Other Blogs Out There

It’s time to add some links to this blog, let us and our readers wander afield and discover new ways of thinking, seeing the world, considering what to do. I’ve added a few on the left – add some more — but especially want to highlight GirlGriot, another WordPress blogger and member of my writing group. I’ve just been catching up with her trip to Mexico to solidify her Spanish, but there are golden nuggets buried in the past few months, such as her warning to street harassers; some of her thoughts about teachingl and her rant about makeup for black skin.

Wondering about Morality in Politics and Life

Just came back from a pretty nice week in Fire Island with kids and grandchildren and extended family by marriage, but I won’t bore you with more vacation details. Yesterday when I returned I happened to read a blog post about the revelations of adultery by John Edwards, and it reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for a while. The blogger in question had a knee-jerk reaction to the news — isn’t it terrible, he isn’t what we thought he was, we can never trust him again, and so on.

Now no one is for adultery, at least when it breaks a vow of commitment, but the moral righteousness around this issue in politics drives me crazy. To be fair, adultery (especially my own) played a crucial part in my life — I’ve been hearing plenty about “what’s wrong with these men”, understandably so after Clinton and Spitzer and Edwards, but let me tell you, folks, I know some women who have had those powerful urges too, so powerful that a lot was put at risk. It didn’t feel much like the Spitzer or Clinton situation to me (I don’t know about Edwards): there was very deep and wrenching emotion involved. Nevertheless, it tends to be thrown into the same pot — it’s all the same to the moralists.

 I guess what gets my goat is that the most vocal people who condemn sexual “immorality” seem to me those who are cozy and have no idea what this sort of desire feels like, and since this is a safe bet, it’s easy to get up on your hind legs and bray. I first thought about this when I was moderating an online forum on D.H. Lawrence, who slept with (and eventually married) Frieda, a married woman when he met her. We were supposed to be discussing his fiction, but a couple of the men, as well as some women, were more interested in roundly condemning Lawrence for his immorality. The men were particularly on their high horse — they would never, ever do such a thing, and anyone who did was unforgivable. At one point I asked these two guys if they had ever had the desire to sleep with another woman, and they proudly answered no, never. Now of course I have no idea if this was the truth, but I can believe it, and rather than impressing me, their answer made me wonder how much of morality is simply judging other people by what feels good to you: in other words, if you have no desire to do it yourself, no one else should either.

In The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe says, ” You respectable ones, you stand there so calmly, without any sense of participation.” He also says, “We have the right to talk about a thing only when we can feel for it.” (By “talk about a thing” he means moral judgement).

Family Vacationing

I just came home from a week-long vacation on the Connecticut shore, a first for me — not only visiting that part of the state, but vacationing with all three of my children (at least since they were really children), and all three of my grandchildren, in one house — plus, for one evening,  my ex-husband and his wife, who took us all to dinner at a fancy restaurant on the harbor. It was an interesting experience, sometimes trying, but often wonderful, and always intense.

First, the annoyances: 

The mosquitos, which were so bad that we couldn’t sit on the deck and the children couldn’t play outside — disappointing because we had envisioned these as being some of the perks of renting a country house. Then my son’s flight back to Georgia was canceled because of storms, so after driving hours to Newark, he had to get to LaGuardia for a flight seven hours later, which was then delayed hours more. And on the last night, when the others had left and my daughter and I were alone in the house with my two young grandchildren, one of them, Madeline, slipped in the shower (I think she was dancing, and the floor had no mat), and split open a gaping wound under her chin.  My daughter had to make a quick decision whether to take her to an emergency room. It was a stressful judgement call, since we feared they would wait for a long time and it might be stitched unnecessarily. The child was understandably hysterical with fear. I was impressed with my daughter’s cool: she IM’d a friend of hers in another state whose husband is an emergency room doctor, and he recommended a butterfly bandage rather than the ER. She found an open pharmacy and got the right bandage, and the next day, when she took her child to her pediatrician in NYC, her doctor affirmed that she had done the right thing.

Then there was the good stuff:

Madeline, age eight, carrying her tiny cousin, age 14 months, and his learning her name, which came out “Maa”, calling out exuberantly whenever he saw her (he’s an exuberant baby by nature). All of us laughing at the antics of Baby Oscar, and our delight in his burgeoning vocabulary of new words and animal sounds. The children playing at the beach, where we stayed for five or six hours one day — Madeline quickly connected with new friends in the water (she’s the social child in her family) and Liam, just turned five, contentedly did all kinds of things with sand and water, so my daughter and I actually got a chance to talk, something we don’t often find time to do when the kids are there. After the beach, we went to a terrific cafe with tables right on the harbor and I ate a warm lobster roll and homemade cookies while the children admired a beautiful swan that hung around in the water near our table, probably hoping for some lobster roll or cookies.

My favorite routine was waking up when the little ones got up in the morning, feeding them breakfast while my daughter slept, then walking with them while they scootered the half mile to town. Got the New York Times in the market, and deposited them in the very friendly bookstore next to the market, where Madeline read to Liam and they browsed books for a half hour or so. Meanwhile I picked up coffee and a pastry from the neat little bakery right next door, and read the paper on a bench outside. Then I met them in the bookstore, which had a lovely children’s section, and bought them each a book of their choice, plus a few I picked out, like Shel Silverstein’s book of comic poetry, Where the Sidewalk Ends (I read it to them at bedtime, and it was a bigger hit than I’d anticipated). I spent a lot of money on new books, something I rarely do, but it was fun to see them so into reading, and it gives me special pleasure to read them books my own children loved. Though the two kids are competitive and fight quite a bit, these morning excursions to town were slow-paced, peaceful and harmonious. We left when we felt like it and came back when we were ready to. It made me realize how much we tend to rush the kids to go here and there, and do this and that, and how stressful that is for everyone.

My favorite moment of the trip was the last morning, when my daughter was busy packing up and I was sitting on the couch with the children. I said something like “We’ll be sleeping in our own beds tonight, if all goes well.” Madeline, who picks up on every nuance, immediately wanted to know why I had added “if all goes well.” I explained, laughing, that I say that kind of thing because my parents did, and it has to do with the superstition of “kayna-hura” (I’m spelling it as my mother pronounced it), the Yiddish Evil Eye. This led to a long discussion of what a superstition is, what the Evil Eye is, whether or not it’s true, and how people used to believe in superstitions of all kinds, like knocking on wood. Liam, who is a thoughtful child, asked me, “How do you know what people did in the olden days?”  I said that I study history, (which I then had to explain), thinking while I answered that I wish my students would ask such good questions.

And I did sleep in my own bed last night, and so did they, and though we were all exhausted, all went well.

Louise Bourgeois, continued

I haven’t been to the Guggenheim yet to see the exhibit, but I saw a documentary about her at the Film Forum. It’s titled Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine and will continue at the Film Forum through August 19, so go see it if you’re in New York.

The interviews with Bourgeois are mostly (apparently) from 1993, but there are shots of work she’s done since then. Her art, she says, all comes from emotion;  she also said about art and the objects that become art: they are problems, and “Once you find the solution to the problem, you can let go of the object.” And about the work that she created out of her emotional need, a friend said, “If she processed this as art, no one wasa going to throw it out.

The documentary is fascinating, watching Bourgeois describe how she approached certain works, yet at the moment her interviewer asks about some crucial aspect of the work, Bourgeois shrugs, walks away, says, “It’s obvious.” Well, often it’s not. Why, for example, do spiders remind her of her mother, and that’s in a good way? On the other hand, she explains the mistress matter-of-factly: her father had a mistress who lived with the family for several years, at first under the guise of being the children’s governess. And the tangerine? This was a strange, artistic thing her father did with the rind of a tangerine, which had the result of humiliating and embarrassing Bourgeois when she was a child. How could he do such a thing? We never know, but Bourgeois’s art is her attempt to get back at him? overcome him? surpass him?

Cooking in Bali

I’ve got another blog over at Redemma1991, and since I’ve already spent many hours learning how to put in pictures and do layout there, I decided not to put in many more hours learning how to do it here. So you will just have to click on that link to see the photos from the cooking classes C. and I took in Bali, as well as some recipes. (If I figure out how to do it here, and it’s easier, I’ll move it all over here.)

Philip Roth assignment

I am not a Philip Roth fan, but I recently read “I Married a Communist” — partly because the subject is similar to something I am writing myself, partly because my Significant Other has been reading a lot of Roth lately, and he wanted to discuss this one.

If it hadn’t been an assignment, I would never have finished reading the novel. First of all, it’s almost a classic example of “telling” not “showing” — most of the story is told in chapter-long monologues, as one character, Murray, is telling the narrator, Nathan, the life story of Murray’s brother, Ira (the Communist of the title), who happened to have been Nathan’s hero for a couple of years of Nathan’s adolescence. The long monologues were very annoying to read, and I had to force myself to get past the first chapter. However, I slogged through it, with the following payoff: the last three pages not only explained the reason for this particular structure but also contained one of the most beautiful thoughts about death that I have ever read.

After Murray finishes reciting his long tale about Ira (over six nights, thus six chapters), Nathan stares up at the night sky and muses on the magic of listening to the tales told over the radio late at night when he and his brother were children. (Aha, Roth is trying to recreate that feeling of listening to the radio in the dark through words printed on the page. Sorry, I would never have known that if he didn’t tell me on page 300 whatever.)

But Nathan’s next memory really touched my heart. His grandfather died when he was very young, and he couldn’t understand where his grandfather had gone. So his mother took him outside, showed him the stars, and said that his grandfather was now one of those stars in the sky. And as now old Nathan stares up at the stars, the book ends: “You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire set by no human hand. The stars are indispensable.”

This clicked with something I felt when I was 20. I was out on the lawn, lying on my back and looking into the deep black night sky, sparkling with stars. And I felt connected to the rest of the universe, to all those stars/suns out there, tiny insignificant little me, connected to those vast star/suns, with their own beings on planets like earth, and we were all part of some vast living cosmos that had existed long before I did and would exist long after I was gone.

It’s only a small step from that thought to the notion that we become stars, that we are all part of a vast universe that heeds our wishes, desires, needs not at all. We tell each other stories in the night to make meaning out of all the meaninglessness in the universe, and the universe will go on without us. I find this comforting. How about you?