannot also be agents of injustice. Right? So goes this line of thinking, or more accurately, this line of emotional reactivity.

Ten years ago, I began three interrelated journeys: I committed my life to Jesus Christ. I drank my last drop of alcohol, and turned to a Twelve Step program for recovery from my various forms of acting out. And I began to work to do more than espouse a superficial egalitarian philosophy — I began to make the effort to match my language and my life, to live a life of radical justice. Now it’s true that alcohol hasn’t passed my lips in nearly a decade, but I’ve had plenty of slips and falls on my walk with Christ. I’ve had quite a few struggles as I’ve sought to live in to an authentic pro-feminism. Growing up and taking responsibility isn’t easy.

One thing my faith, my feminism, and my recovery program all taught me: I was the architect of my own adversity. I couldn’t blame God. I couldn’t blame my parents’ divorce. I couldn’t blame my genetic inheritance for my predisposition to become an addict, and I couldn’t blame my hormones for my chronic infidelities. I certainly couldn’t blame the women I’d married. My misery was a result of a series of choices I made. Hormones and family history helped shape those choices, but the final decisions were always mine. I came to realize that my sense of my own helplessness was an illusion, one I used to justify my bad behavior and one I used to justify a chronic refusal to change.

It’s true that men are frequently oppressed by other men. When a group of older boys or male coaches ridicule a young man for crying or showing fear, that’s a way in which men are complicit in their own oppression. The older lads who torment a younger were themselves tormented when they were his age. The “be a sturdy oak” rule, a rule that teaches men to be alienated from their own inner emotional terrain, is one that is almost entirely enforced by other males. The little boy who is beaten for showing fear or for weeping is not responsible for the beating he endures. But when he grows older, and belittles other men for showing those same emotions, he is making a choice. He has transitioned from victim to volunteer. The fact that he is too frightened or too ignorant to make a different choice doesn’t change his responsibility to make a better decision, and it doesn’t mitigate his own complicity in the perpetuation of a very Great Crime.

The first task of authentic men’s work is helping boys and men get in touch with their own ancient wounds. Men need to re-feel the old injuries inflicted upon them. They need to rediscover the tears they suppressed. They need to go beneath the anger (most men have a considerable amount of anger not too far from the surface) to the root cause of their pain. And once they’ve dragged all that garbage out, then they need to be encouraged to understand themselves as active agents with a choice:

“So your father never showed you how to be there for his family? That’s terribly painful. But your father’s script isn’t yours. If you follow his example, it is not because it is your ‘destiny’: it’s because you are consciously ignoring alternatives. If you do to others what was done to you, you have become not only an oppressor, but a victimizer who has made a decision to be one.”

This is true in the big things and in the little things. The fact that we don’t raise men to be as in tune with their own emotions, to be as perceptive and intuitive as their sisters, doesn’t mean that men are destined to be shallow and obtuse. It’s appropriate for a grown man to express frustration when his own vocabulary for his feelings isn’t as deep and broad as his female partner’s; it’s not acceptable for him to shrug and say “Well, it’s the way I was raised” or “Well, that’s just the way my brain is wired.” To say those things is to be complicit; to insist on one’s own inability to transform because of one’s biology or one’s childhood is to buy into the seductive lie of our own helplessness.

I’m not big on self-acceptance. Really, I’m not. What I’m big on is self-love. Too much self-acceptance leaves me believing the idea that I’m okay as I am, even when I’m not particularly happy and I’m not making the world a better place. Self-love reminds me I’m a precious child of God. Heck, I’m God’s favorite! (And so are you, you, you, and you.) Self-love reminds me I’m worthy of joy, but that the world doesn’t owe me happiness. Self-love reminds me I am called to share with others, to live in community with others, to work to change and transform and heal the world and myself. My Jewish friends call this mandate tikkun olam. The Christians I worship with call it building the Kingdom.

But we can only heal the world and build the Kingdom when we know we have been given the power to do it. And if we buy into the lie of our helplessness, our oppression, our victim status, the world doesn’t change. We stay miserable, or maybe just vaguely dissatisfied. Our relationships are, at best, just okay. And we settle for so much less than we could have.

The MRAs will have a field day with this…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 20, 2007
in Marriage and Men and Masculinity
. 10 Comments

I’ve been kindly linked by those who run the blog “Divorce Diva”. That’s nice, and it looks like it’s got some good advice for women going through divorces. But then there’s this introduction to me:

I am a big fan of blogs and just discovered an interesting one written by a woman named Hugo. Who is Hugo? Who knows and in blogland, it’s not important at all. Anyway, she is clearly a very successful blogger and I enjoyed perusing her posts but more importantly the follow up comments.

Perhaps my photo at right doesn’t show up well on Divorce Diva’s screen. Perhaps in DD’s world, many women are named “Hugo”. Perhaps my writing about divorce seems, well, more reflective of a woman’s perspective. (Some, not all, of the men’s rights activists — MRAs — have been questioning my masculinity for years. They probably think Divorce Diva’s got it about right.)

Look, folks, if my own claim to live as a man and my photos displaying my facial hair aren’t enough for ya, so be it. As long as you’re reading.

Here’s my favorite post of mine about getting married a fourth time, and what’s different this time ’round:

Jesus told me to grow the *%ck up: A response to the Countess.

Basketball and weightlifting: two women’s sports notes

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 20, 2007
in Body, Feminism and Sports
. 8 Comments

A couple of women’s sports notes.

So much for women’s college basketball being less competitive than men’s! That old lie got put to bed these past few days. The lowest men’s seed to advance to the Sweet Sixteen was number 7 UNLV; the women have already sent a pair of double-digit seeds (Florida State, a #10, and everybody’s cinderella, Marist, a #13), to the regional semifinals. This is great for the women’s game, even though it shot my bracket. (I was surprised that Stanford lost, but as a good Cal alum, shed no tears for them.)

I’m late to the story that I read about both at Feministing and Feministe: Florida Girls Lift Weights, and Gold Medals. In recent years, competitive weightlifting for girls (as well as boys) has become very popular in the Sunshine State:

Extracurricular club programs for girls have sprung up around the country since women’s weightlifting became an Olympic sport in 2000. But Florida, with 170 high school teams that have produced two Olympians and several dozen world team members, has “set the gold standard” for the sport, said Rodger DeGarmo, director of high performance and coaching for USA Weightlifting in Colorado Springs, the governing body that oversees Olympic lifting.

It’s a very positive article, and here’s hoping the sport catches on.

I have friends of both sexes who are serious lifters. The sport has never appealed to me, largely because I generally like to minimize my indoor workouts. But what I honor about lifting weights is its fundamental democracy: anyone, at any size, can become a very strong lifter if they work at it. There are few other sports in which “God-given natural talent” takes such an obvious backseat to persistence and determination. It’s much, much easier to make a weak young person into a strong lifter than a slow young person into a fast sprinter! This doesn’t mean weightlifting is easy: it is (not literally) often backbreakingly difficult; it takes time and effort and concentration; it takes mental toughness. More than most sports, doing it well involves intense visualization; it teaches those who practice it to see themselves completing the task before they actually attempt it.

One vital feminist task, of course, is teaching women of all ages — particularly the young — that their bodies belong to them. They are not baby-machines-in-training, nor are they objects to visually (or physically) gratify men. Building strength and muscle serves to undermine the ugly cultural fetish for young women’s bodies that appear emaciated, frail, vulnerable. Lifting ever-greater weights gives young women a tangible sense of physical success; they can measure their body’s progress in terms that have nothing to do with beauty or sex appeal or reproductive potential.

Leigha, the Spruce Creek senior, said she loved the competitive aspect of lifting.

“It’s a rush, it really is,” she said. “We have boards in our weight rooms with the names of all the record breakers, and you’re thinking about how bad you want your name on that record for everybody to see.”

I like reading that.

After all, “weight” is always a feminist issue. Since the 1920s, generations of young American women have desperately tried to lose it, even as we live in a culture that celebrates “weight” and “heft” as attributes of power and influence. We speak of folks “throwing their weight around”; we note that the words of someone we admire “carry a lot of weight.” To call someone a “lightweight” is never praise; it suggests superficiality, incompetence, immaturity. Outside of the discussion of women’s bodies, “weight” almost always connotes something positive and powerful.

Weightlifters, like dieters, are very concerned with numbers. But while the goal of the dieter is generally to become smaller and smaller, lighter and lighter, the goal of the lifter is to push more and more, to see the numbers rise rather than fall. As with wrestling, competitive lifting offers different weight classs to its participants; a team that wants to be successful thus must have a group of girls with very different body types. More so than virtually any other sport, this encourages coaches and teachers to recruit a wide variety of girls.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m an exercise fanatic. My desire to share the gospel of fitness, however, is not motivated by a desire to get everyone to start chasing an unattainable physical ideal. We live in a culture in which most of us are alienated from our bodies, often ashamed of our bodies. The best kinds of fitness activity teach us to reconnect with our bodies, to love our bodies, to experience the power and pleasure our bodies can bring to us.

And in achieving this goal for high school-age women, Florida seems to be ahead of everyone else.

Cathy Seipp

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 19, 2007
in Blogging
. 2 Comments

I only infrequently read the blog of Cathy Seipp, a fellow blogging Angeleno, National Review contributor, and notable conservative. I disagree with her about virtually everything. But according to this post by her daughter Maia, Cathy is in hospital, dying of lung cancer, with only a few days left. Maia is very young and very brave; if you’re so inclined, join me in prayer for them both. (Hat tip to Rudy).

Tennyson and Sharon Olds, Ulysses and Telemachus: a very long post about endurance athletes, independence, and the single body alone in the universe against its own best time

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 19, 2007
in Age, Athletics and Fitness, Body, Favorite posts 2007, Poetry, Sports and Vanity
. 6 Comments

Another busy Monday morning finds me sitting at the messiest desk in the Western Hemisphere. Really, it’s appalling — Clif bar wrappers and old tests, coffee-stained handouts and framed wedding pictures all jostling together. Merely to type a post or an e-mail requires blowing the crumbs off the keyboard. (I need a new keyboard annually, thanks to the food and drink spills).

I’m thinking this morning about a dear relative of mine. Because it’s a private family matter, I won’t share much, but I will say that this relation is a man in his mid-seventies, now suddenly frail and weak and battling serious illness. Though his physical diagnosis isn’t immediately terminal, he seems to have lost much of his will to live. I am praying and meditating for him daily.

This man and I have had a lot in common for many years. My relation was the first endurance athlete I ever knew; he started marathoning in the 1970s, back when the sport was first becoming popular. He ended up doing more than 80 marathons, as well as several Ironman distance triathlons (including a strong finish in the Hawaii Ironman back in the very early years of the event.) He was a great bear of a man, not terribly fast but with a tremendous will to compete and and a tremendous capacity to live with physical pain — two things any serious endurance runner must have. He gave me lots of good advice when I first became a distance athlete, and in many ways, has been an athletic role model for me for more than twenty-five years.

What he and I share, more than a love of sport itself, is an intense desire to maintain our own autonomy and to pursue self-perfection through the endless disciplining of our own flesh. So much of our identity is built around the very satisfying thought that we do things other people can’t do. While others sleep in, we push our bodies to their limits, always seeing what else we can do to improve. And while there is much that is praiseworthy about this tremendous longing to achieve maximum fitness and performance, there’s a dark side to all of this as well. At its worst, this addiction to endurance sports can isolate us from others, cause us to ignore social and familial responsibilities, lead us to prioritize logging miles rather than spending time with those who love us most.

Berkeley-born Sharon Olds’ most famous poem is surely the marvelous Sex without Love. I loved it the first time I read it, largely because it was as close to a perfect description of how my companions and I lived out our erotic lives in our twenties as anything I’ve ever seen. And as a man who was both sexually promiscuous and athletically obsessive, I recognized myself at once in the closing lines:

They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health–just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

I long ago surrendered my sexuality to God, and gave up “sex without love.” I have received indescribable gifts in return. But I struggle, Lord how I struggle, not to think of myself as going through life as a solitary runner, alone in the world, always racing against my own best time. The danger for distance athletes, both world-class and amateur, is that we can become profoundly selfish. Beating “our own best time” becomes the one meaningful battle in our lives. We discipline ourselves with restrictive diets, we beat up our joints on endless hills, we drag ourselves out of bed hours before dawn to do solitary combat on the roads and trails and treadmills. And if we’re not careful, we mistake the pursuit of our own individual excellence with authentic virtue.

Authentic virtue is never selfish, as Aristotle and a hundred other wise folks have pointed out. Authentic virtue is about balancing one’s own need to endlessly recreate and improve with one’s responsibility to the world at large. If our running gives us great pleasure, but leaves us so drained and self-absorbed that we are less available for our loved ones and our community, then we’re not being virtuous. We have to make choices, and in the past couple of years, I’ve made that choice. Many folks think I work out a lot (14-20 hours per week). But that’s nothing compared to what I would do if I gave up more of my outside commitments! Oh, how I long to take eighteen good months and train for a solid 100-miler. But running 120 miles per week would take too much from my wife, too much from my chinchillas, too much from my students and my youth group, my seven classes, my mentees, my colleagues.

The greatest danger for distance athletes, however, isn’t that we become selfish. The greatest danger, one that I see in the life of my ailing relation, is that we become so enraptured by our own physical capabilities that we begin to believe we are radically autonomous. Our bodies do such incredible things, and bring us such pride and satisfaction, that we start to think we’re indestructible. We become particularly loath to rely on others, jealously, often pridefully guarding our own independence. The phrase “our bodies, ourselves” takes on a radically different meaning: our identity as human beings becomes enmeshed with our sense of what our bodies can do.

We came into this world naked and helpless. We had no control over our flesh; we were diapered and dressed and spanked and bathed and fed on another’s schedule. We wailed and flailed, but for the first few years were utterly incapable of meeting our own needs. And unless we are taken young and suddenly, most of us will leave the world in that same way. Even if we retain the ability to use the toilet and feed ourselves up until the end, old age will rob us, sooner or later, of our precious independence. If we’ve spent fifty or sixty years building up a personal myth of indestructible autonomy, “alone in the universe against our own best time”, we’re going to be absolutely devastated by the slow surrenderings we will inevitably have to make as we age.

I’ve posted a bit about my Dad lately. His dying was relatively quick last year; he got the terminal diagnosis in mid-April and he passed on on June 22. A gentle man, not in the least concerned with “personal best times” or “faster and farther”, he surrendered himself easily to his caregivers. He was uncomplaining as he slowly lost his abilities to do for himself what he had done for nearly seven decades. He maintained his dignity and his sense of humor, and above all, he maintained his sense of self even as his body shriveled. My father, a philosopher by training and a wise soul by natural temperament, knew that he was not his body. While he had a hard time accepting the soul as separate from the flesh, he knew that his “Hubertness” was not defined by what his muscles and bones could do. That knowledge gave him the strength to surrender gently when his time came.

My ailing relative, my fellow endurance athlete, is not going so gently. He’s raging against the dying of the light. For him, the “light” remains connected to what his body can do, and losing those capabilities is devastating for him in a way that it wasn’t for my far-less competitive father. As for me, I have had both these dear men as role models all of my life. Though there is much I owe to my Dad, and though I love him still with all my heart, I did not get my manic restlessness from him. That longing I have to climb the next mountain, and the next, and the next, until I reach the final summit from which there is no descent — that obsession comes from somewhere else. My cousin has it in him; his were the first pair of eyes in which I saw what I so often see when I look in the mirror: the sense that life is a constant struggle against weakness, against darkness, against our own sense of limitations. And when at last our limitations overwhelm us… it’s hard.

On the list of the hundred most famous English-language poems, Tennyson’s Ulysses must rank near the top. I first read it in college in a frosh Comp Lit class. I loved it then and love it now, and remember fighting with my Marxist TA who insisted that it was the “Ulysseses” of the world who were responsible for colonialism and imperialism and slavery. She hated the poem (and hated Tennyson) and wanted her students to mock the sentiments within it. I nearly lost my temper, so eager was I to defend both the poet and his protagonist. And I think of Ulysses often as I think of my dear cousin, fighting so hard in his hospital bed.

Ulysses was a lousy husband, to put it mildly. He wasn’t much of a king either, if we take Tennyson’s view — he has no interest in doing what his son Telemachus does:

…by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness…

Ulysses is not centered in that sphere of common duty; he hears a different call:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life!

It’s whopping hubris to compare oneself and one’s relations to the ancient heroes, of course. But when I think of my father, I think of one very gentle, loving, devoted Telemachus. My God, Dad was “strong in the sphere of common duties”! Though he was not a political man or a natural leader, he was a pillar of his family and of the broader community; the hundreds and hundreds of mourners at his memorial service were all touched and moved by him. In my life, especially since his death, I’ve sought to become more and more of the sort of man he was. Kindness and grace came naturally to my father, and I long to emulate him in those virtues.

But my cousin and I — like so many of my friends in the endurance running community — have the restlessness of a Ulysses. We are the ones who find “how dull it is to pause, not to shine in use.” And though we don’t kill monsters, we devote our lives to killing our own limitations. Contentment scares us; complacency unnerves us; we embrace domesticity with often considerable unease. We are capable of common duties, but we’re not centered there. Our center is always a mile further up the trail.

Near the end of the poem, Ulysses says:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are…

That which we are, we are. I am thinking this morning of a man I love and admire, lying in his bed four hundred miles from here. A man who has climbed mountains, swum through oceans, run marathons on five continents. For him, the great question is finding the will to live now that so much has been taken. The question for him is whether “much abides”, and whether or not what remains is enough to continue to live.

Those with the spirit of Telemachus have an easier time letting go. They give up the bicycle, the running shoes, the car keys. They may mourn the loss of their independence, but they haven’t staked their identity to their autonomy the way those with the spirit of Ulysses have. And as one who struggles to reconcile his inner Telemachus with his inner Ulysses, I have much to think about this morning.

Viva Ireland

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 17, 2007
in Father and Sports
. 4 Comments

Not a lot of basketball upsets here in the States, but a St. Paddy’s day miracle at the cricket world cup has me stunned.

My late father played on a club team when he was in grad school at Berkeley. They toured California playing teams made up of folks from every corner of the Commonwealth. He was a bowler, and a fairly decent one. He gave it up when he came to Santa Barbara to teach and had no one to play with.

Though I understand the game better than 90% of Americans, that’s not saying much. I still watch cricket on TV when I’m in the UK and am forced to whisper urgently to someone nearby, “Uh, what just happened?”

UPDATE: Pakistan’s English-born coach died this morning, hours after the match, of apparently natural causes. The loss to Ireland can’t have helped.

Missing Dad on his birthday

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 16, 2007
in Father
. 8 Comments

Today would be my father’s 72nd birthday. From the time I was very small until one year ago today, I always spent time with him — or at the least, spoke to him — on March 16. But he’s been gone for nearly nine months now.

I haven’t blogged much about my father’s death. I miss him tremendously, as one would expect, and I’ve gone through the customary stages of grief over and over again. I had him until I was 39, of course; historically most sons and daughters didn’t reach that age without losing their dads. And my three younger siblings had less time with him than I did. I am so grateful for what I did have with this man. My favorite photo of us together is here.

I often go days without thinking about him. Then something will happen, and I’ll think “Oh, I want to talk about that with Dad.” I still have his cell number programmed into my phone. I don’t ever call it, because I don’t want to hear the little voice telling me that the number is no longer in service. Perhaps soon I’ll delete it.

But not yet.

Friday Random Ten: themes of heartache, ecstasy, and the divine

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 16, 2007
in Friday Random Ten
. 2 Comments

You can configure your Itunes party shuffle to display both recently and not-so-recently played songs. But sometimes, the results of the FRT shuffle leave me wondering if another hand is at work. I sense a theme.

I think more people should annotate, however briefly, their FRTs.

#1 is an oft-recorded classic from a stalwart of the kind of authentic country rock I love so much. #2 is a new track from a favorite Christian band, and #3 is by the former leader of the Christian band Caedmon’s Call. #4 is my favorite track, oddly, off the sublime “Appetite for Destruction” (has it really been twenty years?) #5 is from a third Christian artist who is growing on me, #6 from my beloved Emmylou, and #7 a wicked good cover of the Prince track by a great trio. I remember driving a group of teenagers up to Big Bear two years ago, all of us singing #8 aloud, me wondering if I was going to get in trouble for doing so. #9, as popular and widely played as it was seven or eight years ago, still gives me chills. And #10 is off, well, my favorite album from the whole dang ’70s, the breathtakingly good “Late for the Sky.” Bonus track from my favorite Welsh band of the ’90s.

1. “Paradise”, John Prine
2. “Mirrors and Smoke”, Jars of Clay
3. “Wedding Dress”, Derek Webb
4. “Rocket Queen”, Guns n’ Roses
5. “Closer to Myself”, Kendall Payne
6. “Orphan Girl”, Emmylou Harris
7. “When Doves Cry”, Be Good Tanyas
8. “I Touch Myself”, Divinyls
9. “Cowboy, Take Me Away”, Dixie Chicks
10. “Before the Deluge”, Jackson Browne

Bonus Track: “Bulimic Beats”, Catatonia

Thanks IHE

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 15, 2007
in Blogging
. 0 Comments

Thanks, Inside Higher Ed, for sending a few hundred readers to this post about student crushes.

As I’ve pointed out before, over half of my hits from search engines come from folks looking for information on one of two topics: older men, younger women relationships and student-teacher crushes. It’s an incentive to keep writing on both issues.

“A man should love his wife more than she loves him”: rebutting a nasty old piece of conventional wisdom with some pro-feminist thinkin’

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 15, 2007
in Feminism, Marriage, Men and Masculinity and Relationships
. 66 Comments

On Tuesday afternoon, I was talking to a woman with whom I regularly work out. While chatting about her recent break-up with her boyfriend, my pal repeated a line I find particularly exasperating. She said she’d been on her phone with her mother recently, and her Mom had said:

The best relationships are those in which the man loves the woman just a little bit more than she loves him.

My buddy was wondering about the wisdom of that oft-repeated line, and it occurred to me that I haven’t blogged about it.

I didn’t grow up with that particular piece of wisdom. The first time I heard the suggestion that “marriage is best when the husband is more in love with his wife than she with him” was when one of my cousins got married. My cousin’s new sister-in-law and I were chatting at the wedding (comparing the relative dysfunction of our respective clans) and she mentioned that her brother was absolutely enraptured by my cousin. She said something like:

“I know she loves him, but my brother loves her more. And I think that’s the way it should be. When a man loves a woman more, he’ll pay attention to her and won’t break her heart. When the love is equal, or the woman is the one more in love, there’s a much greater chance he’ll stray.”

This was not the sort of conventional wisdom we shared in my family, so I nodded politely at my new relation-by-marriage and wandered off to explore a new food station. But what she said stuck in my mind, and I began to check it out with my acquaintances. To my very great surprise, this notion that “the man should love the woman more” was actually fairly widespread. In completely unrelated situations, in the past couple of years I’ve had perhaps half a dozen women mention to me that they were raised with this particular relationship philosophy. And talking to my workout buddy on Tuesday really got me thinking about it.

As my regular readers know, if there’s one thing that really sticks in my craw, it’s the various ways in which our popular culture reinforces the “myth of male weakness.” Whether it’s armchair evolutionary biologists opining that promiscuity is hard-wired into the male brain, or misguided Catholic bishops insisting that women cover up to protect weak men from lust, or pop psychologists suggesting that women ought to accept male porn use as natural, a tremendous amount of damage is done by those who reinforce the lie that men lack women’s capacity for self-control, commitment, and relationship. Call it the “all men are dogs” theory, call it what you will — it’s a belief about human behavior that’s shockingly widely accepted, in and outside of religious communities and across vast political and cultural spectrums.

The bromide that “the man should love the woman more” is rooted in the expectation that virtually every man, sooner or later, will prove to be a colossal disappointment to the woman who loves him. If she loves him just a little less, however, this gives her a small “bargaining chip” with which to forestall his presumably inevitable infidelity or abandonment. The romantic imbalance, when it “works in her favor” gives her the chance to manipulate. If she loves him as much as he loves her, however, she loses that chance. And she leaves herself far more vulnerable to being heartbroken when he does disappoint, as popular culture seems to insist he invariably will.

One particularly frustrating way in which the myth of male weakness functions is to relentlessly urge women to lower their expectations for male behavior. Beginning when they hit adolescence, if not earlier, we often send messages to girls to “tone it down”, “don’t be too aggressive”, “don’t be too smart”, “don’t be too sexual”, “don’t want too much.” Older adults and cultural sages urge women not only to give up their girlish longing for a handsome prince, but to prepare themselves to “settle” for a “good-enough guy.” We urge young women not to have too many hopes about finding a man who is sexually attractive, capable, ambitious in his chosen field, emotionally articulate, willing to embrace monogamy in all its rigor and all its joy.

(Parenthetically, at the risk of getting flamed for racism, I see this “culture of diminished expectations for male behavior” particularly alive in my Latina students. Many of them were raised by their mothers to believe that the best one could hope for in a “good” husband was that he “doesn’t drink too much” and he “doesn’t hit” too often and he “doesn’t go to prostitutes.” While that particularly low threshold for masculine decency is certainly not unique to one culture, I do hear it more often from those whose families recently emigrated from Latin America to the USA. Perhaps the issue is more class than race.)

I am not defending genuinely unrealistic expectations for a romantic partner. Insisting that “perfect abs are a non-negotiable must-have” is silly, as is demanding one’s mate produce a seven-figure salary and a four-carat flawless diamond engagement ring. But there’s a world of difference between expecting a man to smother you in minks and jewels and expecting a man for whom emotional competence, fidelity, and a general sense of direction are givens! It’s one thing to teach women not to expect men to provide for all of their material needs; it’s another thing altogether to advise a woman that since most men will leave (physically or emotionally), she ought to “hedge her bets” by picking a man who will love her more than she loves him.

One of the most basic tasks of the men’s movement — not the MRAs, but the pro-feminist men’s movement — is really three-fold:

First, on a societal level, we need to work all the harder to deconstruct the “myth of male weakness.” We need to look at the various institutions (ranging from the inspid works of John Gray to the pious musings of church leaders who want our daughters covered up to the “popular science” articles that suggest that “evolution requires” men to be less capable of commitment, tenderness, and emotional depth than their mothers, wives and sisters) that promote the myth, and we need to take those institutions on directly. Whether the battleground is biology or theology, we need to rebut those voices that urge all of us to “give men a break”; we need to smash the Tammy Wynette school of gender theory. (Wynette famously sang that a woman ought to “stand by your man… because after all, he’s just a man.”)

Second, we need to raise young men’s expectations of themselves. Despite the claims of some men’s rights activists, pro-feminist men aren’t interested in transforming young men merely to turn them into the sort of lads who will fulfill female fantasies. Though raising consciousness and instilling accountability in young men will indeed serve to improve their relationships with all of the women in their lives, the real goal isn’t just ending rape or domestic violence, or improving romantic communication (as worthy as those goals are.) The real goal is to encourage young men to stop living lives of either quiet desperation or passive stupefaction. The real goal is not just to make men more responsible, accountable, and emotionally articulate (all good things) — the real goal is to make them active agents of transformation. It is to give them a sense that by living a life of justice, living a life of ambition, living a real life of sharing and generosity, they will discover a kind of happiness that they’ve never imagined. It’s about expanding their own sense of what it means to be happy.

Third, we need to continue to reach our daughters with a strong feminist message. We need to remind young women that a romantic relationship with a man is not the sole vehicle for personal happiness. But we don’t need to discourage an emphasis on love and enduring commitment altogether. While we can and should do more to encourage young women’s autonomy, we ought also to discourage young women from buying into the “myth of male weakness.” While some women’s fantasy desires may be unreasonable (insisting on the four-carat ring, for example) others are not (expecting fidelity, devotion, a commitment to egalitarian roles in the household, an ability to describe his own emotional terrain without becoming mute or haltingly inarticulate.) Though many women have had and will continue to have disappointing experiences that reinforce their sense that men cannot be trusted, we need to remind them that men are just as capable as their sisters of responsibility and forbearance.

And we need to assure them that settling for a man whom you love less than he loves you is selling everyone involved woefully, tragically, short.

Thursday Short Poem: MacNeice’s “Bottleneck”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 15, 2007
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

On Tuesday, I posted about the possibility that one of my All Saints kids might join the army. And later that day, while reading the Guardian Online, I came across a most appropriate poem. Anglo-Irish Louis MacNeice was part of Auden’s generation, a “second world war poet”, and I’m surprised I haven’t put up any of his work before. I’d read this poem before, and instantly (and narcissistically) thought of myself for reasons I’ll share below. It fits today.

Bottleneck

Never to fight unless from a pure motive
And for a clear end was his unwritten rule
Who had been in books and visions to a progressive school
And dreamt of barricades, yet being observant
Knew that that was not the way things are:
This man would never make a soldier or a servant.
When I saw him last, carving the longshore mist
With an ascetic profile, he was standing
Watching the troopship leave, he did not speak
But from his eyes there peered a furtive footsore envy
Of these who sailed away to make an opposed landing -
So calm because so young, so lethal because so meek.

Where he is now I could not say; he will,
The odds are, always be non-combatant
Being too violent in soul to kill
Anyone but himself, yet in his mind
A crowd of odd components mutter and press
For compromise with fact, longing to be combined
Into a working whole but cannot jostle through
The permanent bottleneck of his highmindedness.

The final eight lines wouldn’t be a bad epitaph for me. I know well what this means:

..in his mind
A crowd of odd components mutter and press
For compromise with fact, longing to be combined
Into a working whole but cannot jostle through
The permanent bottleneck of his highmindedness…

Yup.

If I ever rename this blog, I’m calling it “Permanent Bottleneck”.