My Mountain Man & Proust

I might be in love with this man who might be homeless. He was on the train today. Back when Pause Cafe was open, he used to stop in for the bathroom, which is why I think he might be homeless. He is also kind of dirty but this may be because he is a Mountain Man.

Mountain Man looks like a mountain. His long gray-streaked hair and beard cascade into his giant shoulders cloaked in flannels. Somehow, though, despite his Western ruggedness, he reminds me of some ancient king -- grizzled wisdom and large glassy eyes.


My vague and almost gut-reaction association reminded me of Swann in Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Proust often likens characters to figures in art -- a means of accessing both the person and the historical figure represented. I am not sure how exactly this "accessing" works. It is a kind of lie.

Swann, for example, begins to fall in love with Odette (even though he is not initially attracted to her & thinks she is rather stupid) after he likens her to Botticelli's rendering of Zephora.

This comparison seems to infuse Odette with all the painting's grace and beauty. It is a means for Swann to "understand" her -- or perhaps a better word is "possess" -- even as he makes her what she is not.

Proust can be depressing when he writes about desire. It may seem that the object of desire is never truly "real," so laden with associations. For when the object is seen in reality, the need to understand/possess vanishes.

At the same time, a peculiar and rich satisfaction comes out of associating real people with figures in art. I think it stems from nostalgia for a past that wasn't actually yours. Vague emotions attach themselves to ancient Greece, to the Renaissance, etc., and together they elevate the object of desire.

I agree with Proust to a certain extent, but I'm not depressed about this. When these associations attach themselves to people around us, it makes our experience of the world more complex and interesting. This is not to say that people as they "really are" are neither -- not at all -- but I like the idea of our surroundings being linked to the past, to art, to personal memory. I think desire, in this sense, may not give us a means of truly understanding another person, not in & of itself. But it does create an interesting triad between oneself, the object of desire, and the artwork, connected by different threads of longing.

Tutoring Update: In Which Things Get Really Real

Heading over to Laith and Aseel's apartment in a couple of hours, and I have to admit, part of me dreads it. As much as I care about their family, and about the subject matter they're learning, my visits are becoming increasingly emotionally difficult.

The way the refugee process works - at least, through World Relief, the organization that's been helping them - is that their family receives money for their first three months in the U.S. After that, they're on their own. World Relief helped Laith find a job, but the results are far less than what they'd hoped for.

The job is in a factory near O'Hare airport. From what I've gathered, Laith packages vegetables and food products for four hours a day - not even a full-time job. Half his day is spent commuting: A trip that would take half an hour by car turns into a 2.5-hour journey by public transport, two buses and a train. He leaves around 5 a.m. and is home by 3.

Last week when I arrived at 3:30, Laith was too tired for any lesson. I talked with Aseel, who was very frustrated - "This is not a good job," she kept repeating while the three children ran around screaming, more feral than usual. So we didn't get much done.

So what I'm concerned about, going forward, is how to achieve these things:
- how to have a productive session when Laith is burnt out from work
- how to work with information toward an actual goal - not just various rules of language, but how they can actually be used
- how to wade through my own discomfort about their situation, keeping a motivated spirit

Ok, let's do it.

Alphabets, goddesses, faulty logic & essentialism

The root of patriarchy is in reading, suggests Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The conflict between word and image. Shlain, a brain surgeon, posits that alphabetic literacy fundamentally rewires the brain. This form of learning privileges the brain’s left hemisphere – center of linear, abstract thinking which Shlain codes “masculine” – over the holistic, image-based, and “feminine” right hemisphere. As a result, cultures new to literacy begin subjugating women.

An enticing premise for a more complicated argument. Unfortunately, Shlain seems to assume that writing a book for popular consumption means ironing out nuance and contradiction – even as he paints his theory in broad strokes across human history in its entirety.

Full disclosure: I get very easily annoyed with biological and evolutionary explanations of gender and sexuality. I think they are often reductive, culturally biased, and tangled in circular reasoning. For example, Shlain’s coding of the right and left hemispheres. He acknowledges that, of course, both men and women draw on both sides – he uses “masculine” and “feminine” in the symbolic sense. But where do these signifiers come from?

The beginning of culture is a blindspot where many arguments try to reach and fail. Shlain’s is no exception. For the origin of definitions for “masculine”/“feminine,” he relies on evolution – which means his book begins with imagined scenes of cavemen and -women scrounging for berries and hunting saber-toothed critters. To survive, early ancestors had to prize the image, holistically incorporating everything going on in their fields of vision (although perhaps sound and oral communication were just as important?).

How then does image-based thinking get relegated to the feminine sphere in terms of culture, and then devalued? And who is responsible? Shlain ascribes the blame to literacy, but leaves muddled the details of this transition from goddess-worshippers to wife-oppressors. Many second-wave feminists also imagined matriarchal societies and pastorals of sisterhood – they also had little evidence for how ubiquitous these pasts supposedly were. In each new, cursory, and varied example, Shlain applies his original neurological, which never becomes more complicated even as he wades through often-conflicting information.

The problem with the words “masculine” and “feminine” is that they can mean anything, because they have meant everything. It depends on where you stand in time, which way you point your face. Shlain’s main argument relegates logic, breaking down information into smaller pieces, to the masculine. But the cultures he uses as examples, from the Greeks to the Mesopotamians to medieval Europe, attached their own values to the sacrosanct male sphere. How can just one reason, literacy, be enough to explain the different forms of oppression toward different women?

My critique is not new. I have to assume that Shlain has heard of post-structuralism – after all, he repeatedly claims that he knows history is more complicated, he just doesn’t have time to explain it all.

His treatment of homosexuality is particularly evocative of this reeeeeally annoying discursive tendency: applying essentialist signifiers to pretty much everything and ironing out contradictions. Interestingly, in the “Sappho/Ganymede” chapter, he tacitly collapses male-male sexual relations with misogyny. And he runs into another blindspot: Where does homosexuality come from?

Discussing homosexuality among Greek men, he writes, “Although the causes of homosexuality remain unknown, increasingly modern scientists consider sexual preferences to be based on genetic predispositions. Whatever are its causes, it is most unusual that the Greeks went against the evolutionary grain – especially when their predilection would have such debilitating consequences for their continuity” (133).

I’m sorry, this is just … so stupid. Shlain writes as if the ancient world was just a giant playscape of homolove and rainbows, as if “gay” relationships looked the same as modern same-sex couples, as if “gay” even existed as a concept of identity.

FYI, these male-male couples were typically composed of an older, more powerful man and a youth. And Shlain thankfully recognizes, at least, that these men still married and sired children (so, no actual threat “for their continuity”) – but these proto-queers’ wives “had to live with the unsettling knowledge that they were not their husband’s only choice. A woman knows in her bones how to compete with another woman for a man’s affection, but she will become demoralized if she must also compete with men” (134). Is this supposed to be a girl power moment?

These passages exemplify how so many people collapse gender and sexual object choice. Let’s think of some complicating factors. The younger, less powerful partner in Greek male love was often praised for his beauty. Love poems to the youth sound like more modern poems to women. What happens to the word “feminine” when what we think of as feminine – softness, beauty, grace – are applied to a male figure? Why were these values prized while Greek wives were still locked away, leading quiet lives at their looms?

One thing is certain: Women have faced subjugation, scorn and shame over millennia, over cultures, in many different ways. But the differences are important. Failure to recognize them have long divided feminists – arguments over use of “we,” over the white, Western slant to what patriarchy looks like and what feminism should look like.

It’s fascinating how words change us. But words themselves change. When we ask questions of femininity/masculinity, the answers are often unsatisfying, revealing more and more contradictions. This suggests constrained thinking – not just on Shlain’s part, but also the poverty of our terms about gender and sexuality. “Masculine” and “feminine” sag with the weight of signifiers. A sharper interrogation, in paring away their layers of meaning, finds an absence of any singular truth.

Slime!: The Stickiness of Eros / Vagina as Metaphor

“It was horrible to have her there embracing his knees. It was horrible. He revolted from it, violently. And yet—and yet—he had not the power to break away. […] Then, as it were suddenly, he smelt the horrid stagnant smell of that water. And at the same moment she drew away from him and looked at him. Her eyes were wistful and unfathomable. He was afraid of them, and he fell to kissing her, not knowing what he was doing. He wanted her eyes not to have that terrible, wistful, unfathomable look.”

The dead lake’s reek has stuck with me ever since I read D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter.” The passage above comes after a doctor rescues a woman from drowning herself. When she comes to, wrapped in blankets in his home, she suddenly declares love. In a mixture of fear, compulsion, and revulsion, the doctor acquiesces into her mire: He feels that he must love her.

I am interested in what makes desire horrifying. Here, so drawn in by the woman’s odor, I want to ask: Could we interpret that thick, sultry rottenness as a component of eros?

From what I’ve read of Lawrence, particularly Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he often associates passionate sex with the natural world. (Of course, what is presumed “natural” and healthy in Lawrence is rigidly heterosexual. His attitudes on gender are similarly essentialist; the gamekeeper Mellors refers to Lady Chatterley, affectionately, as a “piece ‘a cunt,” the supposed true source of her womanhood.)

And yet here, in “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” what is natural – the lake – isn’t invigorating or inspiring: It’s gross and sucks you in and down, down into murky helpless depths.

It’s no accident, I think, that a specifically female character becomes the vessel for such power and putridity. Perhaps it’s not just sexuality in general here: Could we think of the dead lake as a kind of signifier for … a slimy vagina?!

Don’t worry. I know that literature isn’t reducible to a simple system of codes that, once memorized, will allow texts’ “real” meanings to curl goldenly open. What I like about “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter” is its mystery. I’ve just been thinking a lot about slime. And the vagina. Particularly, slimy vaginas as metaphor, as metonym.

In literature and philosophy, slime has represented the vagina, which in itself becomes a morass of meaning pertaining to woman’s sexuality. At best, the implied meaning is just kind of lame: a lack, a cold womb of nothingness waiting to be penetrated. More interesting is the vagina (/female sexuality) as a festering thing: as if it were not the origin of life, but a grave.

Let’s look at one of my favorite sections of Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. She describes the vagina as “concealed, mucous, and humid … Man ‘gets stiff,’ but woman ‘gets wet’ … If the body leaks – as an ancient wall or a dead body may leak – it seems to liquefy rather than to eject fluid; a horrid decomposition.”

Here, the smell and materiality of woman is not only swampy, but as rotten as a dead body. There’s more: “Feminine sex desire is the soft throbbing of a mollusk. … [M]an dives upon his prey like the eagle and the hawk; woman lies in wait like the carnivorous plant, the bog, in which insects and children are swallowed up.”

Wow. Even insects and children will not be spared. “She is absorption, suction, humus, pitch and glue, a passive influx, insinuating and viscous.”

Beauvoir was a feminist. But she was also an existentialist. In The Second Sex, she argues that women can achieve a liberated selfhood in the state of pour-soi, “for itself”: a state defined by strength and solidity of borders, impenetrable. Its converse is en-soi, “in itself”: described in some instances as (you guessed it) slime: a muck of weak passivity, sticking with its own immanence.

Women can transcend this slimy state, Beauvoir writes. But her language around en-soi collapses with that of woman’s sexuality and “slimeginas.” How can woman be a free agent, as Beauvoir defines it, if her very body is slime?

To avoid beating “slime” into the ground (a slippery task indeed!), I’ll switch gears for a moment. What is the relationship between slime-like viscous matter, self, and eros?

Jean-Paul Sartre (Beauvoir’s longtime partner in lovin’ and philosophizin’) had this to say about viscosity: When sticking a hand into honey, “Long columns falling off my fingers suggest my own substance flowing into the pool of stickiness. Plunging into water gives a different impression; I remain a solid. But to touch stickiness is to risk diluting myself into viscosity.”

Viscous matter is neither solid nor liquid, near impossible to classify, to hold. Not only is it outside our control, slipping out of grip, it can make us lose control – of our boundaries, slipping and sticking in the matter – and of our selves.

I encountered Sartre’s example in one of my favorite books, Eros the Bittersweet by poet and classicist Anne Carson. In her exploration of the alphabet’s origins and the first written poetry, she discusses the Greeks’ metaphors of dissolution – fear for the self dissolving (into the beloved) through erotic love.

One “melted” by Eros (the “melter of limbs,” according to some poets) suffers a loss of control, feels oneself sliding into desire's object. “To control the boundaries is to possess oneself,” Carson writes. “When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat.”

Carson writes of a desire unattached to specific gender markers. But in much of the literature and philosophy I’ve encountered that deals with fear of losing control, the perspective seems decidedly masculine. By this I mean, it codes an idealized concrete self with supposedly masculine values: strength, solidity, impenetrability, wholeness. In contrast, it positions the body of woman/feminine sexuality as a total mess, uncontrollable and uncontrolled. She is all seepage: Blood, wetness, and copious feelings leaking out. Her rages, her tears and hysterics. And then her sexuality – The seductress’ specter is not only uncontrolled, but suffers men to lose control: ensnared in her bog, sticking to her essence, that alarming dissolution of self. As in “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” it is a dissolution partially enjoyed and finally accepted, but not without horror and disgust.

I’ve made a lot of leaps here. I should clarify that when I talk about the vagina as metonym for woman’s sexuality, I am speaking only to cultural interpretations of both. By no means do I think these words (“vagina,” “sexuality,” “woman”) are easily reducible to simple definitions or essentially, naturally aligned. But in conflating language around the vagina (Beauvoir’s throbbing mollusk, seeping corpse, etc.) with language suggestive of woman’s sexuality and not explicitly the vag (Lawrence’s story, or the Greek poets Carson cites), do I again equate the two?

I have to be careful about these distinctions as I continue my research. But I have to say, I am really excited – I do believe that slime is a potent site for further inquiry – particularly in regards to control/loss of control. (Oh, and btw, if anyone has any suggestions for related reading, please share!)

If I can include a small “rah rah womyn!!!” bit of closure, I’d like to quote my friend Penny, who writes the best emails (in verse!). Fear of women, she writes, comes from fear of "the unbridled wildness of women's nature -

because they are the life-givers,
the keepers of the mystery --
and because they have the capacity, unlike the masculine,
for such unfettered, unbridled, uncontrollable, and unlimited JOY
of the life-force."

ESL post #1: Humiliating myself, as usual, in good ways

Learning a language is infantilizing. It forces grown brains to bend back to their earliest education, when letters themselves signified only scratches, yielding no information. And again you begin in the most stuttering steps, in monosyllables, half-sentences. What I think I will find in tutoring ESL is that teaching a language may be almost as undignified and disorienting.

These past few weeks I’ve worked with Laith and Aseel, an Iraqi couple with three small doe-eyed moppet-children. They are easy to like: motivated and excited, and they welcome me into their home each Friday with much kindness. Actually helping them learn won’t be as easy, though. Aseel, the mother, is a level above Laith in their classes through World Relief, a refugee organization. She often translates for him, which can smooth out miscommunications but also makes him impatient – especially when her tone of voice and rolled eyes seem to say, “Duh.”

I enjoy talking with Aseel – she understands much of what I say, and she seems to have a good edge to her humor – and I wish I could help Laith improve faster. He is always impatient. Questions burst out of his mouth in garbled syntax. Much of this process, I think, will require us all to set some dignity aside. I have already paraded myself around the room yelling, “I am going to the bus! I am going to the bus! [then sitting:] I am on the bus,” etc. But they are good-natured and tolerant, luckily.

I am still finding my footing in terms of planning lessons, so thus far we’ve spent most of our time attempting conversation. They have a lot of questions. Sometimes my answers startle them. When they discovered that I don’t live with my family but am also unmarried and living with a man, there was something of a stir. I tried to explain that my roommate is a friend, but their expressions (Laith’s incredulous, Aseel’s a knowing smirk) indicated they thought the lady doth protest too much.

There is also the topic of religion: They belong to a persecuted group in Iraq, the reason for their refugee status. I’m afraid I don’t remember its name, and my grasp of Arabic is so poor, but I want to hear more about it. Again there was wide-eyed disbelief after they asked me about my religion: A Christian mother, a Jewish father, and as for myself, nothing – What? It felt too insensitive, somehow, to even try to explain atheism to people who have had to flee everything they know because of their religious beliefs. (Of course, without religion there wouldn’t be religious oppression, but sort of an irrelevant point under the circumstances.)

I’ll be writing more as the lessons go on. If I feel something like an awkward child in these first weeks, then perhaps like a child beginning school I will also be amazed as a new area of knowledge, once opaque, becomes open to me.

"Why do you tear me?": Bleeding, the Amish, & a welcome

Do you feel frumpy and culturally irrelevant? Dumped carelessly into the wrong time and place? Welcome, friend. Put on your bonnet and enjoy my budding blog.

O allknowing wikipedia, shed some light: "A bluestocking is an educated, intellectual woman. Such women are stereotyped as being frumpy and the reference to blue stockings refers to the time when woolen worsted stockings were informal dress, as compared with formal, fashionable black silk stockings."

In the spirit of our frumpy foremothers, this blog will be a space about books, feminism, adventures in ESL tutoring, and so on.

Although I'm not about to hitch my wagons toward Amish country, I am excited about my current situation: Lots of alone time in my apartment, sans internet or TV or really any connection to anything going on = So much reading time. This lifestyle can result in an explosion of logorrhea at my dear roommate whenever he comes home. Hence: Internet, you are now trash bin of brain.

Past blogs of mine, from high school (& uh, into college...) could devolve into that particular realm of Dante's hell, the one of suicides locked in trees. The only way they could speak was through bleeding, when their bark was torn. While I promise not to "bleed" my overabundance of feelings into this space (e.g. "Why won't ___ return my texts?!?!??!!"), I also think blogs can appropriately & intelligently deal with the personal without making you squirmy. (I recommend: http://www.extraneousness.blogspot.com)

Please feel free to use the comments board on posts. And again, welcome!