Yule Heibel's Post Studio © 2003-2010

Essence not desired

Near the beginning, as an opening to Chapter 2 of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami writes,

Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?

We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close are we able to come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

It’s unnerving me a bit to realise that I have never desired “perfect understanding” of another person, nor considered it desirable to strive for closeness to another’s “essence.” It’s discombobulating me to realise that there are people who want these effects. Am I too casual in thinking that we’re all changing constantly, that our “essence” is a condition of our relationship to other people and things and events and social structures, and that it’s therefore pointless to seek perfect understanding or essence? Is it a mark of insanity? Shallowness? Comfort? Alienation? Or is it a guy-girl thing, viz. that guys keep believing in some essential beingness? I don’t mind that my children keep changing on me. This is ok, it’s their right. I couldn’t imagine fixing them, and part of my love for them is expressed through the constant dance I have to execute to keep up with their changing coordinates. And vice versa. It’s a form of movement that keeps our lives lively, that keeps us literally on our toes, and young. If I’m really lucky, I sometimes forget how old I am because I have to move.

I recently watched the movie Das Boot, which ends in a bloodbath whose context is quite ironic: after months of escaping dangers at sea, after surviving a disabling sinking, the crew of the submarine, along with various other marines and dignitaries, are mowed down on land in an air attack. The young hero — a journalist — had cried at one point that he wanted, just once, to feel “real” life in its fullness, without the shielding hand of a nurturing mother, without a gentle maiden blurring its outline for him, diluting its essence, or muffling its sound. And then, physically ricocheting through the carnage at the film’s end, he realises that his quest for reality and the reality itself have merged and simultaneously exposed themselves as a materiality (death, mayhem) that never ever will alchemically transmute or transfigure into some “real” or heroic “essence” which the women supposedly were preventing him from accessing. The quest for a higher essentiality was all in his head, and projecting its inaccessibility (or its accessibility) unto women was a self-deluding ruse.

Wars have been fought with this quest as a subtext. I’ve heard that in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle there is a flaying, presumably another quest to reach into the soul. Pain, torture: I suppose that presents a baseline for “essence”-quests, but for anyone who has survived it, we know it ends with just another air attack, from the head this time, with shortcircuits and fainting. Not more life, just less. The other Murakami books I’ve read were full of relationships that kept the stories’ balls in the air, countering or questioning essential conclusions, and I’ll read on in this one. But if it gets too essential, I might not make it through the whole book….

Monia Mazigh

In case you missed this when it came out, on the 23rd The Toronto Star had a wonderful tribute by journalist Haroon Siddiqui to a remarkable woman: Monia Mazigh, who fought for her husband Maher Arar‘s human rights while he was held (and was being tortured) in a Syrian jail after the Americans inexplicably deported this Canadian citizen to Syria. Dr. Mazigh, who holds a PhD in financial economics from McGill University, is currently a stay-at-home mother, which didn’t stop her from raising a ruckus to get her husband released. At a Toronto mosque, a volunteer imam told the congregation that Mazigh “had turned public perception of a Muslim woman on its head.” Mazigh responded by saying that she hoped she had used her public role well, and she urged Muslim men to “encourage their wives and daughters to raise their voices, and be outspoken.” Hear hear.

Scylla and a fighting chance

Yesterday I bumped into an old friend with whom I’d shared an apartment in Montreal many years ago. He has many, many ideas, many really good ideas, too. I suspect that he sometimes reads my blog, ’cause he knew I’d mentioned his idea about the sad actors here. I asked him about difference, and how he deals with the requirements of differentiating, because, you see, he has intimate experience with mental illnesses, with being institutionalised, with battling every single day against the suck and pull of the whirlpool pulling him under. He told me that once, for a long many years, there was a man (let’s say not him, let’s say a stand-in) who was involved with a woman who also was right off-centre, and that this man couldn’t tell anything apart anymore because he and the woman were relying on being codependent on each other. He needed her to be a mess so he could be a mess, and he needed to be a mess because she was a mess. That was the story, to an extent. But if codependency is a danger, part of a whirlpool sucking you under, there are other dangers at hand: the rocks upon which you can smash your head…. or kick against, as the case may be. (This is of course ancient Greek history: Scylla and Charybdis, a favourite trope of Adorno & Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, embody this idea.) Of the two, I prefer Scylla, even though she is just as dangerous as Charybdis. But she’s more anger-directed, more masculine, which is how I’ve behaved to stave off Charybdis’s lure. My weakness is getting hung up on the overt, covert, lurking, advancing, stupid, clever aggressiveness of the culture, not on the sad pulls sucking at my heels as I walk through the world. (I have an engraving of Scylla — the one here, by John Flaxman, hanging in my dining room. Scylla is the one pictured here: rocky, angry; Charybdis, not pictured, is the sucky, pull-you-under one. Click on the image for a better view on another page.)

As we talked about this and that — success, work, failure, being extinguished — I mentioned Patricia Barber in passing, whose work he didn’t know. So, just in case he visits this blog again, here are the lyrics for “A Touch of Trash (Homage to Beauty)”, Barber’s brilliant dissection of modern success, the kind that has everyone wondering who is really crazy here:

the perfect shade of lipstick
a red that belies
insouciance
carefully weaved into a style
eyeliner drawn with an artisan’s hand
replication makes perfection
she’s just a button short of trash

matching toes and fingers
the peek-a-boo shoe
manipulation
as subtle as the perfume
a south beach tan under a sun-streaked do
orchestration and precision
the girl works harder than you

primitive inspiration
packaged in modern disguise
disposition
permitting a glimpse of the thigh
masculine resolve with a feminine plan
domination and submission
she smells the gas then lights the match

stylish deliberation
the chattel of Calvin Klein
obsession
calculation of color and design
glamour defined by supply and demand
education and graduation
she’s just a culture short of class

a moment of indecision
cool wind from the edge of the cliff
intoxication
feels like love when it looks like this
if truth is the price for a superficial charm
the night is laughing
watching us turn absolutely nothing to form

I think Patricia Barber is a genius, the way she charts a course through the straits inbetween the monsters… So David, choose your poison: Scylla or Charybdis, one or the other is going to be too close for comfort. I don’t have to the strength to resist Charybdis, her massive interiority, her crushing single-mattered weight, I’ll take my chances sailing closer to Scylla.

Quelle heure-est-il?

How did it get to be Wednesday evening already? Incroyable! No blog yesterday since I didn’t go to the UVic library for my usual Tuesday evening serendipity forage in the stacks while Emma’s in choir. She went to choir, but I went to a School Planning Council meeting. It always cracks me up that I’m a homeschooling parent whose kids use distance education materials, and that I’m on the Parent Advisory Council of the distance school. Considering it’s just a few kilometres up the road, it’s not so distant…