She told my sister it wasn’t right, the way they’d treated me when my brother died. She told my sister that she’d never wanted to have her.
Dr K. called me yesterday from Boston. He told me that a large part of my mother’s brain had disintegrated. He said you could see it in the CAT scan. His tone was pleased assurance. He sounded like a mechanic when he tells you, “Yep, the transmission’s shot. Gonna have to replace it.” But there is no possibility of a rebuilt brain for my mother. This is it.
I told him about the lady who lived in the house before my parents bought it. I told him about the lady who lived next door. They both went crazy. I could hear in this two lines of thought: 1. a statistic, odd but probably coincidental, and 2. a story about a world in which women went crazy as easily as autumn leaves falling off a tree.
Betty C. saw piano wires coming out of the bedroom walls. When we moved into that house there was a baby grand in the basement, smashed into pieces. That was strange and so was the kitchen: strips of wallpaper hung from the ceiling, grease splotches covered the rest. The wallpaper print was one of those fifties’ stylistic conventions in which teapots floated next to atomic gyroscopes.
The first time I walked into that house I saw the devil’s face staring at me from the fireplace. Charcoal smudges formed the face of a dark, evil-looking man. I took it as an omen. I was right.
I told Dr. K. that my mother was a big woman. No doubt my father would need help to lift her. Lift her onto the toilet, things like that.
Dr. K. was very nice. He said, “It’s terrible, terrible.” He said that, I didn’t. I didn’t tell him that my father had once tried to strangle me, or that my sister and I had hid in our bedroom closet with our hands over our ears so we wouldn’t hear my mother’s screams. Nor did I tell him how she sat at the table and giggled when my father slapped me.
Instead, I said, soon she’ll be catatonic, won’t she?
Yes, he said, “Oh, yes.”
The colloquial medical name for my mother’s disease, the name med students would use, is “walnut brain”. I found this out by going over to the college library and looking up medical dictionaries. In one book I found before and after pictures of a brain decayed. The after picture looked like a coffee-shop menu photo of cole-slaw. Dried-up coleslaw. But I guess you could see the walnut allusion, too — the the shriveled up husk of someone’s soul, the meat brittle and tasteless.
My sister keeps asking me, where is our mother? The same question my sister’s had since she was three. That, of course, is the question that we always wondered. Where is she? But now my sister means, is my mother trapped somewhere inside, no longer able to express herself, but still feeling? Confused, miserable, buried alive?
No, says Dr. K. She doesn’t have a clue.
My sister went to visit my mother — to say good-bye. She said my mother sat on the living-room couch with her feet drawn up beneath her, her chin resting on her knees. She gnawed on the edge of a pillow, which she peered over, her eyes glittering in the shadows.
Or, as my sister said, she looked like one of those dried-apple dolls with beaded eyes sold in New England gift shops. A little old granny doll that purely expresses the cliché, “Mom and apple pie”.
My mother was able to recognize my sister. This was a relief, because the week before she had been unable to recognize her own younger brother. She told my sister it wasn’t right, the way they’d treated me when my brother died. She told my sister that she’d never wanted to have her.
My sister’s baby came running in to the living room at that moment, screaming and throwing herself into my sister’s lap.
“What’s wrong with that child! What’s wrong with that child!” shrieked my mother.
Later I asked my sister what her other kids were doing. They were upstairs watching the Disney Channel, she tells me.
Were there any other messages from Ma?
No. Some pocket in her brain, some reservoir had stored this little pool of clarity just in time for my sister to glimpse and then it was gone.
Jung said. what is knowledge without understanding?
I don’t think my mother ever believed in her own individuality. Like a good Catholic she repressed every dark thought, every hostile intent, every desire because the sin was in being conscious of these urges, and she most desperately did not want to sin.
Like one of Mary Gordon’s characters says, being Irish means you like the idea of a thing better than the thing itself. And it’s probably also true that the Irish fear ideas more than reality as well.
Sometimes, especially in the morning when I’ve just gotten up, I find myself standing and staring in front of my clothes, with an overwhelming longing to simply be. If I have somewhere to go or something that must get done I shake off this feeling, turn from it as one turns from forbidden fruit.
There are twelve other people in Massachusetts like my mother, twelve other zombies, according to Dr. K. Yet, the disease is inherited. Another unlucky gene that gets passed on at random to the children and grandchildren?
I went down to ASU a couple of days ago to inquire about the Master’s degree in English as a Second Language. The head of the section has one and a half arms, the half arm ending just below the elbow. This arm flapped about alarmingly whenever he sought to emphasize a point.
“Well you’ll be lucky to make 19,000 a year,” he laughed. I watched his wayward limb swoosh through the air to the tune of 19,000.
Like one of Mary Gordon’s characters says, being Irish means you like the idea of a thing better than the thing itself. And it’s probably also true that the Irish fear ideas more than reality as well.
What happens to the children of parents who romanticize the possibilities and encourage the children to seek out dreams? Very quickly the children learn that they, too, are nothing more than dreams. If the children end up smashed on the rocks below or dangling over a fiery pit, the parents turn from the scene, unwilling to be disillusioned by flesh-and-blood.
I look at my grandmother who has spent sixty years spinning out fantasies about what might be and never once stepping out into the howling wind herself.
My parents had fantasies in turn, that they would give my sister and me a leg up, put us through good schools, but that got boring and expensive. They were so convincing, too, that we believed them up to the moment they threw us to the ground like toys they tired of playing with. The damage was done.
They encouraged, insisted on is more like it, total dependency in us girls, then kicked us out into the big world, then said, “Oh, is that the best you can do?”
They liked the idea of visiting me in California one time too many. I think now I abandoned them at their hotel, took off with Peter and Miles to a hotel of our own, because it was essential that I pull the plug on their movie.
I went down to ASU a couple of days ago to inquire about the Master’s degree in English As a Second Language. The head of the section has one and a half arms, the half arm ending just below the elbow. This arm flapped about alarmingly whenever he sought to emphasize a point.
“Well you’ll be lucky to make 19,000 a year,” he laughed. I watched his wayward limb swoosh through the air to the tune of 19,000.
Like one of Mary Gordon’s characters says, being Irish means you like the idea of a thing better than the thing itself. And it’s probably also true that the Irish fear ideas more than reality as well.
What happens to the children of parents who romanticize the possibilities and encourage the children to seek out dreams? Very quickly the children learn that they, too, are nothing more than dreams. If the children end up smashed on the rocks below or dangling over a fiery pit, the parents turn from the scene, unwilling to be disillusioned by flesh-and-blood.
I look at my grandmother who has spent sixty years spinning out fantasies about what might be and never once stepping out into the howling wind herself.
My parents had fantasies in turn, that they would give my sister and me a leg up, put us through good schools, but that got boring and expensive. They were so convincing, too, that we believed them up to the moment they threw us to the ground like toys they tired of playing with. The damage was done.
They encouraged, insisted on is more like it, total dependency in us girls, then kicked us out into the big world, then said, “Oh, is that the best you can do?”
They liked the idea of visiting me in California one time too many. I think now I abandoned them at their hotel, took off with Peter and Miles to a hotel of our own, because it was essential that I pull the plug on their movie.
Which left me with the question, what about my own inventions?
Well, better mine than theirs. I wanted to script my own damn movie.
It’s good to have dreams of a better life, but how to effect them, make them real?
It’s clear to me, as it has been to millions of other women, that we’ll all be better off if I work. But work at what? Settle for being “just” a teacher? Or put my nose to the books and study the math and logic they use as the gateway to decent pay?
And what of my paintings? Can I continue to do them and work and maintain a home? Which of those am I willing to give up?
The paintings won’t guarantee a better life for my family, but at least I’d leave something behind of myself.
The paintings are concrete expressions of my own dreams and fantasies. They’re something I have a genuine talent for.
The ideal situation to me is to embrace all of life, so that one sphere enriches another. Monotheism has given us the belief in one god, so that we can barely imagine a world teaming with spirits, with life. For Christians there is God and all the rest is devil. What an impoverished world that is.
I like the idea of making a better life for my family.
I like the idea of leaving behind a body of work.
I like the idea of having a lovely, neat, clean home.
Why is it, in our time, that women are expected to pull off such feats of mastery over life? Why do we do it to ourselves? Are we greedy? Are we making up for what our mothers never had?
Shall I fulfill these ambitions by being modest in all spheres of life? Is greatness possible when you spread yourself this thin?
I’m hungry. I got up at 4:30 this morning, had a light breakfast and read. When it was time for Peter to go to work I went back to sleep. Now I’m ready for round two.
The American way is to take oneself very seriously, to announce to one and all the importance, the urgency of one’s tasks. Americans produce fanatics, not geniuses.
The ideal situation to me is to embrace all of life, so that one sphere enriches another. Monotheism has given us the belief in one god, so that we can barely imagine a world teaming with spirits, with life. For Christians there is God and all the rest is devil. What an impoverished world that is.
Perhaps the Irish never let go of the gods they once worshiped, but they have betrayed them over and over and with the gods they betray their own children.
After all, don’t they say that what you believe in is most important of all? Isn’t the real problem with people like my parents that they never had the courage to follow through on their dreams? Never did anything to make the dreams come true?
Reality limits you, says this is going to be hard, obstacles in your way are presented as insurmountable. And if you believe that, why then, they are.
Why, as a people, are Americans so obsessed by limits these days? What has happened to the national imagination that put a man on the moon? Tried to fight poverty and ignorance?
I don’t know. I sit here and write because it’s my therapy. I’ve kept a journal off and on since I was 13.
It gives me a sense that for at least some part of my life I find room for self-expression. Without that I’d feel like a cog in a vast and grinding wheel.
I’m too hungry to write another word. The same thing happened the other day when I worked on my most recent painting. I had to finish it and I was starving, hadn’t eaten all day. It was like a race against my body — my body racing against itself.
I have the feeling that Sayeed got used to solving a lot of problems with a gun back in Afghanistan’s mountains. Or perhaps his anger comes from the shrapnel in his brain. ... Whatever the reason, he was very intense yesterday as he told me about his sister and her failed marriage.
Miles spends his days in his room, humming merrily while he works on various self-appointed projects.
In the meantime, I’ve been reading like a fiend. I’ve made progress on math — it’s something you have to do everyday, like exercise.
Peter goes off to work every morning while I’m still in a daze from sleep. Of course, this means he gets home earlier, as early as 4:30 in the afternoon. This contributes to the feeling of being on some sort of semi-vacation.
One in which I can never relax. I’ve had one student over at the school, Sayeed. He’s from Afghanistan. Yesterday he told me family stories of betrayal, incest, and death. He also told me about his boss at work, a young woman who, to his dismay, has taken to using him as a taxi-driver. “But,” he grinned at me, “I knew she was crazy: she’s one of those Jehovah’s Witnesses!”
I have the feeling that Sayeed got used to solving a lot of problems with a gun back in Afghanistan’s mountains. Or perhaps his anger comes from the shrapnel in his brain. Maybe yesterday he didn’t take his prescribed dose of barbiturates. Whatever the reason, he was very intense yesterday as he told me about his sister and her failed marriage.
He told me he protested her announcement of marriage years ago. “Well, who should I marry? You?”
“Yes,” he said he told her.
“I’m a bad person,” he smiled shyly. I didn’t know what to say.
As Peter said to me later, they have a different culture.
Sayeed’s sister is unable to have children. Under Muslim law this means her husband can take another wife if she agrees. She did not agree. When one of her brothers died in the fighting with the Russians, her husband didn’t let her go to the funeral. She wrote to Sayeed and asked him if she could come to the U.S. He wrote back, I’m sorry, I can’t help you.
I couldn’t understand this intransigence on his part considering his affection for his sister. But when he talked at length about what a great and generous man his father was, I realized that Sayeed was not going to subvert the father’s authority. His sister must go home first and make amends to her parents.
Then perhaps I could go to Pakistan and marry her there and bring her back to Phoenix, he said.
Well, perhaps, I said. Perhaps this whole tale was Afghani humor, and Afghani tall-tale.
Sayeed withdrew at the end of our session with shuffling feet and hunched shoulders, his backpack dragging along at his side.
I went home and took Miles with me to the bank, the video store, and the fast-food sushi shop. I’m much too thin-skinned for the type of job I have.
At any rate, I’m making progress in other areas of my life, despite the migraines and backaches and nearly constant diarrhea the last couple of weeks.
Peter suggested last night that we always used to move around a lot and we aren’t happy with staying in one place for such a long time. ... We live in a different landscape than the mountains of California and the hills of New England. We associate this valley with aging and why not? The elderly flock here like gray sheep. I’m not sure it’s good for us — perhaps that’s what Peter is alluding to.
The heat is very wearing. We’ve chosen not to go away anywhere, which may have been a mistake. Yet when I think of driving long distances on Arizona Highways I just feel depressed.
Peter suggested last night that we always used to move around a lot and we aren’t happy with staying in one place for such a long time.
I don’t think that’s it. Stability isn’t that frightening a prospect to me and I really have no desire to go elsewhere.
No, the source of my depression lies elsewhere. Could be lack of funds. Even though we’ve regained credit, we overspent at the beginning of the summer.
Expansion and contraction. Tension and release. But with age one’s elasticity diminishes. The lows seem too prolonged relative to the highs, so one settles for monotony, the plodding journey through desert sands beneath a constant burning sun.
We live in a different landscape than the mountains of California and the hills of New England. We associate this valley with aging and why not? The elderly flock here like gray sheep. I’m not sure it’s good for us — perhaps that’s what Peter is alluding to.
And at the same time, there’s the image of my mother and her premature aging. Sixty-one and acting like she’d ninety-one. That depresses me no end.
The ideal situation to me is to embrace all of life, so that one sphere enriches another. Monotheism has given us the belief in one god, so that we can barely imagine a world teaming with spirits, with life. For Christians there is God and all the rest is devil. What an impoverished world that is.
Our cat, who had three kittens in April, is bulging about the middle, her tits sticking out like tank turrets, and eating incessantly. I bought her Alpo with it’s demonic picture of Garfield grinning on the side of the can.
I wasn’t expecting her to be expecting until next spring. What a slut!
The news is of a cannibal in Milwaukee and Russian economics in Moscow. The summer is soaked with the sweat of people slogging through news of bank scandals, and corrupt politicians at the helm. We row and they crack the whip.
But in truth, I’m encouraged at the nonchalance with which Americans greet all this bad news. Of course, People want to hear all the gory details about the cannibal. Genitals in a stew on the stove-top, frozen hearts in the fridge. This is a story people can sink their teeth into. The money stories become abstractions, a matter of diagrams and still-shots of badly-designed temples of finance.
And in Phoenix the monsoon tore down live wires and blew blinding dust across the roadways so that people at rush hour had something else to think about. In fact, Miles and I drove by some firemen on Seventh Street using some sort of contraption to snare a wayward line high above us. The wire had begun to come loose from its moorings and the firemen stood below trying to snag it with some sort of fishing rod thing.
I decided to make haste. No point in sticking around to become crispy critters, I said to Miles. He laughed. He seems to like these lazy summer days. Very often I take him to lunch at some fast-food place, and we’ll do a bit of shopping. Of course, he’s on his own when I have to tutor, but that hasn’t been very often. Sayeed’s my only student this session.
Peter spends a good deal of every evening at his computer. I don’t know how he can sit in front of one of those all day at work and then all night at home.
I tease him about being such a German — a real hard worker.
I’ve gotten a little better control over my panic attacks. I counter-attack the fear that I’m smothering by chanting, “You are breathing, you are breathing.” And it seems to work.
But last week was rough. I woke up one morning from a bad dream where I was struggling to intake air. Then as soon as I awoke all the troubling thoughts, that I was about to die, took hold. Of course, an old-fashioned shrink would say this all stems from the time my father tried to choke me to death but I think the cause is in the heart.
Peter is washing the dishes, at my request. In general, I don’t mind the chores, and since I’m not a cleanliness fanatic, refusing to be brainwashed by the TV ads which still show women coming to orgasm at the sight of a sparkling glass, I don’t feel particularly put upon about housework. But I hate washing the dishes. Unless it’s winter and my hands are ice cold. Then the hot water feels good.
But at the moment, it’s probably 100° out. It’s probably a bit lower than that; but the high humidity magnifies the effect of the heat. I do like it when the winds blow — it’s like living on some alien planet. The winds here don’t drive you crazy the way the Santa Ana winds do. Raymond Chandler wrote about those winds and they still lead to murder today. No, the Arizona winds do not incite murder.
Still, a place where temperatures reach 123° is not an easy place in which to dwell. It hasn’t been that bad this Summer, scarcely hotter, in fact, than much of the rest of the country.
In retrospect, my mother had begun her slow descent into madness. One of the characteristics of her disease as described in one of the medical journals is “a callous disregard for the feelings of others”. She was never an empathetic person, but she certainly worsened with time.
Unfortunately to some degree, I associated her lack of feeling with her job. At that time women didn’t work outside the home. I assumed that she had to sacrifice warmth in her personality so that she could work.
Our cat gave birth to three white kittens this morning. It looks as if she had a litter of rats. Miles is quite enchanted with them, already scheming up ways to spare them. “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” I kept thinking.
I slept late because it is so gray out.
It is immensely wonderful to stop agonizing over every aspect of my life. Studying math seems to be a big help.
I keep asking myself why I didn’t get into it sooner. When I was younger, math seemed impenetrable.
Here are the facts: I went to Catholic schools. The grade school wasn’t so bad because the Polish nuns had a high regard for science. By college I was steered into a career as an “artist,” some vaguely conceived notion of my parents unsupported by any basis in reality.
Unsupported by funds, as well.
In retrospect, my mother had begun her slow descent into madness. One of the characteristics of her disease as described in one of the medical journals is “a callous disregard for the feelings of others”. She was never an empathetic person, but she certainly worsened with time.
Unfortunately to some degree, I associated her lack of feeling with her job. At that time women didn’t work outside the home. I assumed that she had to sacrifice warmth in her personality so that she could work. And she always seemed to prefer work to home.
It’s not that this scenario put me off analytical thinking entirely. In fact, I always had the highest regard for analytical thinking and purposely married an engineer for that reason.
But the agenda it set up for me was not focused on solving the problem of how to be a woman and think analytically. Rather the issue was more how to be a woman and show warmth, especially to a child.
I think now my intense fear of being like her was rooted in an unconscious recognition that something was terribly wrong with her.
By having Miles and staying home with him, I proved to myself my ability to be a “good mother”. But at the same time all those years, I educated myself and improved my art.
It all took a long time, but I think I became a well-rounded person. Actually, physically I am a well-rounded person.
Now I want to take what I’ve learned about myself and put it to good use. I want to go back to school and learn to think analytically. And at the same time, I want to continue to paint my pictures.
How strange my life’s journey has been so far.
It used to frustrate me no end, the sense I had that I was so slowly growing — as if I could somehow magically hurry the process. But then there’s a tremendous pressure in our society to be one-sided. We have far too many people who develop along one trajectory, neglecting all other aspects of their souls, until they become so spiritually attenuated that they collapse in a miserable psychic wreck. No wonder old-age is so feared in this country.
Combine this with the problem of image which predominates as our mode of thinking. I often felt narcissistically wounded by the damage to my self-image. I wasn’t conforming to the norm — my stubborn reliance on my inner voice wouldn’t let me. Yet it hurt to feel rejected by society because I was “different”.
And how was I different? Well, for one thing, I didn’t develop the people-pleasing persona that women are expected to do in our society. Instead I resolutely clung to my search for meaning, even though that made me intense.
Then again, I “let myself go”, didn’t make any attempt for years to dress up, fuss with my hair, etc. Only recently have I paid attention to my appearance, and that because I can finally afford to without much thought.
And nothing I did on the surface conformed to the image of “successful young woman on the rise”. I stayed home and raised a child. The fact that I read incessantly, thought about ideas even more, and kept working on my art, contributed nothing at the time to my external image.
But oh, how I grew. I became more and more strong with the passing years. When I began to venture forth, I found that people responded to me in unexpected ways.
And what of image? For women, this is a particularly troubling problem. When you are young, you feel dejected for not being blonde enough or pretty enough or cute enough — for not being doll-like enough. As you age you feel dejected for simply no longer being physically young — your skin droops in unprepossessing fashion, your waistline expands and your hair fades to gray.
The image, always tenuous in the first place, becomes firmly beyond your grasp.
The emphasis for women is to conform to this image, from early girlhood on. But our whole society thinks in terms of image.
You have to have very strong inner resources to resist the constant flood of images that pours forth from the vomiting mouth of the media.
Some people use religion as a shield. For a long time I did, too, but gradually I found that creed in itself was not sufficient.
Not adequate, really, to the task at hand.
I’m not sure if we are born with an inner truth detector, but I suspect we are in our capacity to reason. But I think we also have intuitive gifts, which allow us to sniff out what is true and what is false when we are under pressure and don’t have time to reason our way to the truth.
Is it ever one thing we can say sustains us? I doubt it. I found in my own case that I had to keep reading helpful books, learning from others, listening to my own inner voice, and praying for guidance when things got really gloomy.
But organized religion did me less and less good.
After moving to Arizona I found somewhat less of the attitudinizing that prevails on the Coasts.
On the Coasts people feel themselves only one or two steps removed from Mt. Olympus. Out in the hinterlands people are more likely to act out of human impulse. The art is “regional”, that is, it’s more likely to spring from some genuine impulse to entertain. At its lowest levels, this art can be very unsophisticated, along the lines of home movies. But as it develops its talents, local art, unpolished as it may remain compared to Coastal art, has something of nature in it, something spontaneous, less mannered, less fake.
Exhilaration should come from being itself. In that sense, every person can be an artist, whose life is art itself.
Once you discover life as art you can assume a mantle of confidence, and feel pleasure at the most mundane aspects of daily existence.
You learn to please others because you wish to share your own pleasure in existence — as you take pleasure in their existence, as well.
I used to puzzle over my mother’s coldness towards me. It was definitely a source of discomfort to me. I felt that she rejected me — and moreover, rejected enjoyment of life — and I could never understand her deep cynicism.
Was she worn down by life so early on by my father’s hectoring demands? By the continual childbearing? But to me she seemed to savor her depressions. She never responded to our childish efforts to cheer her up. I don’t think we took ourselves very seriously because she didn’t.
I suppose rather early on I decided I didn’t want to be one of those artists who develop a clever artifice but are all hollow at the center. They leave the world a pretty shell, but their own lives are a misery of self-hatred and sorrow.
They grow only in one direction because that is where they find the light — they bloom early and fade early. Their careers are generally short and their message to following generations is essentially hopeless. "You can give them your best, but you'll never really be loved,” they say.
We live on a steady diet of young princes and princesses who immolate themselves for our entertainment. This is the popular notion of success for artistic types.
Wouldn’t it have been better artistically for Van Gogh or Hemingway to live to a ripe old age? Who can say — but it would have been better for the advancement of humanity, especially for the morale of the young, if age didn’t translate into despair.
I know how art can spring from a desperate attempt to win love. I wouldn’t elevate that to a spiritual principle, however.
That’s a corruption of the talent, which takes delight in the act of doing, of being able to do, what others find impossible to do. It is as if one could fly — not a matter of clowning about to prove one deserves to be alive.
Exhilaration should come from being itself. In that sense, every person can be an artist, whose life is art itself. Life as art is infinitely preferable to art as life.
Once you discover life as art you can assume a mantle of confidence, and feel pleasure at the most mundane aspects of daily existence. You no longer are a cringing creature who begs attention to the diminished ego. You need no longer crouch at the city gate begging alms for your poor, pathetic self. Nor do you have to live such a one-sided existence as the organ grinder’s monkey, dancing cleverly for one’s dinner.
You learn to please others because you wish to share your own pleasure in existence — as you take pleasure in their existence, as well.
Now, I don’t think great artists ever create solely for the sake of applause. But if they are addicted to applause it becomes a source of weakness — an emptiness at one’s own core is never satisfied by applause.
We live in an age of validation — we seek validation continually. We accept the image of validation in the form of material success, applause, promotions, etc. ... It’s the sort of thing Fromm writes about.
...these men see the fabric that “holds the world together” as weak.
Jung, on the other hand, apparently felt differently. He insists on the primacy of experience, including experience of God.
This I know about, having had the sort of experience he refers to. It transcends all my rational meanderings.
I had been feeling increasingly depressed these last few days until this morning I felt as if I was walking room after room hung with dark, damp veils. I made breakfast despite my gloomy thoughts. But why? I kept asking myself. Why this overwhelming misery?
I wandered through the dining room where I spotted Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. As I read about his youthful inquiries into the nature of coincidence, the thought suddenly occurred to me how depressed I’d become after several days of studying probability as presented by a mathematician. For what the mathematician was saying in effect was that coincidence has no meaning. He poked fun of people who use faith in coincidence “to hold their world together”.
And again, last night I read John Updike’s essay on the possibility of life after death in his memoirs. He described the widening gaps between the brain’s ageing matrices. The metaphor is consistent, these men see the fabric that “holds the world together” as weak.
Jung, on the other hand, apparently felt differently. He insists on the primacy of experience, including experience of God.
This I know about, having had the sort of experience he refers to. It transcends all my rational meanderings. The fabric of every life, including my own, gradually, and sometimes suddenly, frays and weakens. But this “experience” transcends all that. “With God all things are possible”. Our constructions, including our faith, are doomed. But our experience of the eternal must be eternal itself.
Now, in regards to the questions of coincidence and probability, I have always found that overmuch faith in the coincidences that attend daily life offends me. However, over and over, I’ve had the experience since early adolescence, that I would come across the right book at the right time. All I had to do was open my mind up, in a thoroughly relaxed way, and the book I needed would come to me. I seemed to be on some trail of meaning, after all. I’ve never believed that spirits guided me or that God placed his hand on my shoulder. Nonetheless, there was something to it.
After all, my intellectual life has been conducted on the run. It’s not as if I had the time or the money to get a formal education in philosophy. I had to grab the pieces of the puzzle as I ran by, and was lucky that I grabbed the right piece each time.
Because, somehow, out of all that chaos, I came to my experience of God, which changed me forever.
But my own experience tells me there is something more, something unquantifiable, unqualifiable. The sort of something one finds in the woods, on a fall day, when the leaves fall in golden curtains next to the sky-blue pond and your heart sings with pleasure at the beauty of the life-giving breeze.
But this Something I refer to goes beyond any one such experience. Rather, it seems to embrace them all.
Updike points out that work is the best defense against thinking about death. This is true — but somehow life has thrust death at me to such an extent that I cannot escape thinking about it. Here I am now, at a point in life ready to devote myself to a career and my mother begins her slow and terrible descent into death. Just as my brother’s death when I was a child set my mind to dealing with the problem of meaning or the lack of it, so now my mother’s disintegration raises new questions.
For her dementia is like a house collapsing in upon itself. As my sister said, where is she, my mother, in that falling apart structure? That this disintegration corresponds to the disintegration of her body, doesn’t this give ample evidence that the materialists are correct, that there is the matter, sine qua non?
But my own experience tells me there is something more, something unquantifiable, unqualifiable. The sort of something one finds in the woods, on a fall day, when the leaves fall in golden curtains next to the sky-blue pond and your heart sings with pleasure at the beauty of the life-giving breeze.
But this Something I refer to goes beyond any one such experience. Rather, it seems to embrace them all.
Materialists, I believe, mistake the menu for the food, the lines and color for the painting, the notes for the music.
The mathematician seems to be saying that since coincidences occur all the time, we shouldn’t derive meaning from their occurrence. It’s as silly as astrology, he says. There seems to be a mystique behind this thinking, however. Because something is ordinary, after all, it is not special. And because ultimately everything is “ordinary”, nothing is “special". This is science as father debunking childish myths.
What I wonder is, why do such thinkers look down upon the human desire to be part of something special? Are such thinkers suspicious that the ego comes into play — that people project the desire of the ego to be recognized as a prince onto the world around them, turning it into a castle just for them?
There are no castles, there is no magic, no special place in the universe for you, say our professional debunkers. But why are they so dogmatic about this? What virtue do they find in the dead, colorless landscape they inhabit, Life as It Really Is?
Now, I sense that at heart, I am in the same camp as these fellows, in that, I too prefer to see things as they really are, and am mistrustful of the ego’s pretensions. The problem I have with these types is that they hardly ever point out what a miracle the ordinary is in itself.
I don’t believe in magic as special privilege, but I believe the universe is magical. I don’t believe in cults, rites, or creeds, but I feel to the core of my being that “specialness” adheres to every particle of being.
When I look out my window at the dappled light on the leaves created by the noontime sun, and see how the breeze creates a constantly shifting pattern of shadows and light, my artist’s vision frames the scene as a picture of sheer joy. My eye returns again and again to this scene as I sit here. There are times when I think, I am incredibly lucky to be seeing this, and I could easily lose this sight, it is not mine to keep. But that doesn’t stop me from taking pleasure in this moment. Sometimes I have sat next to this same window and watched a little mouse run down one of the branches. At other times a sparrow would hop from limb to limb, oblivious to my watching. At moments like this all philosophical questions seem moot, because the whole problem of our mortality seems like very much the wrong question.
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.