this
not thisSome lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence...I am thinking of the fanatical asceticism of Simone Weil's life, her contempt for pleasure and for happiness, her noble and ridiculous political gestures, her elaborate self-denials, her tireless courting of affliction; and I do not exclude her homeliness, her physical clumsiness, her migraines, her tuberculosis. No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom nor would wish it for his children nor for anyone else whom he loves. Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it, nourished by it. In the respect we pay to such lives, we acknowledge the presence of mystery in the world—and mystery is just what the secure possession of the truth, an objective truth, denies. In this sense, all truth is superficial; and some (but not all) distortions of the truth, some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are truth-giving, sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.
--Susan Sontag, "Simone Weil," NY Review of Books [from Dms]
There is a dichotomy here in Sontag's summation of Simone Weil that is bugging me. And there is one underneath that one, I think, that is what’s really bugging me.
I’ll leave the Greeks alone for a minute, let’s imagine an Amish community instead because that’ll be more familiar: If you walk around in a romantically-linked pair then you’re courting in which case you’re considering marriage in which case unless something bad happens you’ll get married at which point you can’t do absolutely anything autonomously ever again in which case you shouldn’t have started in the first place unless you were willing to surrender your autonomy utterly in the first place. If you so much as share popcorn, maybe you can never anymore blow your own money on ugly shoes or play soccer 4 nights a week or putter or go out with your friends or . . .
It’s simple logic. If A = B and B= C then A = C. So if C = blowing your head off and A= going through a grocery store together and buying sandwich meats, then saying “Hey want to go get stuff and make sandwiches?” = “Hey can I blow your head off?”
We have had countless conversations that go like this
Me: Do you want to . . .
Him: No.
Me: You didn’t even let me finish.
Him: Whatever it is, if I say yes then it sets a precedent. So no.
Me: You might like whatever it is I’m about to suggest.
Him: Nope.
As insane as this makes me, and insecure/rejected (duh), I have to admit an affinity for his instinctive unwillingness to give anything of himself away without a fight. I worked up to that in my life, he starts there. The real reason I don’t have a shower is because not having one meant that I had to be ‘allowed’ the time it took to run a bath in order to get dressed. (Please, I’m the one who thinks a blow dryer is a torture device eh, I’m hardly high-primp.) X would routinely stand outside the bathroom door if I was in there for longer than 5 minutes and rail at the door, often throwing his voice through the kids like “yes I will get you a glass of milk since your mother is the Persian princess in there” stomp stomp slam the cabinet door etc. And then there was walking by the bathroom door and kicking it hard BAM sending me flying like someone jumped outa the bushes at me, so that a shower was out because it masked the sound of his feet coming. In the last years I had separated our work schedules so we were just never together because not only could I never ever do anything right, my doing anything at all was the Not-Right – once, I was done with work and I sooo didn’t want to race home but he was always on the phone before I even had time to get to my office after class and I had my lunch stuff sitting on my desk and there was a fork I’d brought and I went out into the parking lot and tried to stab my own tire with it like it was student vandalism so I could sit there for the time it took AAA to arrive (a fork isn’t sharp enough, fyi). I didn’t even tell K this stuff because it was humiliating. And (here’s the point) as miserable as he made me, I also believed him that I was a bad mother and bad person and that I shouldn’t have gotten married because I was selfish and immature with shit like writing on a blog, running, talking on the phone to my mother even (5 minutes, then cabinet slamming, relentless). Before I withdrew from that too, he made fun of my wanting a kiss first . . . “god, you’re like a 15 year old” he said. I wonder if I'll ever not feel I need to pay for a cuddle up front again, deep down.
I wanted to be one of those people whose maternal grace radiated, like K’s mother, one of those. And I was wincing and furtive instead, bracing-myself-frigid over dreamy-detached, so clearly yes I was all all wrong . . . .
In therapy, it became known as the tethered-dog syndrome. Tied in a shadeless yard, un-petted but screamed at any time I chewed the leash off. Until I just sat there, looking potentially rabid and hardly moving a muscle.
Ok the thing that’s bugging me about that Sontag thing initially is that asceticism is the enemy of communality. That is, you can’t withdraw yourself and be in a ring of happiness too. And you can say that you’re going to stay autonomous individuals too in a committed relationship bla bla, but it doesn’t get underneath to the real thing that’s bugging me: the presumption that some people shouldn’t or can’t or don’t deserve a life-loving life—with others arrayed around them, families friends ties all of it—because of their taciturn natures. It’s not enough to say that everyone has a right to stay autonomous – duh - that doesn’t address the fact that culturally speaking we assume there is something wrong with people who enjoy being alone, who need to be apart some of the time in order to be good when they’re with. It’s not the constant time together that some of us want to share, it’s the meaning of that time, some of which is spent apart and some of which is spent on others and some spent alone, and all spent trying to love-life live with minds that were born craving quiet time to calm the inner reflective pools clear.
I don’t believe that being that way is ‘wrong’ [life-rejecting] anymore, and I think although I’m in the minority culturally speaking, if I started a “nuns and priests types have love/relationship/reproductive rights too” club that just about everyone who reads this blog would qualify for at least a junior membership card. I’ve read the letters she wrote to that priest, and Simone herself would have a membership card.
I wouldn’t post this with FPH around bc I don’t want to encourage him to be even more emotionally unavailable than he already is – I want to go with him outside the city to get to clear air to lay around near a fire and look at the sky where we can see the constellations. I want that, and want it not to mean that we counted off ten paces and turned and shot each other dead in his head. And there are too many nights, too long of time stretches, when after the work is all done and such, I want and can’t have the musky anchor of my man there to curl against to sleep implicitly watched over/safe. But there are many nights, when I’m sitting here with an ugly oatmeal mask on my face (like now), writing or reading something like “Yoga Anatomy”, thinking that I’m glad he is there [as in for me] and glad enough that he's there [as in over there, for his ‘rents, and with himself]. That's not what kills me.
[If he comes back w/ fiance-material in tow, and if I ever have the oomph to give this much of a shit again, my bets are on something like a Reclusive Menonite Trucker.]
There is a dichotomy here in Sontag's summation of Simone Weil that is bugging me. And there is one underneath that one, I think, that is what’s really bugging me.
I’ll leave the Greeks alone for a minute, let’s imagine an Amish community instead because that’ll be more familiar: If you walk around in a romantically-linked pair then you’re courting in which case you’re considering marriage in which case unless something bad happens you’ll get married at which point you can’t do absolutely anything autonomously ever again in which case you shouldn’t have started in the first place unless you were willing to surrender your autonomy utterly in the first place. If you so much as share popcorn, maybe you can never anymore blow your own money on ugly shoes or play soccer 4 nights a week or putter or go out with your friends or . . .
It’s simple logic. If A = B and B= C then A = C. So if C = blowing your head off and A= going through a grocery store together and buying sandwich meats, then saying “Hey want to go get stuff and make sandwiches?” = “Hey can I blow your head off?”
We have had countless conversations that go like this
Me: Do you want to . . .
Him: No.
Me: You didn’t even let me finish.
Him: Whatever it is, if I say yes then it sets a precedent. So no.
Me: You might like whatever it is I’m about to suggest.
Him: Nope.
As insane as this makes me, and insecure/rejected (duh), I have to admit an affinity for his instinctive unwillingness to give anything of himself away without a fight. I worked up to that in my life, he starts there. The real reason I don’t have a shower is because not having one meant that I had to be ‘allowed’ the time it took to run a bath in order to get dressed. (Please, I’m the one who thinks a blow dryer is a torture device eh, I’m hardly high-primp.) X would routinely stand outside the bathroom door if I was in there for longer than 5 minutes and rail at the door, often throwing his voice through the kids like “yes I will get you a glass of milk since your mother is the Persian princess in there” stomp stomp slam the cabinet door etc. And then there was walking by the bathroom door and kicking it hard BAM sending me flying like someone jumped outa the bushes at me, so that a shower was out because it masked the sound of his feet coming. In the last years I had separated our work schedules so we were just never together because not only could I never ever do anything right, my doing anything at all was the Not-Right – once, I was done with work and I sooo didn’t want to race home but he was always on the phone before I even had time to get to my office after class and I had my lunch stuff sitting on my desk and there was a fork I’d brought and I went out into the parking lot and tried to stab my own tire with it like it was student vandalism so I could sit there for the time it took AAA to arrive (a fork isn’t sharp enough, fyi). I didn’t even tell K this stuff because it was humiliating. And (here’s the point) as miserable as he made me, I also believed him that I was a bad mother and bad person and that I shouldn’t have gotten married because I was selfish and immature with shit like writing on a blog, running, talking on the phone to my mother even (5 minutes, then cabinet slamming, relentless). Before I withdrew from that too, he made fun of my wanting a kiss first . . . “god, you’re like a 15 year old” he said. I wonder if I'll ever not feel I need to pay for a cuddle up front again, deep down.
I wanted to be one of those people whose maternal grace radiated, like K’s mother, one of those. And I was wincing and furtive instead, bracing-myself-frigid over dreamy-detached, so clearly yes I was all all wrong . . . .
In therapy, it became known as the tethered-dog syndrome. Tied in a shadeless yard, un-petted but screamed at any time I chewed the leash off. Until I just sat there, looking potentially rabid and hardly moving a muscle.
Ok the thing that’s bugging me about that Sontag thing initially is that asceticism is the enemy of communality. That is, you can’t withdraw yourself and be in a ring of happiness too. And you can say that you’re going to stay autonomous individuals too in a committed relationship bla bla, but it doesn’t get underneath to the real thing that’s bugging me: the presumption that some people shouldn’t or can’t or don’t deserve a life-loving life—with others arrayed around them, families friends ties all of it—because of their taciturn natures. It’s not enough to say that everyone has a right to stay autonomous – duh - that doesn’t address the fact that culturally speaking we assume there is something wrong with people who enjoy being alone, who need to be apart some of the time in order to be good when they’re with. It’s not the constant time together that some of us want to share, it’s the meaning of that time, some of which is spent apart and some of which is spent on others and some spent alone, and all spent trying to love-life live with minds that were born craving quiet time to calm the inner reflective pools clear.
I don’t believe that being that way is ‘wrong’ [life-rejecting] anymore, and I think although I’m in the minority culturally speaking, if I started a “nuns and priests types have love/relationship/reproductive rights too” club that just about everyone who reads this blog would qualify for at least a junior membership card. I’ve read the letters she wrote to that priest, and Simone herself would have a membership card.
I wouldn’t post this with FPH around bc I don’t want to encourage him to be even more emotionally unavailable than he already is – I want to go with him outside the city to get to clear air to lay around near a fire and look at the sky where we can see the constellations. I want that, and want it not to mean that we counted off ten paces and turned and shot each other dead in his head. And there are too many nights, too long of time stretches, when after the work is all done and such, I want and can’t have the musky anchor of my man there to curl against to sleep implicitly watched over/safe. But there are many nights, when I’m sitting here with an ugly oatmeal mask on my face (like now), writing or reading something like “Yoga Anatomy”, thinking that I’m glad he is there [as in for me] and glad enough that he's there [as in over there, for his ‘rents, and with himself]. That's not what kills me.
[If he comes back w/ fiance-material in tow, and if I ever have the oomph to give this much of a shit again, my bets are on something like a Reclusive Menonite Trucker.]
"Gravity," Sara Bareilles
p.s. I reposted the anti-anti-procreation thing below too just because it came before this, spurred by the same Sontag post, and is part of an mounting unspoken ticker tape in my head in general lately that is one thing after another that comes down to “there isn’t something so wrong with people who are wrong so there" typa deal.
