march; or, taking a moment to feel good about satan

In the past four months, my dear, old friend Beth has given me an antique slip, a vacuum cleaner, a set of measuring spoons, a dresser, a table, a silk nightie, a black and white photograph of a happy nun, a pair of reading glasses, and a large, hollow, wooden bunny that I could potentially secret things away in.  Oh, and a place to live.  She and her mom have fed me dinners, poured whole bottles of wine into my cup, listened to my tirades, and told me to get real when my whining verged on indulgent self-pity.  I’ve gotten very sweet hugs and kisses and also reminders that I’m not the only one in the world whose dreams have frayed away.  It’s more comfortable to be the one in a relationship who gives rather than the one who receives—there’s real power in helping and giving to others—but in the past couple years I’ve grown humble and accepted much help from my friends. 

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a [hu]man can have no other vocation than to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him...

I was surprised to hear this quotation from Albert Camus.  Camus, author of The Plague and The Stranger, a book about a man who murders someone for seemingly no reason at all.  It’s been over twenty years since I read these books, and when I sought them out, it was because I thought they were edgy and dangerous.  In the 80’s, downtown Northampton, MA was pimpled with morose-looking teenagers wearing black clothes and smoking cher bidi cigarettes (this was before, even, Morrisey sang the line, “I wear black on the outside because black is how I fe-e-el on the inside”), and one afternoon I ran into one of these, my friend André, who told me, “I’ve been really depressed lately.  I’ve been reading a lot of existential literature.”  For some reason, this encounter left the impression that reading as much existential literature as quickly as possible was a high priority, and with my earnings from Roz’s Place (the awesome vintage clothing store where I worked, played cards, and learned to sew), I acquired The Stranger, The Plague, No Exit, Nausea, The Age of Reason, The Chips Are Down, The Reprieve, Notes From the Underground, and The Mandarins.  I read them as fast as I could, really only enjoying The Age of Reason by Sartre and The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir.  I also read much of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and a little of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, finding much of interest in the former and little of interest in the latter.  Truly, I have since had opportunity to realize in many different contexts that nothingness does not interest me as much as it does some others.  Everythingness, on the other hand, is constantly intriguing and distracting on a moment-by-moment basis.

Where was I?  Oh, yes!  So, when I did all this reading in Existentialism, I wasn’t necessarily in a reflective state of mind so much as an acquisitive one—I needed to acquire knowledge and quickly because my own ignorance was embarrassing and, I felt, a barrier to the kind of profound emotional experience André was having that afternoon on the steps of City Hall.  Teachers did little to alter my attitude toward knowledge from acquisitive to reflective, and their disdain for my frequent confusion and misprision was often palpable.  My uninformed impression of Camus as philosophically cold and inhumanly cruel lingered for decades because I uncritically identified him with the protagonist of The Stranger.  A sound-byte understanding of existentialist philosophy—life is meaningless, god is dead, and all experience is absurd—remained unchallenged and mostly unaltered as everythingness swooped down upon me and swept me off to other compass-points.  It’s only now that I read this one quotation from Camus’ letters, it suddenly seems obvious that what Camus tries to demonstrate in his work is that in a world devoid of divinely granted direction, the very best morality we can embrace is in refining our relationships with one another.  We can succumb to the void, or we can work to create meaning within ourselves and amongst one another.  Why are Beth and I friends?  Because we decided to be twenty-five years ago—enjoying each other and finding much to talk about—and have tried to help and be kind to each other since then.  Love is a feeling, but more importantly it’s something you do, a performance, an action. 

I am challenged every day by the insane difficulty of being good to people around me.  I bitch at people constantly from behind the wheel of my car, and I daydream about thumping certain restaurant customers on the forehead with a dirty soup-spoon.  Often it’s not much easier to be generous, kind, or helpful to my nears and dears, the people I actually know and care about.  And yet I fundamentally agree with Camus’ statement above and can’t think of a better raison d’être than to feel and bestow happiness.  Happiness is an underrated achievement, I think—not happiness because you’re successful or rich or married to a toothsome human specimen, but freestanding, independent happiness.  There’s joy in being alive, in seeing what there is to see and knowing what there is to know.  Maybe I’m blessed with good biochemistry (this is no doubt true), but I feel as though the mystery of existence is woven through with bright threads of happiness in both its warp and its woof.  It’s the philosophy of some that to live is to suffer, and I’m not sure who could argue that, but what unfortunate soul amongst us wouldn’t agree that to live is also to feel joy?  Under a microscope, our cells look like they are singing and dancing.  On a cellular level, we are just screaming with the great good fortune of being alive. Cellula in Latin means “little room,” and in all those little rooms there are a bunch of kick-ass parties going on.  For some reason, we didn’t remain single-celled critters trying to make the most out of life in a gigantic pot of organic soup, but through some impulse we might relate to, our cells symbiotically collected together in ever increasing complex ways until we each became the mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a riddle that puts on clean underwear most days and heads out into the world to do stuff that seems to need doing.  (I think I might be the next evolutionary step—the mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a riddle and smothered with a rich dollop of puzzlement.)  So billions of years ago, our cells discovered this trick of symbiosis, an achievement any prime time television show is ample evidence that we as more sophisticated organisms haven’t yet attained in any abiding way.  Not for lack of trying!  We have the will, it seems, to live out our lives happily amongst others, but we don’t understand how.

I should apologize for my simplistic treatment of cellular biology.  Most of what I know on the subject I learned from Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book A Wind in the Door, which I read, um, twenty-nine years ago.  Apart from that, the only other relevant factoid to make an impression on me is the one theoretical quantum physicists, new-age spiritualists, and Moby like to repeat, that our cells are partly comprised of matter from stars that burned brightly in distant galaxies gazillions of years ago.  “He whose face gives no light will never become a star,” William Blake says in his “Proverbs of Hell,” and the ancients tell stories of human worthies who are rewarded by being made into stars or whole constellations—they almost had it right.  Instead of us becoming stars, stars become us.  We are their ghosts.  And they’re our distant ancestors.  A good graphic artist could do a lot with that concept.  Red giants in top hats and waxed moustachios . . . white dwarves in bows and pinafores.  Or maybe Blake was on to something after all, and after long-dead stars fill our cells with stardust, and we spend our lives walking and talking and whatnot, and we die and decompose, some of the dust we crumble into floats off again beyond our cerulean atmosphere and back into space.  A hugely slow life cycle.  I can think of worse afterlives than to be cosmic dust, the ground of being for dancing angels who spiral through space singing sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, star songs, the music of the spheres...

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!

The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand

and asshole holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is

holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an

angel!

So howls Ginsberg (God, what a poem!).  Why do the ancients imagine the universe as full of music?  Music requires order, rhythm, cadence—the harmonia mundi, they called it, dreaming up a world beyond our sight in harmony, whatever the chaos that might afflict our days and souls and skins.  Is space silent, cold, and empty, as scientists say, or is it an overheated dancehall where the pillars of creation keep the beat for the raving bodies of seraphim, throwing down new stars that dance themselves to pieces, eager for their destiny as motes minutely lodged in our being, keeping us together, propping us up?  (awesome discotheque.)  They come apart and in the blink of a god’s eye, we come together.  Shit, man!  We need to be doing a whole lot more singing and dancing.  (I recommend the Basement on Saturday nights.  Danny and Ariel took me there a couple months ago and they were spinning such great R & B and old rock-and-roll, I completely danced my face off, which is what happened to my face for those of you wondering...)

While I’m on the subject of stars, I know I mentioned that my boyfriend Nick has silver eyes, but did I mention that they’re the exact color of starlight?  Or actually, to be even more specific, they’re the color of starlight glinting off a fairy’s wing.  I think this stuff up on those nights he’s at his own apartment, and I’m lying in my cellula, my tiny bedroom, looking out my window at the snowy river next to my house.  I feel so lucky that even though I live in a city, there’s nothing but trees and a river outside my bedroom window, even if the view is crisscrossed with thick electrical wires (as Iñarritu’s new movie Biutiful suggests in its title, I think, the world is both beautiful and it’s not—both simultaneously and contrarily and harmoniously all together).  My apartment, the first home that’s all mine, is both beautiful and it’s not.  The wood floors are rather worn, the ceilings are dropped, and it smells faintly of cat pee.  This was never a house built for luxurious living.  On the other hand, it’s full of lovely details, a home more desirable than that of most of the world’s population and of most of those who ever lived.  I can’t take that for granted.  We talk about our neanderthal ancestors who lived in caves—newsflash!  People still live in caves.  And not just in developing countries.  I guarantee that people live in caves in Massachusetts, people lacking in money or sanity or, maybe, social skills satisfactory to the status quo.  My old friend David lived in a cave at the edge of Golden Gate Park overlooking the Pacific Ocean for months and months during a particularly insolvent period of his life.  If it turns out that I can’t pay my rent every month, I might look into cave-dwelling myself.  But for the moment, I take grand pleasure in shoving seven-hundred dollars cash in an envelope with my landlord’s name on it every month.  Writing monthly checks to the electric company, the gas company, SallieMae, and Capital One gives me tidal surges of pride.  Right now, I have a home for my inherited, antique furniture, my senile, elderly cats, and myself.  There’s a roof above my dreams and secure walls around my fragile, naked hours.  I’ve painted the insides of these walls yellow, green, cream, blue, scarlet, teal, and two shades of orange—arguably too much color for a four-room apartment.  I have a library with two desks, a futon, a chaise lounge, and hundreds and hundreds of books.  True, according to Feng Shui, the river flowing by is going in the wrong direction, symbolically carrying money away from my front door, but there is at least a mountain behind my house, one covered in mists that move around it, graceful as wraiths, as I wait for tea-water to boil and bread to toast in the morning.  A mountain at your back is always good, but a mountain full of ghosts inestimably better.  You can turn your back on ghosts—they don’t mind—but it’s a cold thing to turn your back on the living.  These past couple years have brought out the worst in me—my pettiness, my tweaky anxiety, my narcissism—but those who matter to me and to whom I matter haven’t turned away.  Do I know the best people in the world, or is this just how people are—caring, sweet, and generous?  It’s hard to believe, looking at the news, that people are even remotely decent, but everyone I know seems the mold and model of some superhuman virtue.

If happiness is the supreme end in life, as right now I believe it to be, then my friends—Beverly, Beth, Neilsen, Nanci, Shoes, Joshie, and my brother spring to mind—are sage gurus.  They show me the way.

One of the things that made me an effective teacher, I think, is that my students felt aware of how completely happy I felt to be in their presence, to be in the classroom with them.  Except for a few miserable, substance-addled years as an adolescent, school was always my particular seventh heaven, the empyrean realm within which all things might flame into possibility.  Through education, I became intellectually a walker between worlds, a time-traveler, a shape-shifter, simultaneously restless and content, hungry and replete.  I never felt overly smart, but I was enthralled with the adventure of wondering, inquiring, searching, debating, analyzing, reading, pondering, reconfiguring, awaiting my small revelations and positing my small critiques.  In the classes I taught, my knowledge was the least of what I had to offer my students; the best I could offer them was myself, my whole self, and the adventure of my life, conducted largely on an intellectual scale.  I loved my students from the moment I set eyes on them, from the moment I saw their names on the roster, actually, and wanted to know each of them personally.  For me, it was hard to be their teacher unless I was also their friend; they brought out the best in me.  The biggest point I wanted to make to them about medieval and Renaissance literature was that it was fun, that dipping into other historical realities and cultural perspectives broadens us in a way that just feels good, not unlike the way a big stretch in the morning feels good.  We learn more about our lives, our relationships, our problems, potential and limitations through reflecting on those of Gawain, Alysoun of Bath, Hamlet, and Faustus.  I wanted for my students to know themselves better, to know what strengths and special gifts they bring to the adventure of life, and to know more about what that adventure can consist of.

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a [hu]man can have no other vocation than to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him...

I glean how unprofessional, how unsophisticated all this sounds to established academia, and I could dress up these sentiments in academese, their own language, if I wanted to, but I’m not talking to them, I’m talking to you, the angelic Everyman.  You’re the ones I want to talk to, have always wanted to talk to, and I thought that in being in the classroom with you I had found my raison d’être, my vocation.  Here’s a picture I’ll always treasure...

Ha!  That was a fun class—Witches, Demons, and the Devil in the English Renaissance.  On the board behind us, it should say, “I know I’m not supposed to feel good about Satan,” a statement Janie Watkins made on the second night of class that thenceforth became our mantra and touchstone.  Why aren’t we supposed to feel good about Satan?  What if Satan just, um, makes us feel good?  How do we respond to those authoritative voices telling us that Satan isn’t good for us?  What’s their agenda?  What’s at stake?  What’s gained and lost, and by whom?  My students will recognize this kind of list of questions—I’m pretty adept at asking questions, and I attend with interest to a variety of potential answers, as people think through these things for themselves.  Listening to people, valuing them for who they are and what they’ve experienced, sharing stories and ideas and jokes and anxieties in our institutional cellula under flickering fluorescent lights as the night falls and the seasons shape-shift one into the next—it was a supreme act of love for me, not just a job or even a profession.  More than losing my marriage, my lifestyle, my self-image as a competent adult, losing this is shattering, the tumble that lands me on a lake of fire, broken, and angry.