february

Portrait of the Artist as a Mid-Life Crisis

by Icaria Able

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.  (peek...)

Let’s start there.  It’s not original, but neither is having a mid-life crisis.  I myself have spotted the balding man wearing a black leather jacket racing past me in the red sportscar and thought, “Ha.  Mid-life crisis.”  Or the man who leaves his wife of twenty years and starts dating a woman half his age?  When my husband did that, I called it for it was—mid-life crisis.  Clichés would not be clichés if they were not true, but still, we all think of ourselves as too special, unique, savvy, or ingenious to become a cliché ourselves.  It’s something other people—less conscious, educated, or interesting people—do.  Having a “mid-life crisis” is itself a cliché, and then part of that experience, for me, anyway, is noticing how much of one’s life has been a series of dipping into one cliché after another.  The life that we thought was independently led, creatively constructed, and dazzlingly original was, from the vantage point of mid-life, in fact awesomely orchestrated by forces much larger than ourselves, forces we probably thought we were bucking even as we fell into the pattern they prescribed for us.  For example, here’s how my personal goals accorded with mere geography: when I was twenty-one I moved to San Francisco to become a poet; when I was twenty-four I moved to New York City to become an opera singer; and when I was thirty-six I moved to Massachusetts to become an academic.  I re-located my entire life because a certain place had certain connotations, as though nobody writes poetry in Connecticut or sings opera in Tennessee.  I certainly turned my nose up at the idea of being an academic in Arkansas.  So what’s next?  Cowgirl in Texas?  Screenwriter in L.A.?  Stripper in New Orleans?  What’s next is exactly what I’ve been asking myself—seriously—a big question for people suffering a mid-life crisis, a question fraught with uncertainty and fear.  “I’m set free,” Lou Reed sings, “to find a new illusion.”  Or, rather, I’m set free-ee!  I’m set free-ee!  I’m set free to find a new illu-sha-uh-uh-uhn!  It feels better if you scream it.

The above quotation in the gigantic font comes at the end of James Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—the final paragraph or so.  I’m telling you that because there’s some likelihood that you’re not an English major, as I am, and won’t necessarily recognize it.  English majors have the advantage of being able to connect whatever is going on in their personal experience to something they’ve read about, and while that may not sound like much of an advantage, it really is.  There will be more time later to discuss that further but at the moment I am not so much in the mood to glorify the intellectual lives of English majors—there are actually very few benefits that I can see lately, and I am not just an English major, but the consummate version of one, the mega-English major who spent over a decade in a university reading timeless works of literature and was finally rewarded a doctorate of philosophy—the impressive-sounding Ph.D.—at the end of it.  The cliché about education is that it is supposed to offer people more opportunity, and that is probably true for most educational paths, but there is really only one way to use a Ph.D. in English, and that is to become an English professor.  These are not easy jobs to come by, and if you do not get one, you’re fucked.  I cannot get one.  More about that later, I promise you.

Let’s continue on with clichés (this is fun!).  So, we mentioned the older man dating the younger woman—he’s in denial about his own aging, or he’s reliving his youth, or he simply finds younger women more attractive.  It’s been speculated that his ego is so damaged by the rigors of mid-life that he needs a woman for whom he is a cross between father and god—he knows everything, has done everything, and can give everything.  Fair enough.  I’m genuinely sorry I ever mocked this person, cliché or not.  Until recently in our culture, the older man-younger woman scenario was much more common than the other way around. Three years ago, my husband and I separated after nineteen years together; we’ve been divorced for less than a year.  He’s been dating a woman sixteen years younger than he is for about a year and a half. I, too, am seeing someone now—a handsome, burly, bearded man with silver eyes and a smile that careens through my body like a gust of wind.  “I think your totem animal is the bear,” I told him one morning, “What do you think my totem animal is?”  He’s thoughtful, and so he deliberated for a moment before saying, “You’re like a cat, but not a housecat.  More like a formidable, wild cat.  A mountain lion.  You know the other name for a mountain lion, don’t you?”  I nodded, smiling because I knew where he was going with this. My boyfriend is twenty-one, twenty years younger than I am. The word he was insinuating is cougar.

I don’t think I’ve ever written a paragraph with so many numbers in it! Does math have anything to do with the human heart?  I mean, sure, we know that the average, healthy human heart beats 42,075,904 times a year, give or take a million or two depending.  That’s kind of interesting, imagining how all those echoing thumps that we listen to as we lie awake at 4 o’clock in the morning add up.  Everything adds up over time—mistakes, lovers, jobs, friends—college degrees, maybe—grey hairs, wrinkles, fine lines.  Pets.  Kids.  Bills.  Vacations.  Achievements?  Failures.  You can add up anything and try to reckon what it amounts to.  I thought nineteen years was pretty impressive—I felt safe at year three when we moved across country to San Francisco together.  Likewise for year seven when we officially tied the knot surrounded by friends and family who all proclaimed our relationship an inspiration to them.  Even at year sixteen, when we bought our first house, but by year seventeen, I was beginning to wonder.  I had finally finished my dissertation and was intent on finding a job in a difficult economy.  He spent more and more time out with friends.  I thought we were both happy with that arrangement as a short-term reality, but we weren’t.  There was a moment—a second in time amongst all those days and weeks and years—when I realized we were not going to be together for the rest of our lives, and my heart beat against my breastbone so violently—a wild bird waking up in a cage—I felt as though I had to let it out somehow.  I opened up my mouth wide, but nothing came out.  That’s something that’s hard to measure—emptiness.  You can try to find the bottom of it but can’t note your progress in knots or cubic feet.  Maybe you can count it as tears shed or sleepless nights.  Deperate phone calls to friends.  Hangovers.  Rages.  How long does a mid-life crisis last?  Maybe when you find the bottom of your own emptiness you’ll know. 

If you’re an English major, chances are good—even if you specialize in Medieval Feminist Christian Literature or Mid-century American Authors-cum-Hollywood Dipsomaniacs—that you know the main character of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is named Stephen Dedalus, a part biographical, part fictional representation of Joyce himself. To me, that category of “part biography, part fiction” is so obvious, no matter the genré, that it really need not be stated at all.  Not only is fiction always part biography, or memoir always part fiction, but even life—the way we live it from bed to breakfast and all through the mundane day—is shot through with elements of both fiction and biography.  Even the least imaginative of us is just making shit up as he goes along, but that made-up shit might be the most important, meaningful portion of a person’s biography.  This is just my opinion.  It seems to me that there can be more truth in a book of fantasy—Jeannette Winterson’s The Passion, for example, or Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Shelley Jackson’s Half-Life, or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy—than in history books, which as time goes by often seem less and less accurate since they are so colored by time-specific assumptions.  Ditto for science, the endeavor that we in the early 21^st century credit with being most able to penetrate the secrets of life and nature and reveal the truest truths, the realest reality to our wondering eyes.  But not only are science and fiction not polar opposites, they are intimately implicated in one another; yes, there a literary genré called “science fiction,” but doesn’t all science necessarily begin as such?  What else is a theory—any one—the blank slate theory, the theory of relativity, or chaos theory—if not a fiction, something made up, imagined, that scientists set out to prove or disprove?  And even once a theory has been accepted by the scientific community and thenceforth by the rest of us dopes, time and circumstance will often provide insight that dismantles our truths in the least elegant ways.  Scientific “fact” once supported the superiority of the Aryan race and the irrelevance of greenhouse gasses in climate change.  Before Leonard Nimoy ever separated his third and fourth fingers and monotoned, “Live long and prosper,” Vulcan was thought to be a planet between Mercury and Mars.  Reality often begins in fiction and ends in either illusion or disillusion, each terrible in its own way, and so unstable are “facts” that it seems almost wiser to secure one’s truths in fantasy than in reality.  After all, a scientific fact (a word related to “manufacture,” reminding us that facts don’t just exist but are deliberately made) might last a year or an hour, and, meanwhile, look at how enduring the myths of the ancient Greeks have been.

This brings us back to Stephen Dedalus, a character whose fictiveness is implied by his mythological last name, evocative of the consummate Greek craftsman Daedalus, who built the Minotaur’s maze and escaped King Minos’ prison by fashioning giant wings for himself and his son and flying off over the sea.  But which portion of Joyce’s hero—his reality or his fiction—lies in the name Dedalus?  Joyce the author certainly went on to create literary labyrinths—Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake—as confounding as the Minotaur’s maze, becoming a literary craftsman of masterful and inescapable influence.  This seems almost prophetic of Joyce, himself a young man, imagining how he would grow to inhabit the shape of the archetypal Craftsman.  In this writing of mine, Portrait of the Artist as a Mid-Life Crisis, my perspective makes me less sanguine, and although I am older than Joyce when he wrote his book, it is not Daedalus but his son, Icarus, the boy who flew dangerously close to the sun and tumbled into the sea, that seems my more appropriate mythological counterpart.  They say, “The child is the father of the man,” and my youthful Icarian tendencies have landed me in this present moment where I am helpless in a sea of doubt, waiting to discover if I can swim away or if I must sink indeed.  I made some mistake, as Icarus did—I did not heed the warnings of my elders maybe—I could not fly that middle path between salt wave and sunbeam, but allowed my flight to be guided by my own exuberance.  Lucifer did that, too, and also took a tumble for it.  I have some lofty precedents.  There are always precedents, which may be why it is difficult to impossible to be original and why it is so easy to spot clichés.  They are everywhere, and therefore they are easy to dismiss.  But, maybe, in them, as in myth and folk-stories and fairy-tales—the least factually true narratives around—lie the truest parts of our lives.  This is where we locate “the reality of experience” that Stephen Dedalus seeks at the end of Portrait, and we can read this reality in books and in the lives of people around us, but we cannot really know it as true until we experience it ourselves, until it is forged in the smithy of our own souls.  Young men and women set out on the adventure of life with the sure knowledge that they can make no mistake, but by mid-life, we see how we have blundered, faltered, faked it, misinterpreted, misunderstood, sailed up shit’s creek without a paddle, and generally fucked up.  The time left ahead of us in the labyrinth of life is no longer an heroic adventure but a trap.

I am trying to resist seeing every single decision I’ve made as a mistake simply because the sum of my choices has landed me here, in an unrenovated apartment smelling of antiquated cat pee that I can’t even afford, frighteningly underemployed, without health insurance or retirement savings.  I am—like many people—one major car repair away from overdraft.  I was always aware that many people live this way because I was raised by them and among them—the working poor, I believe they’re called now.  I was intent on going to college, and Pell Grants and state grants from Massachusetts and California paid for my undergrad degree, SallieMae fronted me the money for my Master’s, and the City University of New York remitted all tuition for my Ph.D.  I worked between twenty and forty hours a week for the duration of my long formal education, living ascetically and working hard.  My husband said he’d never known anyone who worked so hard; he himself wouldn’t claim to be a hard worker, but sometime during my grad studies, he began to make more money at his career, as well as become the beneficiary of annual financial gifts of his wealthy, aging parents.  We lived better—bought new clothes (and not just at thrift stores) and took vacations.  I looked forward to a life of happy productivity and comfortable easing into retirement.  It felt very secure—my effort at my career and in my marriage seemed bound to result in fruitful rewards.  Comfort. Ease. Wealth. Happiness.  For some reason, though, just a few years after this vision seemed so viable, it is now clear that my work on both of those fronts has ended in a yellow brick wall rather than a yellow brick road.  My marriage is over and my academic career is a wash.

For reasons I’ll discuss later, I work in a restaurant as a server.  It’s a nice restaurant, and I make decent money there, though I only work two nights a week, which isn’t enough.  I like it better than working in an office, and I make a better hourly than I would working in a shop.  The people I work with are amongst the best I’ve ever known, their humanity so singingly vibrant and effective in every way except for this stupid matter of making money in a professional career, a skill which none of us has been able to master, apparently.  For the past three years, as my Ph.D. becomes less and less meaningful, I’ve been busily dreaming up new careers for myself: grant-writer, librarian, GED teacher, furniture reupholsterer, English language tutor, lawyer.  None seem right.  Due to the kind of masculine interest my single status has stimulated, the job of trophy wife seems entirely possible, except that I like being alone and would only stand for being with someone else if I fell in love with him.  An old friend of mine recently had an interesting suggestion.  We share this duplex that her brother owns, and the laundry happens to be in my apartment, so when she came over to do laundry the other day, she said, “Have you thought of being a dominatrix?  There’s good money in that.”

“There is?”

“Sure.”  She meets different people and has different conversations than I do.  “You wouldn’t have to work that much.  A couple weekends in New York a month.”

“And I wouldn’t have to have sex with anyone, right?”

“Right.”

“And I wouldn’t even have to take my clothes off?”

“Right.”

“I kind of like dominatrix clothes.  They’re really comic book-y.”

“The clothes are a big part of it.  You’d just wear these cool clothes and strut around acting like a bitch, which you already do, anyway.”

“I do?”  I think of myself as a nice person, but maybe she meant “bitch” in that good way, the recuperated way that implies that I’m a confident and independent woman.  When I told my mom about the conversation, I was surprised at how unhesitatingly she agreed that I’d be good at it.  I think of myself as a humanitarian.  Another option I’ve been thinking about lately is joining the Peace Corps, and now I’m wondering about paddling people for money?  (As Roland Barthes said, “I am not self-contradictory; I am dispersed...”) With my English background, I could specialize in grammatical correction.  “How DARE you split an infinitive in MY presence!  What must I DO to you to make you re-SPECT the English language?”  Naughty school-teacher?  Is that the answer to my present dilemma of supporting myself, the avenue by which I’ll find the self I’m meant to be through the labyrinth of middle age?

Where is the escape?  How does a person ever find the way out of this maze of questions and potential realities?  A thread really is the best metaphor for our only hope of escaping the irrational, ax-wielding monster at the the heart of the labyrinth, isn’t it?  Right now, what connects me to the sunlight and the vivid world of life is as fragile and tender as a silken thread.  Maybe somebody is out there, outside the door of the maze, gently tugging at the other end, hoping I’ll ravel as surely as I unravelled.  Maybe this savior is a friend, a brother, a lover, a hero of some sort.  Maybe it’s some part of myself, the Daedalus I once believed I was, the Daedalus I might still become, who hasn’t abandoned me with a sad flap of invented wings to a fate of fighting for my life amongst the horrible depths, but has doubled back, hopes for me, believes in me still, and waits for me to find the delicate thread and follow it blindly through mind-fucking twists and turns, through the stabbing, wretched darkness, and out, back, liberated...

Welcome, O life!

One of the most dispiriting realizations of my mid-life crisis is that no one can save me except myself.  Just when I’ve come to fully understand how useless and ineffective I am.  Some people might turn to God, often referred to optimistically as a “savior,” but I’m afraid that depending on myself is the closest I can get to a religious feeling at this moment, religious because God—whatever he, she, or it is—did after all give me to myself, bountifully bestowed my life to me.  And so far I have been the villain of my own life story. If I had not been afraid my whole life—afraid of poverty, of mockery, of finding and being disappointed by my own limitations, I would be an artist.  Instead I am a failed academic, having made my bid for acceptable, socially-responsible citizen and been shot down.  Fear is not an appropriate motivation; it results in bad decisions and, simply put, bad people. Hence, I have been the villain of my own life so far, but now I must become the hero or lose something very precious, indeed—hope, the will to adventure, exuberance—a life beyond a series of biological functions.  I want to write a book about it, but this is not a self-help book except inasmuch as any book is one.  This is merely a fantasy that I, for some reason, must create, and you, generously, have decided to read about.  Please don’t expect anything original, ingenious, insightful, or brilliant.  I tend to experience my life through literary and historical lenses.  My title is obviously a take-off from Joyce’s novel, and even in this imitation I am not being original.  Dylan Thomas wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and the band Dillinger Four wrote the song “Portrait of the Artist as a Fucking Asshole,” both totally awesome titles.  Still, in and amongst all these clichés and iterations there must lurk some “uncreated” portion of “the conscience of my race,” and that’s what I am intent on discovering.  Very reasonably, I fear that an average, work-a-day human being like myself will find only one unextraordinary truth after another within the wilderness of my own life, and maybe these unextraordinary truths will deliver me or maybe not.  If there’s something yet uncreated, however, that I need in order to become the person I yearn to be, then I must set about creating it, and all past failures can fuck off and fear of still more failure can fuck off extra hard.

Mid-life crisis?  Yes, obviously.  But I’m portraying myself as an artist because that’s what I need to be to save my own life.