On My Mind

As I wrote last week, I did finally read that article in New York magazine about parenting and happiness. I was curious whether or not it addresses the extraordinary lack of support afforded to parents in the United States. As it turns out, it does, and it doesn't. Author Jennifer Senior cites a study by sociology professor Hans-Peter Kohler, who found that "countries with stronger welfare systems produce more children—and happier parents," but does not explore just how bad we have it here. Remember, only four nations in the world provide no paid leave for new mothers: Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, Liberia, and the U.S. Furthermore, as is pointed out in a magnificent post at PhD in Parenting on this and related articles, we're all out here on our own, with no village to help us out. It's no wonder we're all so stressed out.

Also, my initial argument against the quotation I cited earlier still holds. The article distinguishes between in-the-moment happiness and the happiness gleaned from working toward a greater purpose and suggests that in parenting, one may be sacrificing much of the former type of happiness in favor of the latter. OK, maybe; but on the other hand, unhappiness does not inhere to such activities as washing dishes and doing the laundry (both of which I should confess Beckett mostly does around here), or changing diapers (a shared duty), or comforting a sick child (usually my gig), or anything else. One can—and I often do—experience in-the-moment happiness doing any of these things.

However. As Katrina Alcorn found in her "Who clips the nails?" survey, even in homes where both parents do paid work, Mom is still the one doing most of these things. Unhappiness may not inhere in these activities, but they do constitute a burden. No wonder mothers tend to report less happiness than fathers.

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At ...infinitely learning..., a recent post titled "Rekindling My Affair with Books" got me thinking about reading, specifically how I don't do much of it anymore. Poetry, yes; nonfiction, haphazardly; blogs, obviously; but fiction, hardly at all. And it's not just because I don't have the time for fiction, as I once claimed. The very idea of entering a fictional world and sticking with it through the course of a novel actually exhausts me these days. "Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality," writes T. S. Eliot in "Burnt Norton." Probably so, but these days I find myself not wanting to escape reality, but rather seeking to connect to it more deeply. Where else is my life but right here, in this moment?

The Yellow Light Shining

I sometimes find myself wondering, What if I had not married? What if I had no Critter? My mind then turns to lines from one of Linda Gregg's poems, "Staying After":

Women have houses now, and children.
I live alone in a kind of luxury.
I wake when I feel like it,
read what Rilke wrote to Tsvetaeva.

How I sometimes long for that luxury: a large quiet space for my thoughts, for language, for poetry. While fetching a washcloth for the Critter's face one morning, I marveled at how busy I once thought I was. These days, I am lucky to jot a line or two in my journal, lucky to get to bed before midnight. And far too often my mind is like a puddle and my energy like dead leaves scattered and turning to mud in the puddle. Writes Gregg,

... And even now
I love the yellow light shining
down on the dirty brick wall.

Yes! That's what I want: not to look at the world as though through a muddy puddle, but rather to see the yellow light shining!

But. When I am tempted to wish that my life were otherwise, it is because I have forgotten who I really am. The truth is that in the long years before I met my love, I spent far too many hours wallowing in the muddy puddle of depressed self-pity. And the truth is that I once thought I was busy because I really was too, too busy at a job I did not much like. And the truth is that with or without a large, quiet space for my thoughts &etc., I've actually written my best poetry since shortly after I became pregnant. The yellow light is in fact shining all around me: on the sweaty, napping baby; on the piles of dirty laundry; on the unmade bed.

Whan That Aprille with His Shoures Soote ...

More things we like

I have tended to prefer May, the month of my birth, for its full, lush green. But in recent years I have begun to prefer April and its new green, a pale haze. And now—already!—the daffodils I waited through March to see are drying up, the petals of the magnolia trees are blowing away, and the forsythia have given up their gold.

As a work-from-home mommy, I have no time for novels. And so I nourish myself with poetry alone. Though I have been reading the work of other writers (Meghan O'Rourke's debut collection and, off and on since the Critter was born, Jane Kenyon), lately I find my mind turning to Robert Frost. Everyone knows about the road that made all the difference, I think; the poem unfortunately seems to have been sentimentalized, however, though its narrator seems to me more rueful than celebratory. Indeed, I love Robert Frost for his lack of sentiment, which is grounded in his being versed in country things. He knows that nature is indifferent to human fate, and that though it may be miles away, we are always headed toward winter. And even when he celebrates the new green of April, he focuses on its brevity.

At Home, But Unhappy

Suddenly I've got more work than I know how to get done (and no babysitter). One current project is to write a handful of passages, items, and lessons for a test preparation book for first graders. Yes, indeed: for first graders. Debates about No Child Left Behind and high-stakes testing aside, I can tell you this much: spending time on the lessons in such a book might help a child improve his or her test scores, but it is unlikely to stir any excitement about reading. Certainly not the wide-eyed, bobble-headed excitement that I see in our four-month-old Critter's face when I turn the pages of The Very Hungry Caterpillar for him.

Ah, school. What else is it for but to crush your spirit? I do my work, the Critter on my lap, and consider these sentences:

Education on Freud's view is precisely the attempt to make children (and adults) forget about what most interests them. Our unique attachments to the world are what education is designed to erase, and it is those unique attachments that make knowledge real for us, as opposed to mere rote exercise.

I quote from an essay in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy, "'My God, It's Like a Greek Tragedy': Willow Rosenberg and Human Irrationality," about Willow's sixth season–concluding attempt to bring about the end of the world. It was while attending the International Reading Association's 2006 Annual Convention (about which I remember little other than the ugly carpeting extending toward all horizons of the massive McCormick Place, Chicago's convention center) that I read this essay, and, gazing at all that carpeting, asked myself, What have I been doing with my life?

Like Willow, I was good at school. Success at school involved a paradox, however: I was at home in the classroom—particularly the English classroom, where poetry, novels, and stories were the subject—but unhappy. There was always too much to do, and I felt I was smothering something else in myself in order to measure up to what seemed to be expected of me. And so I mastered the invisible curriculum, learning to put aside my own desires in order to accomplish what others expected of me.

Who were those demanding others? Parents? Grandparents? Teachers? Though I possessed an abundance of wild energy, like many children, I wished to please. So now that I have my own wild little Critter, I see just how important it is for us—parents, grandparents, teachers—to carefully consider what it is that we expect of our little ones—and whom (or what) those expectations really serve. And what worries me most as I write and edit the various lessons, teacher editions, and tests from which I make my living (what, indeed, am I doing with my life?) is that I consider very little of it good enough for my boy.

Abject Things, Part 2

And now, a confession. In truth, my stated project of "considering the relationship between works of imagination and reality, specifically what literature has to say, if anything, about how we should live" may be entirely a defensive act. I love to read, and I want to believe that reading is good. True, perhaps the pleasure of reading could in itself be an argument in favor of reading, except that there are those (the author of this recent book, for example) who would argue that reading does harm to the reader. Also, reading has often been presented as a form of escapism, while as a student of Zen I am committed to living in accord with reality, insofar as I am able to perceive it.

Clearly, given his desire to incorporate "abject moments and moments of spillage" in his work, Aleksandar Hemon is not interested in literature as a vehicle for escapism. And, with his vivid perception and idiosyncratic language, his voice seduces me, and I am able to tolerate stories about experiences that in reality are intolerable either to live or to consider. In our culture, we are encouraged to turn inward and tend to our own little gardens, investing our best energy in ensuring that we look and feel good and that our homes are beautiful and comfortably arranged. Such stories as Hemon's, by calling attention to the suffering of others, puncture the fantasy that by tending to my garden I can shelter myself from the possibility of difficulties or sorrow.

So, given that I cannot actually wish away the abject things of the world, what do I do about my knowledge of the suffering of others? It may be that the knowledge in itself is transformative. Since reading Reading Lolita in Tehran, for example, I've been interested in the connection between reading fiction and empathy, an idea with a history longer than I had realized. In fact, it has even been argued that "novels spread human rights and discourage torture."

All Abject Things in the World

To say that I've gone back to work would be misleading for two reasons. One, as a freelancer I generally, though not always, work from home, so I haven't actually gone anywhere. Two, I did some paid work in October, which probably wasn't a great idea (the Critter was born mid-September), but it turns out we do need the money I earned then. Anyway. I'm working again—very, very part time—and trying to figure out how to be a work-from-home mom without neglecting the Critter, my clients, or myself. I've hired no child care (yet?), so it's been challenging, but not too, too bad. However, as you may have noticed, I haven't been able to write any new posts, including one I had planned to post on Thanksgiving. Also, I haven't been reading much these days.

But I have been reading some. I'm a student at the Writers Studio, so in the weeks since the Critter was born I've been doing my best to keep up with the Craft Class. One recent assignment, The Question of Bruno, by Aleksandar Hemon, has disturbed my peace.

Hemon grew up in Sarajevo, and in his inventive stories, Eastern European history, family history, and personal history are inalienably entwined. In vivid, idiosyncratic language, the stories portray, among other things, life in Stalin's camps, the siege of Sarajevo, and the isolation of a Bosnian immigrant in Chicago. "Don't torture the boy with these stories. He won't be able to sleep ever again," says the mother of the nine-year-old narrator in one story. "No, let him hear, he should know," replies the narrator's Uncle Julius. Perhaps, indeed, I too should know ... but I certainly do not want to know about children sent to Stalin's camps for the mere crime of truancy, for example. I do not want to know about Sniper Alley in Sarajevo, or the body left rotting in a bedroom because it is too dangerous to take it outside for a proper burial.

In an interview, Hemon has spoken against the tendency toward the "purification of life, including your own body" in both memory and fiction. "It becomes this clean, controllable object," he says. "All abject things about it, and by extension all abject things in the world, are presumably not supposed to be there. But if you want to remember the world, it's hard to do it without abject things."

I admit my guilt! I most certainly wish away the abject things of the world, especially from human nature! But wishing things away, of course, does not make them go away....

Looking Back

To begin my consideration of what literature has to say about how we should live, I look back to an essay I wrote three years ago as my first—and last—column on contemporary literature for a now-defunct Web site. Girl in Landscape is one of my favorite novels (the other two: The Crying of Lot 49 and Persuasion), and in this essay I sort out why this novel matters so much to me.

The essay now raises some questions. Why the emphasis on emotional reality? Is it accurate to equate what Stephen Dobyns calls “the writer’s relation to the world” with what I call emotional reality? What other than one’s emotional reality constitutes one’s relation to the world (ideas about the world, for example)? Finally, what about that concluding reference to writing about myself? I don’t believe that my writing is an act of either onanism or narcissism, but why should anyone else care about what I might discover about myself through reading or writing?

Questions to consider in future … but for now, some notes on what’s changed in the three years since I wrote the essay: I now live in Victorian Flatbush, aka Ditmas Park, no longer just down the slope from the Central Library; Jonathan Lethem has written a seventh novel (more conventional and so less exciting to me than the others); and my then-fiancé is now my husband.

I’m Not Afraid of Aliens, and Neither is Jonathan Lethem

Five years ago, when I lived in the Bronx, I regularly wandered up to 231st Street to browse through the shelves of the Kingsbridge branch of the New York Public Library. I chose Girl in Landscape on the strength of its title. I had read another novel by its author, Jonathan Lethem, the previous summer. As She Climbed Across the Table was okay, interesting—I don’t recall all that much about it anymore—but through the snowy weekend that concluded 2000, I did not put down Girl in Landscape until I finished it. How could he possibly understand? I marveled, wondering how a male adult could so successfully evoke the raw, bewildered rage of 13-year-old Pella Marsh, taken by her uncomprehending father after the death of her mother to live on another planet.

I live in Brooklyn now, just down the slope from the Central Library, where half of Lethem’s novels are shelved with science fiction and half are shelved with general fiction. I’ve read all six novels, but so far I’ve read only Girl in Landscape more than once (three times). In each of his two most recent novels, Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, Lethem has drawn closer to home—or closer to reality, if you prefer to call it that. The most recent, Fortress of Solitude, is also the most autobiographical; its protagonist, Dylan Ebdus, grows up in 1970s Boerum Hill, the same Brooklyn neighborhood where Lethem lived in the ’70s.

In his sixth novel, Lethem arrives where many novelists begin: with their own stories. To get there, he first had to go through what he has referred to as his “clumsy attempts to work out his surrealist impulses in the despised medium of science fiction.” Although others of his novels are categorized as science fiction, Girl in Landscape specifically comes to mind in relation to this quotation, because of its origin in an essay titled “Defending The Searchers,” in which Lethem never mentions Girl in Landscape by name but does refer to it a couple times obliquely as “a novel I’d predetermined should be influenced by The Searchers.” Most likely biased by my own experiences of loss, I cannot see whatever clumsiness there may be to Girl in Landscape; I see only the emotional truths of its metaphors. When your mother dies, it is because the entire Earth is in a poisoned ruin. Life after your mother’s death is in exile on another planet. The father who remains is a politician who lost the election and is left with only empty words. Growing up is the guilty exploration of an alien landscape. Even the vastness of these planet-sized metaphors itself conveys their emotional truth: to lose a parent is to lose an entire world; to grow up is to discover a new one.

Writes Stephen Dobyns in Best Words, Best Order, “I believe that a poem doesn’t try to present reality but presents a metaphor that represents some aspect of the writer’s relation to the world: a metaphor that can be potentially re-experienced and become meaningful to the reader.” As Lethem himself has stated, the most salient aspect of his relation to the world is the loss of his mother to a brain tumor when he was only 14 years old (and she only 36). A writer of novels rather than of poems, he finds in science fiction both an array of metaphors to evoke emotional truths and a framework that “explains” these metaphors as actual events.

The logic of metaphor, of surrealism, of dreams, is not solely literary. It is fundamental: we are always transferring our emotions to other, safer objects. Just a few Fridays ago, there I was: in a blind rage at the Red Sox’ loss to the Yankees, at the drunken Mets fan who insulted my fiancé at our favorite bar, at my fiancé for his complaints about my inane and repetitive mockery of Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez. In my rage at the game, the Mets fan, my fiancé, I finally let go—and let myself feel my rage and terror over the mammogram I had two days earlier. Six times the technician screwed one of my breasts into a machine that did not give; when I thought I could not possibly hurt more, she screwed me in more tightly. Six times she said, “STOP breathing.” Then I returned to wait in a room with a dozen other smocked women for the possibility that the doctor might call me in to tell me that I had the same cancer that killed my mother ten years ago. The doctor did not call me in; eventually, they let me go, then sent a letter to say that all is well, at least for now. How much safer it was to feel my rage over a baseball game, two days afterwards, in my own bed, in my fiancé’s arms.

And so in Girl in Landscape, Jonathan Lethem channels his grief over his mother’s death through an obsession with The Searchers. By casting his grief in the surreal terms of science fiction, by channeling it through the John Ford western, he gains the safe distance he needs from it, paradoxically, in order to write about it. Then, in subsequent novels, he can successfully take on his material in a less and less oblique manner—as he does in Motherless Brooklyn and in The Fortress of Solitude. And as for me, I chose to write my first column on my favorite book by my favorite contemporary author in the hopes of simultaneously discovering and revealing what I value most as a reader. I find (today? for now?) that what matters most is the evocation of emotional truth: a good book makes my own emotional reality—or, to put it in Dobyns’s terms, my own relationship to the world—available to me. Thus, I also find that in writing about a good book, I write about myself. When I first read Girl in Landscape, Pella Marsh reminded me of my youngest sister. Now when I read it, I see how much she, in her rage, is like me.