Understand things, or, "The unexamined life is not worth living"

The new university term starts Monday, and this means I’ve officially spent a term here in Chicago. And – this is painful and humiliating to admit – I’ve done pretty much nothing I came here to do re: academic excellence, although other things have happened that will hopefully be very good re: happiness. If I were inclined to be very gentle with myself I’d call this an ‘incubation period’ work-wise. It’s not as if this is a new thing. In the past, writing the dissertation, I’ve had periods of two, three, even six months of not being able to write, and I’ve always returned. I’m trying to remember that what I did accomplish was considered very good quality, although I wasn’t the fastest one in the race, and though I doubted myself countless times.

There are two things that worry me deeply about me and this career. One is what my dear, extremely blunt older friend/colleague told me maybe six years ago: that I am too happy to be a _{academic field censored}, meaning that I actually favoured happiness over the unhappiness and discontent she thought produces the drive for our profession. (Come to think of it, she’s also the one who told me I won’t get a good job here which still stings. Ouch.) The other worrying thing is meeting an American colleague who works at Northwestern this autumn and being told by her she doesn’t think it’s possible to work as an assistant/associate professor without working extremely hard seven days a week – no weekends off, ever. I look at the three, four most successful women colleagues I know, and three of them are extremely ambitious, driven, harried, wound up too tight, self-admittedly unhappy. And, well, not in relationships, although I don’t think this is a result of being successful as such but rather the result of a certain kind of personality type that can become extremely successful academically.

I’m a feminist, and the idea of building a false dichotomy between success and happiness/love appalls me. I categorically refuse to accept that this would be a choice I’d have to make. I am quite ambitious too, but I think I’m slowly realizing that my ambition is different from my friends’. I do want excellence and shining, but for me the sphere of this is the whole life, not just academia – I don’t know if English has a word for this, but life as Gesamtkunstwerk, a complete work of art where the parts are indistinguishable. I want to create a life less ordinary, and I think all the literary salon keeping and murder mystery partying and party hostessing has been an attempt in that direction. On the downside of that project, I realize now that I was partly in love with my position in the circles of Bohemia, husband being who he is, with the idea of being half of the It Couple. I came from the outside of the scene, and ended up being as in as one can be. It took time to realize I didn’t want to have the outwardly perfect glamorous bohemian life at any cost.

So, I need to find a way to think of ‘excellence’ and ‘success’ in a wider context that’s my context, not anyone else’s, however successful they have become their way. The key word for 2009 shall be Gesamtkunstwerk. Goddammit, I will be luminously happy this year, and that won’t make me an academic failure. I won’t choose.

• not having built up any savings and occasionally (like this autumn) being careless with your credit cards, because at least your credit cards haven’t been taken away from you, like your husband’s _twice
• way too much laziness and not giving your best at work, because at least you get out of bed every day at nine-ish unlike husband who can sleep until 2 pm, or 5 pm, and actually sometimes finish things before deadlines unlike he
• leaving dirty plates on the coffee table and books strewn all around the floor, because whatever you do, at least you’re not as hopelessly careless and untidy as the husband who used to live in a dirty book-labyrinth of a studio apartment with paths from door to bed to toilet
• actually letting your mother-in-law pay for the husband’s half of the mortgage some months because he, at 48, is apparently unable to plan financially for leaner months.

Argh. The fact of the matter is, the husband is what he is – a famous public intellectual who’s managed this far without really having to change his lifestyle, and probably will manage until the end of his life. But I’ve been getting away with murder because I’ve always been able to feel relatively ‘normal’ and ‘functional’ and even ‘efficient’ compared to him. And I want to do better than this, because better than awful is not good enough.

I certainly don’t want my life to revolve around somebody else’s desperatebourgeoishousewife ideals of how life should be lived. But I do want to pay off my credit card debts, and actually start saving money to go on more adventures and one day visit Mahinui’s tree house in Hawaii. I never want to clean my apartment as slavishly and obsessively as some of my girlfriends do, but I do find I feel better in uncluttered spaces. And I do want to be able to look at myself and be proud of my independence and my achievements. I want personal accountability. And death to foul Ms. Smug.

When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.”

take some time to think about things a bit.

“Things” being jobs, work, scholarship, money, love, marriage, divorce, desire, friendship, future, hope, life, what to do with these things, where, with whom, in which order, how, and why.

I’m afraid I’m buckling down under the weight of everything that’s on my plate right now. The momentuousness of these decisions frightens me. I’m scared, and am getting an attack of the good old “I can’t talk to anyone ‘cause I’m such a mess”, which is always a big help when one is feeling alone and lost and helpless.

I may have learned something in the last two years though: I need to wait this out. Things will probably, hopefully, feel better in a few days. I’ll learn by going where I have to go, right?

A few weeks later, our Quixotean search for a place to sing already turned into a stuff of legends, my partner is again away from town, and I’m having a wonderful evening with other dear friends that included dressing up in little black dresses (the femmes of us) and smuggling small champagne bottles and bendy straws into a movie theatre and watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in a pleasantly bubbly atmosphere. We go for after-dinner drinks, and get a text message from Beardedguy who’s just returned from meeting his parents in another town and really needs a drink. So he comes, and we all have a wonderful time. Beardedguy, you see, is smart and witty and warm and self-deprecating and very funny, and I adore him as much as he adores me – we’re Family. The couple leaves, but he and I stay, having a very interesting conversation about whether there really is any place for love within the psychoanalytic world-view (ah, I have learned since what that discussion means…) The bar closes, so we move into another. They play music, and we note once again how uncannily similar our tastes in music are, not only when it comes to cool bands but when it comes to the most tasteless 80’s music. He lets a drunk borrow his cell phone. We keep talking. This bar closes too, and we are outside at 3.30 am in the light, warm summer night. He says, ‘Of course we could go nightswimming, but that may not be a good idea.’ I say ‘Yeah, I’d better get a taxi.’ So he waits with me in the taxi line, and when it’s time to go, hugs me for a long time. In the taxi, I notice that I’m smiling uncontrollably. He is perfect. But I am together with someone else, and so I can’t be in love with him.

And thus, despite the fact that I ache for his company and at times have to sit on my hand so that I would not send him ‘perfectly innocent’ text messages, I say nothing and do nothing. By the end of the summer, I have found and introduced to him a really wonderful girlfriend, who quite understandably wants him all for herself and does not want him to continue his friendship with Ceci. For a while, we continue our golden life, the three of us left, but then Ceci falls for a married man we never get to see, and our lives stop being intertwined weekly. Seasons pass. My partner asks me to marry him, and Beardedguy and Ceci are the first people we tell, being reunited as The Family once again, for that one night. Beardedguy sings Born to Run for the first and last time ever, and Ceci whispers to me “that was for you, you know.” I and my husband get married. Beardedguy is in charge of the soap bubbles. He and his girlfriend (who I like and respect very much) buy an apartment together. And, one day, it has all become just a story I can tell.

This, I believe: The only cure for love is to love more.

Seven, eight years ago I and my now-husband were the Famous Couple, the Golden Couple, the Enchanted Couple of our circles. It wasn’t just our couplehood that was golden: we had The Family around us – a few close friends I would have died for any day and who I knew would have done the same for me. The closest were my husband’s oldest friend Ceci whom I had known for several years before I got together with my husband, and her colleague Beardedguy with whom she had an occasional friends-with-benefits relationship. We were the Bohemian Pack – when others had to go home, we roamed the night, singing and laughing and playing surrealist party games and reading poetry aloud and inventing dirty limericks and staying up to see the sun rise. We all loved each other terribly much, and it was all pretty wonderful although I always seemed to have bags under my eyes… A snapshot from the final Summer of Love:

My partner’s away on a trip, and on a Monday night I get a text message half an hour to midnight saying ‘We’re celebrating the finishing of a book manuscript [both Ceci and Beardedguy being editors]; come, we’ll pay your taxi!’ So, I put on some mascara, and take a taxi, and we drink champagne, and want to sing, so start looking for a karaoke place. But our regular one is closed Mondays, so we try another, but the karaoke host is evil and only lets his old friends sing so we decide to boycott the place and end up sitting and talking at our balcony all night. At about six am, it becomes clear that it’s imperative that we get to sing karaoke asap. But at that time of morning, where? Someone gets the bright idea that there are cruise boats that do day cruises to a neighbouring country and that they have karaoke (it might be me, since I once won a karaoke contest on such a ship), so Ceci grabs her phone and starts calling cruise companies. We find a cheap cruise that leaves in an hour and a half, so get a taxi and drive to beardedguy’s home since he says there’s something essential he needs to fetch, and just catch the boat. It’s warm enough to sit on the deck, and the sun is shining, so Beardedguy reveals what he had to bring – a bottle of soap bubble liquid and a book of poems by a Bohemian poet who happens to have a day named after him; that very day. So we sit on the deck, blowing soap bubbles, and he reads poems from the 1920s, and I think: This is one of the brilliantly shiny days I will never forget. No karaoke on the boat, though, unbelievably! So we visit the neighbouring country, wander around a bit, and come back, our song still unsung. There is a choice: we havent slept in more than 30 hours – either home, bed, sleep, or karaoke. So we call more friends who join us, and we all go sing through the night, and it’s all… perfect and exquisite and humming with the enchanted fleetingness of it all like a bell of thin glass, while I think it will last forever.

I think I had – perhaps it was in my previous incarnation – a goal about exploring the ‘no guilt’ philosophy that two people I greatly admire recommended. (I didn’t do that well on that goal.) I do recognize there’s bad guilt, needless guilt that shouldn’t be carried, useless guilt one is better rid of. But there probably is a version of guilt I personally need in order to function to the best of my abilities – when it comes to work, that is.

The thing is, I know in an ideal world I would be motivated to work purely by my deep and enduring love for thinking and writing and reading and teaching. I do love those things. But is that enough in this world to motivate me? NO. Thinking is hard. Uncomfortable. Unsettling. And so is concentrating on reading, and doing research, and especially writing. When I get going, I do get moments of flow, moments of flying, and those moments I really do enjoy what I do purely for the sake of itself. But to get going… honestly, until the pain of not doing those things exceeds the pain of doing those things, I won’t do them. And that’s where guilt and waking up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, are good.

I have a quote from Anaïs Nin somewhere here about how people don’t change until the pain of staying the same becomes unbearable. I wish it wasn’t like this. But every article I write, every paper I give, is about growing and trying to become better at what I am and what I do, and growing hurts and takes an uncomfortable amount of effort. I’d mostly much rather lie on the red velvet couch of life with cocktails. Again, I’m amazed at how and why such a fundamentally lazy person as me could choose this unsettling a path in life. I want the red couch. But it will have no worth and value without laurels to rest on.

I think I think that nothing’s more important than being good, becoming better, and shining and helping others shine on the way. I don’t think I could do any of these things without my good friend guilt.

of people in the world: The first think that Anthony Hopkins should have said something to Emma Thompson in The Remains of the Day, and the second think that it’s fine that he didn’t.

These two kinds of people are not ‘American’ and ‘British’, ‘women’ and ‘men’, and definitely not ‘romantic’ and ‘unromantic’ – both the views are romantic, because everyone in the world is fundamentally a romantic (except my ex-colleague P with whom I once had a huge argument at a party about whether what was romantic could be defined scientifically – and yet he seems to be quite happily married and has a small daughter – but I digress).

When I was (briefly) a first-year English major fifteen years ago, I remember writing an essay arguing passionately that Newland Archer married exactly who he should marry in The Age of Innocence, that is, I believed it to be glaringly obvious to everybody else that he really should have chosen the exciting Countess Olenska (that would be Michelle Pfeiffer) instead of the sweet but conventional May Welland (that would be Winona Ryder), but that really his choice made and defined him as a man and lover; that because he did not have the guts to go for Olenska, everything went exactly as it should, and that thus we, the readers, should not think his choice, his loss, a tragedy. Ah, we are only this passionate about books at 20, perhaps. I believed that my argument was really important (and I also used to italicize ‘really’ when I spoke a lot) for understanding how we become who we are through our choices – after all, I had read Sartre too…

I remember having a conversation five or so years ago with a dear friend about The Remains of the Day, specifically on whether Anthony Hopkins should have said something to Emma T. before it was too late – she thought he absolutely should have and I thought the whole beauty of the film lay in the bittersweet nothing that ever happened. I remember thinking that this difference in opinions probably said rather a lot about us both.

Last summer, I saw Once – another film where the two people you probably expect to end up together don’t exactly do that. He buys her a piano – a piano, I ask you – and they both end up with the wrong person, at least according to the advertising slogan of the film (“How often do you meet the right person? – ONCE”). I wonder if I’ve grown less sophisticated and less poetic, or just less… young and less inclined to admire the tortured beauty of not getting what you really want. Had the male lead of Once been my friend, I would have troutslapped him and told him to check out what it says in the movie poster. “Hel-lo... you don’t know her, but you want her all the more for that, guy-from-Once. You sang so yourself in the Oscar-winning song, stupid.”

I feel for Anthony Hopkins’s butler. I’ve kinda wanted to be him for a large part of my life. It’s so much cooler to have passion just flutter almost unperceivably somewhere around your left eyelid than to go embarrassingly all out in this culture of confession that we have. Maybe honesty is totally overrated. Maybe it’s better to buy pianos. But, back to the two kinds of people, maybe we end up admiring exactly that kind of behaviour we didn’t choose for ourselves. Maybe Anthony Hopkins’s stoicism is to the 34-year-old me what Countess Olenska is to Newland Archer – the path not taken that is still inescapably within me.

Something happened sometime during last night – I woke up feeling peaceful instead of apprehensive and stressed. I’m trying to formulate the epiphany in some way to myself now…

It is not the strongest or the fastest or the meanest who survive and thrive, it’s the ones who adapt best to changing circumstances. And it’s what happens to you, how you take it, when things don’t work out exactly the way you want that really shows you who you are and are capable of being. I met a friend yesterday who immediately asked me about my DS-2019 though I had never told him about it (Facebook status messages…), and I realized there are plenty of equally important things I could be talking about instead of carrying this albatross around my neck.

It has been wonderful to go through all my closets and give six large bin liners full of clothes to charity. I found a dress I haven’t seen in four years, and shoes I adore but had forgotten I had. I gave away the evening dress and shoes I wore to my ex-fiancé’s dissertation party, and other pieces of clothing with strong emotional associations. It was wonderful to go to see an artsy experimental play with friends yesterday night, and to stay up late discussing it afterwards. Today, the first child of very dear friends will receive a name, and I’ll sing a song at the name-giving party while another dear friend plays the piano.

The thing is, I don’t remember when I was last happy – it must have been sometime last spring. Then something I wanted very much didn’t work out the way I wanted, and I have been mourning that since with wildly fluctuating degrees of dignity and reticence. But now, when once again confronted with not being able to control outcomes in the world… I suddenly feel released. Free. Calm. Happy and grateful for all the love and support I have received.

Things with forms and visas and flights are just Things Happening in the World, and do not need to make me unhappy inside.

I did the Myers-Briggs personality type test, and browsed a bit to learn about what it might mean. In the last few months, I’ve persuaded four of my friends to start some kind of life-coaching processes, so this really struck home:

The Idealist most committed to guiding others through the doors of life, or along the pathways of learning and understanding, is the type that Keirsey has named the Teacher (Myers’s “ENFJ”).

Teachers are natural facilitators in all their relationships, encouraging those around them, urging their personal growth, and taking charge of others (particularly of groups) with an extraordinary enthusiasm and confidence. Indeed, Teachers are so expressive and charismatic in their leadership – in a word, so inspiring – that they seem in some ways less coercive than the other Idealists. Keirsey says that, though Teachers are both expressive and role-directive, they manage to “command without seeming to do so,” not by means of explicit orders, nor through saintly patience, romantic longing, or mute withdrawal, but by kindling in their students and colleagues their own passion for self-exploration and development. Teachers are masters of the art of positive expectation (or “front-loading”), and they communicate their belief in the evolution of the “self” with such a glow of promise that quite often, as Keirsey tells us, their optimism “induces action” in others, and the “desire to live up to [their] expectations.”

Teachers bring all this infectious energy to their intimate relationships as well, and they make passionate and delightfully creative companions. However, at such close range the intensity of their wishes for their loved ones can create interpersonal conflict. Teachers can overwhelm their loved ones with their exuberance, and with their Pygmalion presumption that everyone wants to be helped along the path of self-discovery. Then, when their loved ones either resist their pressure or fail to meet their idealistic expectations, Teachers can feel frustrated, disillusioned, or even betrayed by the persons they care most about.

This last part about Teachers and personal relations is… alarming to say the least. This is what I am: an overwhelming woman with a Pygmalion complex and idealistic expectations that everybody should feel just like me about life, self-discovery and personal growth – maybe even about their goals in life. Damn. This is not an ethical attitude towards others. I may need to do some soul-searching now.

Also, I need to become a lot more inspiring to live up to my personality type :D – these personality types descriptions seem to be like horoscopes, all very flattering stuff. I wish they’d say more about weak points!