And though Héloïse Cerys Raquel is our first born human child, our “first son”, Dudley the chinchilla, has his Facebook page up and running and accepts friend requests. Should he twitter too?
Real blogging returns Monday.
And for those marked as friends or family only, pictures of our Cerys are up in my Flickr account.
You know the rules — hit shuffle on your iPod or iPhone or MP3 players and see what ten songs come up. Bonus track is whatever’s been in your head most this week.
1. “Brilliant Disguise”, Bruce Springsteen
2. “We’re All Gonna Die Someday”, Kacey Chambers
3. “Bang Your Head” (Metal Health)”, Quiet Riot
4. “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos”, Joan Baez
5. “I’m Coming Home”, Robert Earl Keen
6. “Welfare Music”, John Hiatt
7. “Songbird”, Rosie Thomas
8. “Gaudeamus Igitur”, Mario Lanza
9. “My Heart is Free”, Tift Merritt
10. “The Truth About You”, Rosanne Cash
Bonus Track: “One Tree Hill”, U2
Experiencing the steep learning curve of a new father has me thinking again about men and domesticity and the ways in which we carefully inculcate “learned incompetence” in so many of our brothers. (An old post on men and household chores is here.)
As I’ve said several times now, I never changed a baby’s diaper until my daughter was born. Though my younger sisters are more than a decade my junior, I was never invited or encouraged to change them or participate in their care. Growing up, the men I knew were immensely enthusiastic about babies — in short bursts. After some active play, a crying child would be handed by a man to the baby’s mother (or aunt, grandmother, cousin, and so on). My own father was very loving towards me all his life, but the actual care I can remember receiving when I was small was largely from my mother or from other women.
My feminist mother, to her credit, taught her sons how to do laundry, wash dishes, and perform other domestic duties. But we were never given, that I remember, any sort of education about how to care for babies. And though in many previous relationships with women I learned to be scrupulous about balancing out household tasks, small people were never a responsibility. (Pets were, and I’ve always been eager to volunteer to take the lead in caring for animals.) So when Cerys was born, I was suddenly “on” duty in a way I had never been before. Continue reading ‘Dad on duty: of domesticity, acculturated incompetence, and that steep learning curve of the first-time father’
Elizabeth Alexander had the misfortune to have the largest audience any poet has ever had, and the misfortune to follow rather than precede Barack Obama’s inaugural address. She deserved better, though I thought she acquitted herself well, far more effective than some critics have suggested.
This poem, typical of her style, is on a subject near and dear to my heart these days.
Neonatology
Is
funky, is
leaky, is
a soggy, bloody crotch, is
sharp jets of breast milk shot straight across the room,
is gaudy, mustard-colored poop, is
postpartum tears that soak the baby’s lovely head.
Then everything dries and disappears
Then everything dries and disappears
Neonatology
is day into night into day,
light into dark into light, semi-
and full-fledged, hyperconscious,
is funky, is funny: the baby farts,
we laugh. The baby burps, we smile, say “Yes.”
The baby poops, his whole body stiffens,
then steam heat floods the pipes.
He slashes his nose with nails we cannot bear to trim,
takes a nap, and the wounds disappear.
The spirit lives in your squirts and coos.
Your noises and fluids are what you do.
Neonatology
is what we cannot see: you speak to the birds,
the birds speak back, is solemn,
singing, funky, frightening,
buckets of tears on the baby’s lovely head, is
spongy
I am, it should be noted, on a very steep learning curve as a first-time Dad. I have learned so much these past months as I walked with my wife through her pregnancy, through the delivery, and now through the work of caring for our daughter. Having never changed a diaper before a month ago, I’m turning very nearly into a pro. And I’m keenly aware of Cerys’ noises, smell, movements every moment that I’m home with her. My workout schedule — which for years averaged 10-18 hours a week or more — is down to three hours of running in any given seven-day period. Something amazing is happening if I’m willing to forego my beloved addiction in order to get a different kind of high, the “Daddy high” which I’ve been on these past thirty days since her birth.
And I’m learning a lot about parenting theory and styles. Our pediatrician is a big advocate of breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and attachment parenting. And my goodness, I’m as much of an advocate for this as any father (who has a limited right to push his partner to breastfeed) could be! (I try and respect my wife’s privacy on this blog, but the breastfeeding is, blessedly, not the problem that I understand it can be for some folks.) I certainly am a big advocate of the co-sleeping and of picking up Cerys whenever she cries. I’m getting four hours of sleep a night on a good night, but frankly, couldn’t care less. My wife is at home with Cerys all day; at night, when breastfeeding is done, it’s my job to get the girl back to sleep, however long it takes. She’s usually up between 3:00 and 4:30AM, and we sit in the sleigh glider in the nursery, each with one eye on Bloomberg business television and one eye on each other. I sing to her an eclectic mix of lullabies; her favorite these days seems to be (perhaps problematically) “Der Gute Kamerad“, a German song I’ve known since I was very small. I am exhausted much of the day, wired on obscene amounts of caffeine, and deliriously happy. I may be teaching full-time, but by God, every other moment I can give will be with my wife and my splendid bouncing daughter.
We’ve had a doula around to help out my wife during the day while I’m teaching. Today, Mariela told my wife and me about her experience working with families who want to practice the “cry it out” technique of training infants to sleep. With babies as young as Cerys — who is just one month — these parents will let their babies cry in the crib for hours, offering no more reassurance than a simple whispered, “I’m here if you really need me” while standing over the infant. The idea is to condition the baby to understand that there will be no response, and presumably to teach the kid to give up and sleep. Mariela, said in her experience, the babies cry until they are too exhausted — or until, in her words, “they give up hope.” Both my wife and I were frantic at the very thought of our girl “giving up hope.” She never cries for more than thirty seconds before we pick her up, and we’re both determined to have that commitment continue. I may be brutally tired, but — frankly — I don’t care, and neither does my wife. It’s been a month of long nights’ journeys into days, and it’s been the most blessed month of our exhausted and happy lives.
I’m not trying to start the “mommy wars” or the “Daddy wars”. This isn’t about the right or the wrong way to parent. All I know is what I intend to keep on doing, which is answering that plaintive wail at whatever hour it is heard, however bone-weary I may be. Every human being will face a time in his or her life where they need to just “cry it out”, but as far as Cerys is concerned, infancy is not that time.
Yesterday’s post about emotional affairs and betrayal elicited this comment from jennyfields:
I am relating to today’s post on many complicated and vague levels. I wonder how this applies to “entertaining” fantasies that would be an emotion betrayal of yourself instead of a partner. Is it the same thing or is it different? Where is the morality when it’s only to yourself that you have made certain promises?
I know quite well what jennyfields is referring to, both because she and I have corresponded and because it’s an issue I’ve had ample opportunity to consider in my own life. I’ve written before about the issue of feminist men and the problem of heterosexual desire, and that touches a bit on the topic jennyfields raises, but not entirely. What she’s talking about is breaking unhealthy sexual patterns, and how to cope with the intrusive fantasies that often arise as we make our way in recovery.
Lots of us, for example, have a history of being attracted to people who are not good for us. Call it the “bad boy syndrome” or what-you-will, but it’s common enough to be the subject of biting humor and endless reflection. Women and men, queers and straights, a great many folks have struggled to reconcile what our head tells us is healthy with what our libido (informed as it so often is by childhood traumas of one kind or another) or our heart longs for. And a great many of us, myself very much included, developed unhealthy patterns early on in our sexual relationships. To use one classic example, a young woman who had an emotionally distant father may form destructive sexual relationships with inappropriately older men, hoping (whether she’s conscious of it or not) that she will be able to earn attention and validation through sex. Assuming her father didn’t sexualize her inappropriately, sex for her becomes the one missing element that made her invisible to the older man she needed most when she was small — and thus she pushes that sexuality front and center in her adolescence, hoping that it willl be the missing piece of the puzzle. That’s a hard habit to break. Some men may get into the “knight in shining armor” pattern in which they seek out women whom they imagine need them desperately — which often leads them to become the so-called “Nice Guys(tm)”.
I had so many unhealthy patterns that they intersected and wound ’round each other into a perverse patchwork quilt of romantic and sexual dysfunction. With an addictive personality since birth and a drinking problem (well-concealed at first) since I was fifteen, it’s no surprise that the women I was drawn to were often close to my own level of emotional stability. And though my first two wives (the ones I was married to in my using days) were very different from each other, and though some of the women I dated were remarkably stable, my “unhealthy type” was usually the same. I liked my fellow addicts, preferably with a dual diagnosis of manic depression to boot. When I was newly single after my second divorce, a clueless acquaintance, hoping to “get me back out there”, asked me what sort of women I was interested in meeting. Without skipping a beat, a cousin of mine who was part of the conversation said “Hugo likes short-haired brunettes with sex addictions, high IQs, eating disorders, and a bipolar diagnosis.” Continue reading ‘Learning to long for what is good for us: some thoughts on sexual recovery for unquiet minds’
A friend of mine with whom I’ve had many conversations about feminism and older men/younger women relationships wrote me a note last week about a close acquaintance of hers, a young woman of 21 who is having an “emotional affair” with a man of 44.
I’ve blogged enough lately about age-disparate relationships, and I intend to do much more writing on the subject. Today, I’m interested in writing about this strange and troubling beast called the emotional affair, a phenomenon enormously abetted by modern technology.
I’m not treading on new ground when I remark that when it comes to love and sex, humans are generally very good at deceiving themselves. We are particularly good, as a rule, at justifying certain kinds of betrayals because they don’t meet our own contorted and legalistic definitions of what constitutes genuine infidelity. The paradigmatic example, of course, is that of Bill Clinton. A great many of us believed, and still believe, that our 42nd president was absolutely sincere when he denied an adulterous relationship with Monica Lewinsky; he had constructed for himself a moral calculus in which only intercourse constituted authentic infidelity. In 1998, as the nation watched the Clintons’ all-too-public agony, a great many folks were challenged to think about their own little webs of deceit and justification. If the politicians we elect are mirrors for our best and worst aspects of ourselves, then President Clinton — a man of extraordinary gifts and extraordinarily banal frailties — reminded us of our own capacity for duplicity.
Most people have no trouble labelling oral sex with an intern behind your wife’s back as adultery. Bill Clinton is easy to admire, and easy to ridicule. But lesser men than he — and a great many women too — have shown a similar capacity for self-deception. And we are particularly prone to this sort of self-deception when it comes to affairs that don’t have a physically sexual component. For those of us who define fidelity in terms of what actions we don’t undertake with other people, it’s all too easy to slide into an emotional affair.
For the purposes of this post, I’ll define an emotional affair as a non-physically sexual relationship characterized by mutually intense psychological intimacy, accompanied by words or gestures that traditionally are reserved for one’s romantic partner. That’s a vague definition, of course; emotional affairs are notoriously difficult to define. (One thinks of the perhaps apocryphal Potter Stewart remark about knowing obscenity when he saw it.) The slipperiness of the line between “good friend” and emotional “lover” allows those involved in these affairs a great deal of plausible deniability, both to themselves and to those around them. “We’re just friends”; “It’s totally innocent”; “You’re reading too much into this” are the sorts of things that can be said with genuine sincerity in response to suspicious queries from others. Continue reading ‘“Sin boldly”: against the trap of the “emotional” affair’
A week ago, I posted a request once again for “older men, younger women” stories. I’ve had several dozen replies, but am still eager for more. In any case, the discussion thread below the post turns to a re-visiting of the old myth about younger women and fertility.
Hector takes the classic traditionalist view: men need to be “older” and women “younger” because of economics and biology. The man needs “time” to grow to the point where he can support a family, while a woman ought to be younger and hence more likely to be fertile. Hector (and the legions who share his views) offer a weird amalgam of evolutionary psychology, biological half-truths, and an unwitting social commentary on how long it takes men to get their acts together in our culture. Hector tells us that he often offers advice to the women in his life to settle down and reproduce sooner rather than later.
“Matey” has a great rejoinder.
I’m in my early forties, my wife in her mid-thirties, and she is on the younger end of first-time mothers in our social circle. We both recognize that there is a very slight decline in fertility for folks our age, along with an equally slight concomitant risk in potential pregnancy complications. That said, we’re also keenly aware of how the “have kids young, before it’s too late” message is one far more rooted in ideology than in biological fact. A culture deeply troubled by women’s independence and ambition has good reason to encourage the young to step onto the “mommy track” as early as possible. Untangling hard fact from misogynistic myth is difficult.
But for the sake of argument, let’s grant that women hoping to have children ought to start early. That still doesn’t explain why they ought to partner with older men (especially given that fertility problems and birth defects — particularly autism and schizophrenia — are much more likely in the children of old dudes). Why not devote energy to fighting the scourge of “guyhood” — the flight from responsibility and commitment that characterizes so many young men’s lives? If you really want your young women married and pregnant early, then push young men to get their acts together sometime before they turn 35. American middle-class male adolescence has turned into a quarter-century project; far too many twenty-something lads are far too hooked on pot, porn, and Playstation to even consider making commitments. A thoughtful social conservative wouldn’t push for age-disparate relationships as part of some divine or natural plan; a thoughtful social conservative would push to accelerate young men’s acceptance of responsibility so that it harmonized neatly with young women’s fertility.
Personally, I think most folks of either sex are better off waiting to have children. One tends to be much more patient, one tends to have worked through more of one’s own insecurities and “issues”, one tends to have more financial resources. (There are myriad exceptions, of course — irresponsible forty-somethings and responsibile twenty-somethings are not unheard of.) It’s also, happily enough, a good way of practicing family size limitation. Extreme experimentation with fertility drugs notwithstanding, women who start to reproduce in their thirties or even early forties are more likely to have only one or two children, thus placing less long-term stress on our planet’s resources.
One thing is clear: whatever you consider the ideal age for reproducing, there is no defensible rationale for arguing that dramatically age-disparate relationships are ideal. Unless, of course, you embrace the lie that men are entitled to enjoy three decades worth of puberty, while their sisters ought to start breeding before the first wrinkles appear.
A deeply misguided story in this week’s Newsweek magazine about my state: Death of the Dream, written by Joel Kotkin.
For decades, California has epitomized America’s economic strengths: technological excellence, artistic creativity, agricultural fecundity and an intrepid entrepreneurial spirit. Yet lately California has projected a grimmer vision of a politically divided, economically stagnant state. Last week its legislature cut a deal to close its $42 billion budget deficit, but its larger problems remain.
California has returned from the dead before, most recently in the mid-1990s. But the odds that the Golden State can reinvent itself again seem long. The buffoonish current governor and a legislature divided between hysterical greens, public-employee lackeys and Neanderthal Republicans have turned the state into a fiscal laughingstock. Meanwhile, more of its middle class migrates out while a large and undereducated underclass (much of it Latino) faces dim prospects. It sometimes seems the people running the state have little feel for the very things that constitute its essence—and could allow California to reinvent itself, and the American future, once again.
It doesn’t get much better. Continue reading ‘“We must unhumanize our views a little”: on Kotkin, California, and the parasitical human animal’
Actually, nothing about the Oscars in these links. In case you’re wondering what I’m pulling for tomorrow night:
Best Picture: The Reader
Best Actress: Kate Winslet
Best Actor: Mickey Rourke
Best Supporting Actor: Josh Brolin
Best Supporting Actress: Marisa Tomei
I think I’ll get the main actor and actress awards right, but lose the other three. Never mind.
Some Saturday night links:
Jessica issues a stirring rebuke to those who insist on peddling the “hook-up-culture-is-ruining-our-daughters’-lives” myth.
Amanda hits it out of the park with a similar post: “Dangerous Young Women Who Know Themselves.”
Violet Socks on Women’s Rights and Culture — a nice corrective to those who think feminists ought to think twice before criticizing the way non-Western societies treat women.
Amber Rhea on class consciousness.
Jenell Paris, one of my favorite Christian feminists writers in the whole ’sphere, put up a very insightful series: What Evangelicalism Likes. Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.
Many years ago, Jenell (who is an anthro prof at Messiah College in Pennsylvania) and I joked we were going to form the North American Evangelical Gender Studies Association (NAEGSA). If you’re a feminist — and your name is written in the Lamb’s Book of Life — and you were born again of water and spirit — AND you believe gender is largely a social construct rather than a biological or divinely-ordained reality — well, we’ve got a place for ya in our little club.
Since our daughter Heloise Cerys Raquel came into the world just over three weeks ago, friends and family have been giving us various adorable baby girl outfits. And though we’ve had a few yellow, green, or pale blue items, the overwhelming percentage of blankets and onesies and dresses and shirts and pants we’ve received have been some shade of pink. In our unbiased opinion, Cerys looks marvelous in that color.
I’m often struck by the vehement hostility with which some folks react to pink. For some, it may be a purely aesthetic objection — they just don’t like the shade. For others, it’s the modern association with “traditional” femininity. (As most fashion scholars will tell you, less than a century ago, pink was considered a masculine shade.) Plenty of young women who were both swathed in pink and in sexism as little girls associate pink with the straitjacket of misogynistic cultural expectations. In the minds of some, a young woman’s fondness for rose almost becomes a litmus test for her willingness to live within conventional gender roles. Anyone who has worked with groups of junior high school girls, for example, will know that a mere discussion of the color can lead to rowdy — and occasionally serious — disagreements. I’ve worked with many a gal who went through an “I hate pink” stage; the objections tended to be more political than aesthetic. As they age, most drop all but aesthetic objections to the color. Still, even among adults, I sometimes encounter flashes of genuine hostility to the shade. And I have been asked, more than once, if my wife and I intended to dress Cerys in pink.
Of course, as my friends and students know, I wear pink often. My favorite off-the-rack shirt store is Thomas Pink, though I have green and blue items from that merchant as well. I’ve been wearing pink for more than 25 years, since my high school days in the preppy culture of the early 1980s. I like how the color looks on me, of course, but I also like the subversiveness of the choice to wear it so often. Though pink has waxed and waned as a fashion for men in the past quarter century, I’ve always had pink shirts (polos and long sleeves) as key elements of my wardrobe. And I’ve long enjoyed flouting the convention, common in at least some circles, that pink is an unserious and even de-masculinizing choice for a man to wear.
Pink on a man can mean many things, of course. It can mean “preppiness”, or it can mean a comfort with androgyny. It can even, I’ve been told, be a symbol of a strange kind of classism. One of my exes who didn’t like the color once remarked that she thought that only wealthy (or aspiring-to-be wealthy) men wore pink; her theory was that pink is normally “read” as a feminine color. Therefore, only a man confident of his affluence and of his cultural power would dare to signify his comfort with something so feminizing. “WASPs can afford to wear pink because they don’t need to project obvious masculinity”, she said (or something like that.) She postulated that preppy WASPs know that they already have the culture behind them, protecting them, and therefore they send a certain message about their own power with that willingness to wear the shade. She compared it to the captain of the football team dressing up as a cheerleader for laughs; he can do it because he is such a hyper-masculine icon that he knows no one will seriously dare question his manhood. Someone with less status can’t do it as easily. Or so her theory went. I didn’t think much of it, but I’ve run into others who share similar views.
Anyhow, I love pink — both the soft pastel and the vibrant, aggressive, Miami Beach-on-Easter-Sunday variety. And my daughter, who will grow up with some very strong feminist parents, will grow up with plenty of examples of tough, athletic, and ambitious women. But until such time as she starts making her own clothing preferences known, we will swath her in various shades of rose.
And the first FRT in a while features new discoveries for me at #1 and #7, my favorite song off the new GNR record, a magnificent Loretta Lynn/Jack White duet, and on the bonus, a song by my beloved Catatonia, featuring the sublime Cerys Matthews (she of the most wonderful name).
1. “Jungle Drum”, Emiliana Torrini
2. “The Everlasting”, Manic Street Preachers
3. “Ootishenia”, Be Good Tanyas
4. “My Favorite Book”, Stars
5. “Portland, Oregon”, Loretta Lynn
6. “For a Dancer”, Jackson Browne
7. “Reasons to Love You”, Meiko
8. “I.R.S.”, Guns n’ Roses
9. “Angels”, BoDeans
10. “Warm and Tender”, Caitlin Cary
Bonus Track: “International Velvet”, Catatonia
A few months ago, I put up a long post about how we move on with and without the people from our past: The crowded “cloud of witnesses”: of ex-lovers, ex-wives, and the call to grow. This week, Amber, who introduced me to the marvelous (if somewhat cobbled together) term Erfolgtraurigkeit (sadness at another’ success) links to a New York Observer story about the frustrations of having an ex-boyfriend suddenly become a much better person after your relationship ends.
I was happy for him, but there was also a little teensy part of me that felt whatever the opposite of schadenfreude is—instead of feeling happy at someone’s misfortune, I felt resentful at someone’s good fortune. Why couldn’t he have gotten his proverbial shit together while we were dating? And, a more uncomfortable thought: Was it somehow my fault? Maybe, I realized, I had seen him as someone who had potential but just needed a little tweaking. But it was sort of annoying that he managed to do all the tweaking after we’d broken up.
It’s the Butterfly Effect: one day he’s a pot-addled caterpillar barely hanging on to his barista job, begging off brunch because he’s only got $37 in his checking account, spending his nights “playing music” (his band is going to start playing shows again really soon) and eating cheese fries, and then, six months after the breakup, he’s turned into a Monarch: lost 20 pounds, has a job as a graphic designer, his band is playing the Bowery Ballroom and he has a new girlfriend (tall, blond, wearing what appears to be the $282 Vanessa Bruno sweater you eyed longingly at Stuart & Wright) who, he casually mentions when you run into him at brunch, is the heiress to a paper clip fortune.
I like Erfolgtraurigkeit as the opposite of schadenfreude.
I wrote last November:
I don’t know if it’s always been entirely true, but I’ve always assumed that every woman with whom I shared a bed and a life liked me and wished me well. It’s not that I imagine that I am God’s gift to women; far from it. But for whatever reason, I’ve never been the sort of person who imagines that those closest to him secretly dislike him. All of my exes found flaws in me, of course, and most of the time, those infuriating flaws played a part in the end of the relationship. But though they might have been furious with me sometimes, and even said “I hate your guts” once in a while, I always figured that deep down, they wanted nothing but the best for me as I did for them. In most of these relationships, what ended up happening was that the gulf between the “real Hugo” and the “public Hugo” became obvious and eventually overwhelming. (Ask anyone who’s had the pleasure of dating and mating with someone who was habitually diagnosed with the standard “cluster b” personality disorder.) It may well be my my old character defect of narcissism rearing its ugly head, but I remain convinced that those whom I loved genuinely and deeply loved me as well, and that even after the relationships ended, their hope and their expectation that I could grow and change endured.
And so today, I do everything I can to pour all of my sexual and romantic energy towards my wife. At the same time, I know that my ability to do so is based on experience as well as grace. I am blessed to have been loved, and loved well, by many people in many ways. Whatever confidence and optimism and resilience seems apparent in my character is a consequence of having certainty that I am loved. Loved by God, first and foremost, and — increasingly — loved by myself. Loved by my wonderful family, of course, and loved too by a series of women who in one way or another tried to build a life with me. I learned from each and every one of them, or so I tend to think; the fact that most lessons had to be repeated several times doesn’t vitiate that truth. Of course, the role of these women was not to make me a better man — they had their own drives, their own motives, and their own equally important lessons to learn. But the byproduct of the love we made and the lives we shared is a series of lessons about how to live, and live well, in this brutal and beautiful world.
I haven’t asked if any of my exes experience Erfolgtraurigkeit, and I’m certainly not going to hunt them down to ask. Were one of them to inquire “Why are you sober and faithful and communicative in your marriage now, when you weren’t any of those things when you were with me?”, I would assure her that my bad behavior was never a response to anything that she did or didn’t do. Every one of my relationships taught me something new, even if the lessons learned did not result in any discernible change in my actions until long after those relationships had ended. And some of the lessons I needed to learn were repeated in a series of relationships until finally the stars aligned and I “got it”. I accept that it might be immensely frustrating to have been the very last one on the list before the “Eureka!” moment.
One of my exes whom I dated on and off for more than a year was a drug addict and an alcoholic. We alternately used together and tried to get sober together, were chronically unfaithful to each other, and couldn’t stay away each other. It was with this woman that I did drugs for the last time and took my last drink; it was with this woman that I tried to take my life — and hers — in a strange and thankfully unsuccessful suicide pact in June 1998. I haven’t seen this ex of mine since I looked over at her in the ER of a hospital where we were being treated for our overdoses. We spoke a few times in the weeks after this disastrous final evening together, but we have had no contact at all in well over a decade. I heard recently through mutual friends that this ex of mine is doing well, finally sober herself, in a relationship, living a good and interesting and productive life on the other side of the country. I was very happy to hear this, though I had and have no interest in resuming contact.
But if I am rigorously honest, there’s just a little bit of me that wants to know if our relationship, for all of its beauty and toxicity, played a role in prolonging her addiction or served (as it did in my case) as a catalyst for transformation. It’s ego, of course, that creates that hope that I was an important and ultimately positive figure in her life. But I know enough to know that not everyone has the same narrative. I tend towards a tenacious optimism as well as a fondness for the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc — and that means that I tend to have, as my linked post above makes clear, a generous slant to my memories of ex-wives and ex-lovers. It ought to be pointed out that that generosity is linked to an ease with forgiveness (ENFPs tend not to carry grudges) and, perhaps most importantly, a recognition that in relationships, I have always been a sinner (to reverse Lear) more often sinning than sinned against! The reality that others may want to blot out any recollection of “what we had” is one of which I am keenly aware. That awareness doesn’t entirely vitiate that childish and narcissistic longing to “know that I was important”.
But there is no Erfolgtraurigkeit. Rather, there is simply an acknowledgement that in the end, in the final analysis, we make sense of our past the best way we can, by making it all seem part of the plan. Many people know this famous excerpt from Joseph Campbell’s Power of Myth.
Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.
Bold emphasis mine. This is how I see my former lovers, and how — though I have no say in the matter — I would like them to see me. It’s how I see most people, really, who have come in and out of my life. And in that vision, there is surely no room for Erfolgtraurigkeit.
Barack Obama has been president for thirty days, and to believe some reports, has proved a disappointment to liberals. Though I am far from a full-fledged political junkie any more (in high school, I could name all 100 senators; now I could probably get 60-70 at best), like a great many people I’ve been following these early hopeful days of 44 as closely as I can.
Remembering the old adage about politics being the art of the possible, I count myself very pleased with how things are going — particularly on the environmental front. These stories have had me pinching myself with excitement:
EPA to Regulate Carbon Dioxide
Oil and Gas Leases Needed Scrutiny
A Green Stimulus that Wins Praise from the Sierra Club
Vilsack calls for Stricter Food Labels
And the right-wing is worried about increased animal rights influence from within the administration. May their fears be well-founded, and may the estimable Cass Sunstein live up to his billing as an advocate for non-human sentient creatures.
I haven’t loved everything Obama has done; some of his cabinet appointments have left me crestfallen, though Hilda Solis at Labor and Steven Chu at Energy were the two perfect nominees for their respective posts. I’m increasingly optimistic about Eric Holder, our new AG, after his frank and brave “nation of cowards” speech yesterday. And I think Lisa Jackson will do a terrific job at EPA. Get us a strong family planning advocate in at HHS, and we’re in business.
I never believed Bill Clinton (the only other Democrat to hold the presidency in my adult life) was a progressive. The left forgave him over and over again, largely because he was a man so lucky in his enemies. We mistakenly believed that anyone who could arouse the wrath of the likes of Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde and Bob Barr and Jerry Falwell had to be “one of us”. But the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend, and Bill deceived progressives more than once with that tack. I sense Obama is well to the left of the 42nd president, perhaps our most genuine progressive since FDR, to whom he is often compared. That may be overly optimistic, but at least some of what has been said or done these past thirty days has given me cause to believe it might be so.
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