Another Love Discourse, page 17
While the trees of New England host slim trees and hardy birds: new-growth forest, host to long-ago timber homes and woodfires, a long history of settlers, appropriators, colonialists, murderers, councilmen, puritans, reparative ventures. On bad days, raising three girls, Roland studies on the wane, and mate losing truck-driving jobs due to the entropy of rage or rage from entropy, our landscape looked bleak.
I had to (re)learn to love the nature here, glacial waterfalls spilling into ponds and old granite, mossfairy landscapes, secret grottos in which to find life.
The judge ejected us out: divorced. Out into nature. We were to tend our young now separately. And in the state of Massachusetts, a legacy of Hammurabi’s Code, the bureaucracy asked us to learn parenthood: a weekly class we each were to take separately, as, without tutelage, we might continue our trend of failure.
Nights, I drove to a hospital to learn how to be a parent. One daughter was seventeen, another fifteen, the other eleven. Passing the amplified heartbeats of the ward for those prematurely born, the NICU, I found my way to a conference room for those prematurely divorced, a ward in which to hear my brethren sing distress.
Right now such a class might be taking place. There you will find the angriest of the sunderers, jaws set hard toward ego’s north, half-listening to legalities, more bloated with righteousness than the cheeky squirrels of my poorly tended garden, beings so ready to pounce on the last little bit of tomato clinging to the vine: their goal being to confirm not only parental rights but ultimate rightness. As if such rightness exists.
My ex was always a nightmare jawsetters say, ex as a parent is worse. The tenet they live by has the unforgiving logic of a hearse: slam shut all sentiment. Yet treat buried love untenderly and it might wake, zombie-like, to plague you. I tell myself this even as I put these words down. How the jawsetters raised hands and lamented to enlist others in grievance, no matter how petty or grand, far too heavy to carry alone: what do you do when someone is a jerk about transitions?
Vegas mate could not be called a bad father: just prone to an impulsive scary fury he never recalled, staying disorganized, muddling others but defiant, looking for umbrage and insult. His mother used to say to him: why so nervous? As if a creed, he foreswore so many forms of calm communication others swear by, staying committed for years to unemployment while using the kids as his excuse without our agreement, while I would have been willing to stay home (the good-enough mother), not having to work several jobs to support all of us. Once I helped him get a job teaching mechanics at a local community college but soon they fired him for his anger and he seemed happy again, excelling in edging me out of the home. He finally got a new license and took on the habit of being the driver on call, getting calls at three in the morning, end-result being I could never organize time with daughters between catching moments to work on Roland.
Often these days, with my daughters around town I run into strangers who say, on hearing a kid’s name: O, you’re the ex-wife, I don’t know your ex-husband well but you’re so-and-so’s mother, yes, I heard about you from him eyes widening to hold the ire of his words. Use of the perfect and imperfect tense: despite the apology note he gave me at divorce court, he could never stop talking.
Substitute truck-driver, X loved how the emergency of the job sparked the house. Called for deliveries out of nowhere, he loped out for a haul as if a happy martyr for the cause, though he only made some fifteen dollars an hour. Supply chain faltered, labor protested, raises happened, he was called and became important. Any conversation about it turned into bullying tantrums. All of us learned quite well to jump and shy away. Look, father works! His loyalty never up for question, just the intermittency of the work ethic. The state of Massachusetts had a point, asking us to pause and reconsider: what did you mean, daring to be two mammals raising your young? Consider history before you officially break for the future. Clearly we had fumbled some part of our storyline.
Crucial points from that parenthood class: always speak kindly of the other parent; support the other’s way. Acronyms bandied about included recalling the STUG, a spontaneous traumatic upswelling of grief: a sine wave cycling, a miscarriage of the dream.
This grief cycle (they promised) would shorten. Equipped with the acronym STUG, I knew the following: one steady-eyed barista watched me tear up, unable to finish our small talk when the particular incantation came on as backdrop: I want to see you dance again, sings Neil.
This song above all had been ours: despite sadness, Neil sings, there could be return. So many grief cycles live forever (within and) after a long marriage.
What I learned, and wish to give to others: when attached to anyone over any haul, you must be aware of every single moment you start to secret parts of yourself away for protection. To make things work, the American phrase, you must find instead a way to share the very questions that make you wish to hide. (The much-quoted Winnicott quotation of our time: it is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.) Once too much of you is hidden away from your partner, attachment has no place to land. You start living a parallel life, your authentic self no longer in conversation, your relation loses both magic and glue, abandoning the possibility of being seen and growing.
The key to intimacy:
stay on the journey together,
show the wound
yet only to the safest.
You get hurt as a child. Someone is never there, someone pierces you. The hippocampus easily confuses details and context, leaving you with a welter of pain. In that ocean, your memory tries creating a legible story: cause and correlation. The more you repeat it, the deeper the track grows. Neurons that fire together wire together. Later, you find yourself angry, hurt, or disappointed, and this dragon from your amygdala awakes to return, vast and hungry.
We are here to help one another heal, says the genius friend, we share the journey, in a safe bond we move toward a partner, and in the light of current love, all wounds are healed.
Or time wounds all heels, as the sorry adage goes, and mine had worn out pursuing the possibility of safe attachment in the marriage. No longer enough left in me to believe it existed. So much of me had been secreted away, I could find no landing spot.
Open as a flower, soon into childhood I learned to close; then I performed and worked hard toward recapturing the bliss of that openness. Our marriage had acted as a homunculus, a wizened being with its own needs in which we lived—some a priori dictates made by a mad maker. He too suffered. We all know this risk: a child self can shrivel away.
No one spoke: the host, the guest, the white chrysanthemums
At one point in the disentanglement, I ran into them, youngest daughter’s teacher and her husband, on a Sunday morning at the market after they had gone to church. Adopted at birth, she felt keenly the growing pains of her elementary charges: clearly an enlightened mother of four grown children.
Remarkable to me still: the regard in which her husband held her—when you lack, others can seem irradiated by abundance. Surely over the years there had been so many parents who had approached her, so many times he stood by as small talk was exchanged. The cast of his patient embracing light on her startled me, a living punctum. The beautiful embrace of his love-light around her, protective and yet offering space. He needed no entry; he was there to support. How incredible to see that gift of intimate autonomy in a(nother) couple.
The grief carried in one line of the song, the one that made me tear up before the barista, was based on shifted tectonic plates (the past swallowed the present). There could be no more dancing again, the verb tense and duration proved impossible. Grief has no compartment; there had never been a husband who could hold all our future ruptures; the husband I recalled seemed to care mainly for his own sentiment in relation to whether or not I ever danced with him again.
The ongoing lesson of adulthood: inside personal relationship, your emotions and experience are yours to handle. Terra incognita I had traveled thirsty and ravenous, trying to be a steadying presence, feet firm, ready to play and console, to support and confirm, to model—like the former teacher—some different possibility about love for some luminous children who still knew how to skip so lightly forward, filled with wonder at each day. On the wheel of feelings, is wonder the true antonym of grief?
Renewal
I want to see you dance again
on this harvest moon
(sings Neil).
Why? Can we return to it? Why does the singer want to see the addressed dance again? To remember that first tendril of tenderness that led them toward each other.
There will be replenishing, claims the song. The harvest is a cycle, a season, all comes back.
Some earth had turned, new tendrils poked up, and the tiniest part of me was curious, like a ladybug new to spring, landed inside but exploring a windowsill, curious about light and nourishment as well as what in that world outside could ever be safe?
Our new age favors the image of the spiral to chart people’s growth (and perhaps as in this treatise, in art): we find ourselves ascending, and yet certain points of the circle resemble a similar point of lower stratum.
I propose we recall that field of object relations Winnicott helped create. Object relations says our first sense of self is formed in attachment to a primary caregiver—say, a mother—to an internalized mother who acts as a stable referent for all else that follows. There can also be an understanding of parts, such as, say, the good breast that feeds, while the starved infant who finds nothing lives in relation to the bad breast.
Young Donald Winnicott, the child of an ostensibly happy and fortunate family, saw himself as being oppressed by two sisters and the dark moods of his mother. One day, he would speak of trying to make his living by keeping his mother alive. His own problems came from not knowing where to pocket his own habit of performative goodness, something he had taken on in trying to lift mother’s mood. We can be grateful for the insights that rise from such a habit.
The ingredients of your life can create joy, a friend of mine wrote on a postcard to me this past year.
You look at DW and, with the clarity of retrospect, see how habits were sown; the wounded healer always bears the most passion; later he made his living working with troubled youth. Only the true self can be creative and only the true self can feel real, exclaims DW. If you have play with a mother who responds, in some ideal situation, your instinct for play (creativity, authenticity) is aroused. What happens when you lack such a holding environment? What do you recreate?
Expenditure
Roland says the modern writer can only mimic a gesture forever anterior, never original and is forever layering whatever has been done over itself, yet the Author-Gods, those early originals, have their bond clear: the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. When those Author-Gods write, according to Roland, they are born simultaneously with the text. There is for them no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.
Yet as I felt—
raised in a particular town after a surge of romanticism had found its snubnose paper-airplane destiny, as every generation feels, including these kids I try to help raise—
we skid into the present moment already late, coming after the fact, we find ourselves speaking with tongues of the past, wondering if they are our own: the key to a text is not to be found in its origin but in its destination.
Or as Kahlil Gibran intoned from everyone’s bookshelf in that era: your children are not your children!
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself
and later
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Try to create any text, even your life, even your life as a decent parent, even your life as a decent parent to a book on Roland you must write in order to be a good parent to children fleeing your ideas of them even as you fled the marriage codicil, and you are no longer that author sitting and offering any ultimate meaning.
What Roland says: the Author-God is dead, the text flees its creator, and only the tissue of meaning rests in the passions and understanding of readers. The deity’s life illumines the text written by the scriptor, bearing the exact same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child, the struggle nothing less than Oedipal: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author!
In other words, Roland forever argues against the criticism in which the background of the author offers some ultimate explanation of the text: none exists. In his view, if you give a text an author and force upon it a single interpretation, you impose a limit, based on your own codes, and anyway, that text itself is more like a fabric of quotations.
You may be reading these words and understanding what Roland means when he says all work is eternally written here and now each time you read because the origin of all meaning lives only in language itself. Such recognition might help you or also seem obvious, reader, but for me Roland was the revolution I sought to heed:
decenter the family (or literature) so that no longer did we have to obey any absolute authority but the call to be present in each moment of reading life (or any other text). You exist as many beings, understood in so many other ways. And none of us can fully be the Author-God of our own life; we write life by reading it.
Once I thought Roland to be alone in his absolutist declarations of relativism, but he is not. The Buddhism of Sri Lanka, Theravada Buddhism, which some find a fiercer and less hospitable discipline, has an idea not unrelated to Roland’s ideas about text. Contingent dependency and anicca, the no-soul doctrine of karma, mean that no one soul survives all your lives, but rather gets distributed as bits of cosmic fluff in the ether, which means that everything you do always affects everyone else’s merit and salvation. Born, you enter a giant invisible web of connection that sees beyond time.
A belief which seems enacted in the new love’s confrères, an ensemble of well-trained composer-musicians committed to improvisation. So notable how they deal with the bodies of others. In rehearsal sessions, they move like dust motes, authored only by Brownian motion, sacrificing authorship for improvisation within parameters.
Imagine you sit watching them in a glass-walled room with forest beyond. How rigorously they both abandon and claim authorship. Each player has navigated shoals of childhood discipline or lack, alphabets of forbidding or forgiving mentors, lexicons of awards or deserts, but no matter, their well-practiced spines are called to the moment in which they offer a note to the universe of the ensemble, erect and alert when heading into performance.
Such good players and translators that, when they are done making music and sidle near one another, a faux casualness veils them, bearing an aura of performance even when smearing peanut butter on a rice cake at the communal table. Because they are aware of the slipperiness of any musical entry into the collective, when they speak even to joke, they still seem more incarnated, simultaneously taking on and shucking authorship.
To say it straight, reader, since clearly I am enamored: some good faith pulses through them. They know what it is to listen to others. And what elegant mercy new love shows in magnetizing all of them and their work.
When the musicians return from peanut butter to practice his new piece, all timbrels and drone, your mate’s dance before them as he conducts is loose-limbed, a person trusting the fulfillment of some collective destiny. Can you start conducting a few bars earlier? the oboist asks more than once, since clearly beau’s trust itself wishes to conduct.
You notice that, unlike a herd of writers—the idea most often an oxymoron—these musicians treat one another’s foibles with the respect of bodies in space deserving gentleness, that soft tier of love extra yet necessary like music itself which is also exactly the laughter our universe needs.
Could you admire anyone more?
In these last months, you and new love have found a separate occasional and temporary dwelling for him, to lessen the cohabitation friction known by younger daughter. You go for a drizzly mushroom walk on the path nearby, the fungi of a variety you have never known, the frolicsome spray of tiny white niblets like seafoam over plastered leaves in a high cathedral forest, the wild purple nubs and blushing pink open slatternly mushrooms, the empurpled brown flowers and white vertical coral, the huge cheese-covered pancakes and bialy fungi, or the extreme amber frills of the hen of the woods in layers tiered from trees, the extreme wildness of the speciation of these mushrooms all protruding from giant subterranean mats of mycelia in this eastern forest by a fallen forgotten quarry now just boulders, from which, in a different age, Irish stonecutters, beau’s distant brethren, drove oxcarts hauling granite to build a college’s chapel.
