Changes

My blog has moved here. It's a cumbersome address and not as reliably accessible as the blogspot one. But writing is a fragile enterprise. Some days (though not others) I think I prefer it that way.

The Road Most Taken

John Ashbery feels a certain warmth in his heart for cliches. He said so in his quiet, brittle voice while discussing his latest book of poems on Bookworm on KPFK radio. It stopped me in my tracks. It disturbs me that a poet's love of language is so inclusive as to encompass even the hackneyed. And yet I have to admire this kind of love. It is courageous, doesn't care what the world thinks, places the poet in a relationship strictly with the words as they are, the reality of them, even -- or perhaps especially -- when that reality is ugly.

I have two volumes of Ashbery's poetry in my library, neither of which I read through. The poems that I did read I approached with that violent earnestness that Billy Collins laments and mocks in "Introduction to Poetry": "But all they want to do," he writes of the students in this imaginary class, "is tie the poem to a chair with a rope/ and torture a confession out of it./ They begin beating it with a hose/ to find out what it really means." I wrote notes in the margins of Ashbery's books of poetry, looked up the allusions, made diagrams of the development of the ideas in the poem. All that, however, was to no avail. One other thing I did, though, more out of exasperation than anything else, was to listen to them, prick my ears to the sound of each line. There was something in that music, but I dismissed it; it seemed too easy and too small. Back then poetry was to me a means to understand my own inadequacy, and so the more abstruse it was, the better. But no one can live for too long in the presence of one's irrelevance, so I abandoned reading Ashbery, and any other poetry, altogether.

It is in cliches that we talk to one another, Ashbery said, because cliches embody fundamental emotions. They give us ordinary mortals a tried-and-true way to talk about what is otherwise ineffable. What do you do when you don't have a way with words, but a certain experience you've had is so profound and exhilarating that it must be expressed? What do you do when you can't speak but you must? You say, "My love is like a red, red rose" and reject the baggage that those words come with, say it as if for the first time, when it was new.

Every year for my birthday my parents give me a card with greetings printed in gold script on the front and long poems on the inside about how precious I am to them and the many ways in which they have continued to love me. I hate these cards. I hate them because they bring tears to my mother's eyes and a shy smile on my father's face. I hate them because their meter and rhyme are perfect, carefully measured and polished, like dishonesty. And I hate them most of all because I know that this dishonesty is false. Though these words are not their own, my parents mean them from the heart and couldn't say what they express any other way. So I save each card and when I'm seized by one of my organizing fits I find them tucked away in a crumpled envelope, a stack of pastel-colored paper whose professions of love pain me with their self-conscious pomposity and sweetness. But they are part of who I am, part of who my parents are, part of our relationship. This is indeed how we communicate; not the best way, not even second best, but what simply is.

Marrow

Yesterday afternoon I spent almost three hours in a dentist's chair having an emergency root canal performed on a dying molar. The diagnosis startled me -- the nerve inside my tooth was dying -- because I had never thought of teeth as living things and especially not as separate from me, so that while I was still alive they could be dead. And the treatment -- to scrape the infected nerve out of the roots with long sharp implements -- sounded and felt downright barbaric. This isn't so much because of the pain; rather, it's the poking and prodding deep into tissue -- nerve and bone and blood vessels -- that ought to remain private, inviolate, hidden in the dark of the body. I'm waxing faintly religious here. So let me correct myself: I don't consider the body sacred, only private. And the consent to have it invaded, no matter that it's for the purpose of good health, never feels voluntary, even when, as wasn't the case yesterday, I have time to consider the implications of that consent.

Once I gave it, I entered a different world. A dentist's office has its own rules about the passage of time, about what a human body is when it's lying, head lower than the heart, mouth agape, on disturbingly comfortable soft leather chairs in pastel colors, hands and feet crossed, every muscle in the body tensed as if to remind you that you, as a whole self, still exist, that you are more than a tooth about to expire, more than a mouth that produces inconvenient saliva that interferes with the surgery you're undergoing. It's a position of utter defeat, of profound discomfort that stuck with me through the evening and the night, through dreams and terrified moments of wakefulness in the small hours of the morning. But the most traumatic aspect of this vulnerability for me was the fact that I couldn't speak, that my mouth was full of sterile rubber, my tooth isolated from the others but a metal brace in such a way that I couldn't articulate most consonants, so when the dentist asked me questions my answers were slurred as if I'd been drunk. And of course I was too discomfited and troubled to ask any.

In the end I did ask some. Lips still numb, tongue sluggish, I asked about nerve fibers and antibiotics and success rates and why the anesthetic didn't work as well as it was supposed to. The dentist gave me a small, condescending smile after every question, but also a complete answer. He is a rather young man with thick, longish, black hair, and a feeble, fingers-only handshake that alarms me. Perhaps he shook my hand that way because I am a woman, and that troubles me even more. But he's supposed to be a very competent dentist, and wouldn't I take competence over a firm handshake any day?

I watch House, MD, the television show, in part because this question of competence versus kindness is at the core of the story. It's not simply a question of convenience, at least not to me; true, it's easier to be mean than to be kind, but that's not the point. The much deeper problem is whether being a brilliant doctor requires stripping a person of dignity, reducing him or her to a puzzle to be coolheadedly solved. And if this kind of cruelty is necessarily the price for exceptional competence, is it worth paying it? This dilemma seems to me to be specific to Western medicine, whose fundamental assumption is that the body and that other part of the self that isn't the body are two different things irrelevantly connected to each other. When you get sick, you cease to exist as a whole being and become the sickness. The part stands for the whole. This transformation is even more humiliating than the inability to speak.

I have to go back to the dentist for another appointment, and I don't want to. Every fiber of my being tells me not to go. Well, there's one exception: my logical mind says: Don't be ridiculous. Infections have to be treated, and doctors are the only ones qualified to treat them; so you have to go to the doctor. I feel compelled to submit to this reasoning. And as a protective measure I become didactic, force myself to learn something from this experience, console myself that, if nothing else, it's material to write about. When I was young, nine or ten, my father said to me, after I had my feelings hurt by someone, to write about it. I set out, vengefully, to do it, determined to have my pound of flesh. Maturity hasn't entirely exorcised that impulse out of me. But I have a more powerful motivation now that trumps revenge: I want to learn not to fear death, and that means learning first not to fear smaller things, like the death of a tooth, like the dentist who kills it.

The Tested Self

Numbers have always reassured me. Two plus two always equals four. Mathematical problems have a right answer and a wrong answer -- at least at the level of mathematics comprehensible to me. Precise measurements are possible. Tests have answer keys with orderly sequences of black-and-white truths. So I like tests, and grades, and measuring things out. That includes even measuring myself, figuring out what percentage of this or that quality of mind I'm made out of.

Last week I took a version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The types to fall into are straightforward: extroverted or introverted; sensing or intuitive; thinking or feeling; judging and perceiving. This is a catalog of categories after my own heart: spare, smacking of oversimplification, precise, and, at least at first sight, unambiguous.

I counted on being labeled, even though I know, in my better moments, that labels do more harm than good. But I was in need of precision even at the price of oversimplification. For six years I've been swimming through my life in a haphazard way, mostly against the current, constantly in doubt about the purposefulness of my work, but reassuring myself that this was the right way to live: accepting not knowing, not being sure, as part of what it means to be an adult, to grow up. One Buddhist teacher calls this groundlessness. I stand in it -- I do, I practice standing in it every day -- and it burns me. There must be relief from this, I told myself; there must be a limit to not knowing.

So I set out to know. And I began by answering questions on a test and looking up the answer key to give me to myself wrapped in a definition I could understand and use as currency in the world.

Life has a sense of humor. It reminds me in all sorts of small ways that I can't get away with certain things. The results of my test are one instance of that: like all things human, some of them were clear, some nebulous. I'm introverted, I found; that was straightforward enough and something that corresponds to my sense of myself. I'm also intuitive rather than sensing, which is something I knew about myself as well. But my scores on thinking versus feeling were equal; I'm, apparently, both. As for judging versus perceiving, the test says I'm the judging type. The trouble is that my experience of making decisions contradicts that. So again I might be both, a tangle of rationality and irrationality, rigidity and flexibility. In other words, I'm just like everybody else. I fit in some categories and not in others; my mind works in predictable and unpredictable ways.

There's no solution, then, for the problem of myself. Not an easy one, in any case. Perhaps my assumption that the self is a problem to be solved is itself flawed. Right now I'm struggling to understand what work is meaningful for me to do. But the way to go about that isn't to imagine that there is only one type of work that fits that definition and that the definition won't change even though I will. So I must go back to the old-fashioned way of figuring things out: making mistakes and hoping that I make different ones every time I start over again.

Courage

It occurred to me as I was thinking, rather obsessively, about the mathematician Georg Cantor's death after years of intermittent mental instability in the second half of his life, that religious faith can be a kind of medicine for the mind.

Cantor is famous to the the likes of me, curious but fundamentally ignorant about mathematics, for using set theory to classify infinities. He proved that infinities are not all created alike and defined them as countable, uncountable, and absolute. This was a reckless thing to do in his time (second half of the nineteenth century). It amounted to splitting open the mystery of God and proving that the human mind was able to understand the divine, summarize it in a handful of theorems speckled with arcane but comprehensible symbols.

The strange thing is that Cantor didn't make, as a result of this kind of work, the predictable enemies. The one man who opposed him most vehemently -- standing in the way of his work being published and intervening whenever Cantor was about to get a better university job -- did not belong to a religious institution but was a fellow mathematician. Leopold Kronecker found it abhorrent that mathematical logic would be applied to such nebulous, untidy quantities as infinity. He wielded all the power he had to undermine Cantor and prevent him from spreading his ideas.

Eventually, Cantor broke under the pressure. Science historians with a flair for the unnecessarily dramatic call this the madness of Georg Cantor. He began to look at his mathematical ability as a gift from God, the absolute infinite, and at his work as a form of devotion to the divine. He distanced himself from mathematicians and gathered around him a circle of men of faith and philosophers. Depression claimed him almost every year but he kept resurfacing and working, sustained by his faith. He died in the hospital of a heart attack in 1918.

Perhaps if you can't stand the heat you should get out of the kitchen. I tell myself this with the cruel practicality of street wisdom every time I succumb yet again to despair that my mind doesn't have what it takes to make beautiful, enduring things. Then I wonder if genius, that overused and nearly empty word, doesn't mean endurance, stubbornness, an unshakable faith in what you can do, more than it means brilliance. I wonder if accomplishing something extraordinary has to do more with courage than with intelligence.

Cantor's life half confirms and half belies all this. He succeeded in changing mathematics, after all. And at the same time he lost faith in his work's ability to stand on its own, apart from God and his redeeming power. That's how I see it, at least. This failing of the heart deeply troubles me. For if people like Georg Cantor cannot be sustained by the power of what they are able to accomplish, what's left for the rest of us ordinary people?

There is, of course, a biochemical explanation, besides the psychosocial one, for Cantor's melancholy. These days, he would have been kept going by anti-depressants instead of God. This sounds flippant, and I don't mean it to. God fails at least as often as pills do. And that's because both of them oversimplify, to some extent, the strange workings of the human mind. Both assume that there is an unequivocal answer, a final solution to the problem of doubt and despair. Whereas in reality there's nothing but waiting for them to release their hold on you enough for another deep breath, and another, and another. You do the best you can, and sometimes that's enough, and sometimes it isn't.

40,000 Years

This I knew: it takes light eight minutes to travel from the surface of the sun to the Earth. But this I didn't: to travel from the center of the sun to the sun's surface it takes light forty thousand years.

For weeks I haven't been able to get this out of my head. I've been walking around with this bit of knowledge in my head as if it were some kind of secret. Not one that gives me, as an individual human being, any kind of special significance. Just the opposite: I feel an indescribable peace at the thought that the universe is immense beyond my capacity to imagine it, that even such a small part of it as our Sun is so big and so dense that light gropes its way through it, a step forward only every millennium, and that this universe contains me so briefly as to make me irrelevant. It's strange to find myself encouraged by absence of meaning.

But I have a suspicion that it smacks a little of cowardice. Every time I encounter that cliche about people's fear not that they don't matter but that they do, not that they are powerless but that they're powerful, I shudder. It's out of shame as much as disgust, because I'm convinced that whoever believes that to create fundamental change of any kind -- and therefore meaning -- is possible, sorely, and dangerously, deceives himself. And at the same time, the alternative, giving up on change, on exercising this illusory power, seems a cop-out.

I've failed to change time after time, no matter how earnest and disciplined I am. I seem always to end up in the same place, caught in the same patterns: confused about what's right and wrong, sunk in familiar despair about all the things I'm unable to do, vacillating wildly between the desire to give up and stubbornness to keep going. Time after time I find myself back to square one, persuade myself that the work necessary to get to square two is worth doing just for itself, and then when there are no results, when I'm back where I started, I simply can't bear it. Then the idea that I don't matter in the grand scheme of things, in the context of the infinite universe infinitely expanding, begins to sound like salvation. It takes me out of myself, places my failures into perspective. It turns me into a mere flickering of atoms in time and space.

Like most everyone else, I grew up thinking I was different, special, unique. It was a sort of religion, fed by my parents and teachers, fed by everything, really, that happened to me: the fact that I had hardly any friends as a child and have hardly any now that I'm an adult; my almost pathological love of reading; my speech impediments; even my constant doubt in myself. And what if I'm not different, special, unique? What if I'm not meant to do any great, enduring thing? What if this life of mine with its approximations, its ordinariness, its failed resolutions to change, is all there is? What if progress is a fallacy?

As always after asking such questions I think of Wittgenstein and the limitations of language. And as always I've reached the end again without learning anything new, having circled through the same old questions and not managed to find their answers.

The unexamined life isn't worth living, you might say. But the examined life doesn't seem a much better alternative either.

Mind Map

A man and a woman have built a library meant to help you find what you're not looking for. It's the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, thirteen thousand volumes strong and organized in the half-logical, half-chaotic way of the human brain, so that in one aisle the "Suburbia" section flows into "Domestic Environments," which in turn becomes "Architecture"; and in another aisle "Typography" blends into "Visual Arts," which branches into "Fine Arts" and ends in "Advertising" and "Sales." It feels to me like the map of a mind, a labyrinth that I wouldn't mind being lost in. Because this is what a library is for, even more than to help you find, say, the authoritative book on manatees or the life of Matisse: to expose side roads, unexpected mental paths from endangered species to orchids or urban development, from Matisse to the printing press or ancient pottery (these are the wildest and most tenuous and blood-quickening connections I can make on the spur of the moment), to challenge you to see the strange ways everything is linked to everything else -- a fruitful sort of disorganization.

I know people who disagree. (In my more disciplinarian moments, I am one of them.) But I don't imagine these eccentric little private libraries replacing the enormous Dewey decimal system ones. Rather, I think of them of a refuge from the predictable, and I'm one who needs such refuge.

Strangely, though, as much as it excites me, Prelinger Library's unusual way of shelving books also makes me deeply uncomfortable. There's the question of time. Who can afford hours and hours of blissfully being lost? And there's the difficulty of finding your way back to the idea that you started with, of being overwhelmed by how, indeed, everything is connected to everything else. Finally, there's the problem of someone else doing your thinking for you. A private library like this is like being inside someone else's head, prey to her limitations and prejudices, trapped in the way she looks at the world. But no matter how risky, I have to confess that, for me, this is the most tempting aspect of the whole endeavor: to explore what it's like to be someone else, being myself while being other.

Perhaps I'm making this library sound more dangerous than it is. I like the couple who started the Prelinger library; their love of books is excessive enough that I instinctively trust them. It's the best way to be a little insane: to start buying thousands and thousands of books and build a library that's a reflection of who you are in the most accurate and defiant way possible. We all do it on our bookshelves, as little and as much as we find the courage and the time to. But I at least still group my philosophy books together and don't let them spill into poetry or science or history. Maybe I will, from now on. And then Godel, Escher, Bach will lean into my Latin-English dictionary, which will be flanked by How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker, and the row will be capped by Carl Sagan and his billions and billions of stars.