To see a World in a Grain of Sand

and Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

—  William Blake

 

One day late last fall, I spent the afternoon with my friends Sarah and Jordon.  I picked them up at their home, and we went for a walk under a canopy of trees, next to the local creek.  During our walk, Sarah and Jordon gave me gifts of leaves and acorns and pine cones, each one more impressive than the next.  “Oh, look at this one!  I love this color! You can make a leaf bouquet!” Sarah informed me, handing me a leaf, and then another, and another, until I had two handfuls of discovered beauty. “I love this one,” she would say, unaware or ignoring that my hands were full, believing me capable of carrying limitless autumn beauty in ten fingers.  “I love that one too,” I said, because I did.  Not dead leaves, but molted treasures, each one had at least six or seven colors, textures to discover, autumn’s flowers, a universe in a leaf.

Jordon gave me an acorn cap, and authoritatively told me that it could be used as a drinking cup, if I took it home and washed it.  He was very precise in his instructions.  I believe he wanted to give me something useful, something practical, something enduring.  He likes to give me rocks, also.  Flowers and leaves fall apart.  Rocks and acorn caps, not so much; he seems more inclined to give me rocks, pieces of shimmering asphalt found on the road, and, on this trek, pine cones and acorn cap cups.  Whereas Sarah enjoys beauty, Jordan’s utilitarian, concrete and practical.

Sarah disagreed about the acorn cap’s usefulness.  “No, there are bugs in the crack, you can’t do that.  Bugs live in there.”  She said with an older sister’s experience.  To which Jordan answered, “That is why you wash it, and all the bugs come out, and then you can use it for water, you have to wash it out,” he said with emphatic desperation, and a roll of the eyes.  Sarah disagreed.  Jordon persistently gave instructions for how to overcome the hidden bugs problem.

This discussion went on for sometime, back and forth.   To drink from the smaller than a thimble size acorn cap, or not to drink from the smaller than a thimble size acorn cap, that was the question — until a more important issue than hidden bugs in acorn caps caught their attention.

We came back to my place, made some art with glitter glue and watercolor crayons, signed and dated the masterpieces, delivered the works to their mother, then went up the hill to watch the sun play through the clouds and over the mountains.

The clouds were dense and dark over the White Mountains, heavy with water, and where the clouds broke light shafts lit parts of the valley.  The sun was low enough to create intense, radiant beams through the clouds’ darkness, in a play of light and dark over the valley and mountains.

I’ve looked at this view tens of times for over a year, yet details I had never noticed emerged in the landscape, and for the first time I saw not a single valley, but tens of nestled valleys in and around the mountains’ foothills, the contrast between light and dark illuminating what was otherwise obscured to my eyes.  Sarah, Jordan, and I perched ourselves on the old stone fence at the road’s summit to watch the light move through the clouds and over the hills, bright rays dancing among the mountain’s wooded undulations that lay hundreds of miles away.

We went home, when the sun dictated.

Later that evening, I received an email from Amanda: “Sarah told me this evening, ‘Mom, I had the best day!’  I asked her why.  ‘Because I got to spend the day with Julia, got to do art with Julia, got to walk with Julia.’  There was a theme, there!”

I thought about my time with these children, this past year, some of which I’ve written about before.  Sensitive, kind, creative, and thoughtful, Sarah and Jordan have taught me new lessons on love, trust, and how easy and carefree life lived well is.

They see the world through magic eyes: autumn’s flowers, acorn drinking cups, and the ease of days spent in trusting companionship.

 

******

As a child, I never used dolls to play make-believe mother.  Bottle feeding and diapers held no interest.  A Chatty Cathy type doll — but soft-bodied and cuddly — is one that I remember fondly.  A doll that talked, and she had much to say when you pulled her string.  No surprise that she won my heart.  Her eyes went around and around, and she spoke about eleven phrases.  “My eyes are magic, I can see through anything,” was my favorite.  I wondered if she could see through my clothes.  I wondered if she could see through the walls and into the neighbor’s house, and then see through their clothes.  I doubted it, but I  adored the idea of magic eyes that could see through anything, an impressive superpower for a girl’s doll.

Perhaps I never played Mother to my dolls was because my mother worked, and I never watched her caring for kids.  It doesn’t matter.  What does matter was that in my imagination, dolls were players in a universe of characters that had nothing to do with motherhood.  My imaginative life was more like The Wizard Of Oz, a landscape of fantasy adventure in a faraway land, and sometimes  I allowed the dolls and stuffed animals to come along.

Sometimes.  I usually was happy simply acting things out in my imagination while drawing and singing to whatever music fascinated me that day.  The Wizard Of Oz, Camelot, Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, Tubby The Tuba, Doctor Dolittle, come to mind at the moment.  Thanks to Columbia House’s introductory offers, my mother and grandmother managed to collect most of the musicals, as well as Johnny Cash, Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra, and some classical music.  I hated Beethoven’s Fifth, then.  The opening notes frightened me, the banging sounded violent and hellish.  At a young age, as young as five or six, I managed to move most of the LP’s to my room, except for the Beethoven, though I don’t remember consciously doing this, and there were never objections.  I only remember that the records were always in my room, and that I was the only one who listened to them.  Because my most prized possession was the old gray plastic phonograph player, given to me by a family friend.

If my dolls weren’t for mothering, it’s because they were treasured ornaments in an otherwise bleak domestic environment.  A water pipe broke under the house, and for a couple of winters, perhaps three, because there was no money to move, water seeped in through the floors.  The hallway, bath, kitchen, and dining rooms were wet and cold, the cement entirely soaked.  The tiles lifted from the foundation, the pipes had been laid in cement, and the floor was so cold that shoes were mandatory.  Shoes, not slippers.  I was chronically sick with ear infections those winters because of the cold and dank.  The house was ugly and wet and cold.  Except for my musical sanctuary.  I lined my dolls up on my pink and white fraying bedspread, making sure their dresses were perfectly displayed.  Every doll and animal had a place, positioned just so everyday when I made my bed, in a precise and orchestrated play of doll and stuffed animal.  This early compulsion about objects in their place likely shaped my creative neurosis, the need to impose order on chaos.  They were unusually well cared for, because they maintained a beautiful illusion, and they did their job well.   Even Magic Eyes — who I don’t remember ever naming, I remember only her superpower — wore our play together well because of my aesthetic fastidiousness.

The dolls were more than ornaments, though.  I imagined they might think and feel, so they excited a preoccupation in the unseen and unknown: for a long time they were a mystery waiting for me to unravel.  I wondered with a singularly strange obsession if stuffed animals and dolls came to life at night.  Never during the day, of course, because they wouldn’t want to get caught.  Their possible night life haunted me for several years, and I repeatedly tried duping them into thinking that I was asleep, so that I could catch them playing.  I assumed they played.  I didn’t know, but I imagined them dancing while I slept.  Several times I set a yarn trap, so if they moved, I would be able to tell by the moved yarn.  Unless they fixed it.  If they knew I set the trap, they would fix the yarn, so that I wouldn’t discover their secrets.  I started talking aloud to them, pretending to do one thing while actually setting the trap, so they wouldn’t catch on.  Sometimes the yarn seemed to move, but I couldn’t be sure.  I resorted to bargaining.  I promised I would not tell anyone ever, if I caught them dancing or playing or doing whatever it was they did, while only half-heartedly believing it would work.  I did this several times.  They didn’t budge.  At some point, I gave up, because it was too much work.  I figured that they probably didn’t do anything when I slept, which made me sad, because I liked the idea of them coming to life, freed from their frozen drudgery.  I also decided that if they really were running around in the middle of the night, they were too smart for me, and I wouldn’t be able to trick them.

I thought them full of powers and freedoms beyond me.  So it seemed silly loosing anymore  sleep trying to win a game played against a doll with magic eyes.

 

*******

In The Marriage of Heaven And Hell, William Blake writes:

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, Infinite.  For man has closed himself up, til he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

Magic eyes.  William Blake wrote about magic eyes.  He believed in eyes that could see through anything, see the “universe in a grain of sand.”

“We are, as  a species, addicted to story.  Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”  —  Jonathan Gottschall   

I once read that Steinbeck wrote that everything a person does, they do for love.  The quote struck me like lightning, made it into my journals, but  I’ve never been able to find its source.  Paraphrasing an unsubstantiated Steinbeck quote seems more literary than quoting Marianne Williamson who writes, “see all human behavior as one of two things: either love, or the call for love.”  Nobel winning male author.  New age female self-help guru.   Take your pick, whatever your proclivities dictate.

Love is a story we tell ourselves, and there are limitless ways to love and be loved.  There are also limitless ways for us to shape our love stories.  We’re not only addicted to stories, we are addicted to love, from the sacred to the profane.  Lacking skill and courage, we usually seek love in faltering ways, simply doing the best we can with who we are and what we have.   But the best love story is usually feebly fashioned during our lives, if at all.

Underneath the imaginative convolutions that I’ve listened to over the years, this simple truth has struck me, the one echoed by Steinbeck and Williamson: everything we do, we do for love.  This is why I went independent years ago — while the mainstream phone service that I found myself working for focused on a character description, what kind of sex the character enjoyed, and learning as much nastiness as quickly as possible to turn a quick buck, I heard other stories coming through the receiver.  When I listened, I heard that even in our so-called darkest yearnings, most of us are calling out for love, whether we recognize it or not.

I’ve heard volumes of loneliness from men surrounded by family, colleagues, and friends.  The stories are usually similar: the feeling of being unlovable projected onto a fantasy object.  The fantasy, i.e., the story, keeps facing self-loathing at bay, and the ego successfully shifts the focus from its feelings of lack, to a projection on what the object is assumed to provide.  I believe this shift, or diversion, drives much of celebrity culture, capitalist consumerism, and modernity’s civilization of spectacle.  This behavior has nothing to do with the realities of one’s outer life.  It’s the universal human condition of finding one’s self unlovable, no matter one’s accomplishments, one’s status, one’s looks, one’s good deeds, or merits.

The Semitic religious traditions refer to this pathology as “the fall,” while Indian mythology and Buddhism call it Maya, the illusion that keeps us trapped in ego’s delusion.  Without inner work, self-loathing seems to me universal and nearly inescapable.  In itself, myth isn’t the answer, but it provides us clues to get us going in the right direction, to get us back to a state of grace, or love.

I’ll wear my armchair psychologist hat for a minute and assert that, biology aside, that when left unmitigated, this pathology leads to a wholly successful narcissism, the ability to compulsively, habitually, and unconsciously exploit others for one’s own benefit, a behavior reflecting a deep disassociation from one’s true self.  “Lack of empathy” defines the narcissistic personality and sociopathy, in a kind of intense self-loathing, turned outward.

See every behavior as love or a call to love, no matter how deeply buried that call.  This is how it looks to me, and it has become more glaring during my years of work.  More recently, the journey into myself and my writing, with few distractions, a conscious practice of greater awareness, and swaths of contemplation have further convinced me of this reality, and of the need to live fully in life’s most important love story.

I believe that the greatest love stories aren’t the ones written out there, but the one written within ourselves.  I’ve finally started living the truth, “I myself am the most deserving of my love and affection.”  It’s a story unfolding in an unfamiliar landscape, a land that I’ve taken the long roads to enter, and an environment that I am easily and surprisingly getting used to.

A story will nicely illustrate.  I adopted a cat from the no kill shelter, several lifetimes ago.  He was older and had been dumped.  Someone found him wandering around, homeless.  A big white and grey boy, about 16 pounds, who needed all of his teeth removed.  Older.  Abandoned.  Health issues.  But I adopted him anyway.  I soon lovingly referred to him as “The King of Everything,” and he accepted that role and his place in our little universe quite easily.  One day, he was not too happy with the food in his dish (some of the best organic feline chow for sale), and let me know about it.  “You seem to forget,” I told him, “that you were once just an abandoned old cat with little hope of a roof and food.”

He ignored me.  He was worthy of all the love and affection of the universe, he was convinced, no question about it.

Takeaway: the learning curve for self-love need not be years long, according to cat wisdom.

This Valentine’s Day, I am writing the greatest love story every written.  I’m deeply and wholly — or holy — loving myself, with all the care and affection that my heart can hold.  No permission needed.   Trusting myself.  Enjoying the moment on its own terms.  Refusing unnecessary baggage and anxiety.  This seems to be the best story that stillness and awareness can write in our understanding — religion sometimes calls it the Kingdom of Heaven, sometimes enlightenment.

I embrace this love story, because I know that the more one lives this primary story, the more love stories proliferate from this sacrosanct nucleus.  Spiritually.  Creatively.  Personally.  Professionally.  Not necessarily in that order.  The first love story gives birth to another, then another, then another.  Then suddenly the idea that there’s only love becomes real and palpable.  Not because it’s been found “out there,” but because the primary love story has been brought to life, lived, made real.

This particular story about loving one’s self has been told for millennium, but we still rarely get it.  Besides, as we evolve, we need new ways to reference the mystery of ourselves.  We are addicted stories, and addicted to love, but we’re still not sure how to dissolve those barriers that we’ve built against it, walls that won’t be eroded with a Hallmark card, dinner and champagne, or a series of toe curling orgasms.  Only through a radical return to our primary, most important story do those walls yield: the return to ourselves, and our most important love, the love from which all love finds its ground to grow.

My version of life’s oldest and least understood story, offered for Valentine’s Day.

 

In order to go deeper into what’s important to me, I’m taking a social media sabbatical through at least March.

Technically, I’m supposed to be “platform building” so that I can acquire an agent or build a base for self-publishing, but at this juncture, I don’t even know what platform building means.  The people who use the script with that language, I find mystifying and even more frenetic than myself.   These are the folks who use the words “marketing,” “branding,” “tribe,” and a whole slew of terms that I have tried my best to connect with, but I can’t for the life of me wrap my head around the disconnect between the life I’m living, and the life they are talking about that exists in social media.

Construct.  Produce a product.  Disconnect.  Market.  No seeming intimate connection with materials or sources.  No substantive discourse, rather, the bulk of the conversation revolves around product.  Just product production (a.k.a. my story) and marketing, measured in sales, followers, and surveys.

Everyone and everything is an economic construct, that’s a reality.  But I have already lived an extreme version of that reality, and that’s the purpose of my living in the middle of nowhere, to get myself into something bigger than consumerism’s one dimensionality.  Sex is the most ubiquitous product for consumerism run amok, no matter how banally packaged.  In my mind, everything else seems child’s play, and extraordinarily obtuse.  But that’s an excess of unkind experience speaking, and not necessarily a good thing.

Yes, we are all hemmed in by economics, but isn’t living life well determining how we will define our economic decisions, instead of letting economic forces define us, over and above all else?

Also, I’m hearing too much noise on social media.  Either I’m getting more neurotic, or the stridency and one dimensionality oozing from the interwebs is getting exponentially worse, a rapacious Godzilla of opinion and policing that I find myself too easily participating in and contributing to, and I seem always to offer the contrary opinion.

Perhaps that’s the neurosis.  Doesn’t matter.  At this time, social media isn’t where I need to be.  Following my inner GPS, I deactivated my personal account, and may or may not be back.  My author page will be used only for blog updates until I understand “platform building” a little better.

Relieved of my innate tendency for over sharing, I’ve returned to things that are necessary and important, explored areas I’ve left aside, gained clarity, and done some good work.  I’ve returned to myself in unexpected ways, journeys that at I am not sharing now that the social media over -sharing animal has been tamed for a time.

Because what’s important isn’t the construct we create on social media, it’s giving more quality space to creating a beautiful life, one consciously lived in rhythm and color.

Social media may or may not be part of that life, in the future.

 

 

 

(Addendum to my original post:  I’m ambivalent about posting this entry; but I’ve learned that when something deeply moves me, to honor the feelings.  There’s something there, even if the story/stories I’m hearing or feeling differ from the all the people in the know.  Especially on social media, which is where this particular bit of offense got it’s legs and ran, especially among the politically correct, the liberals, the feminists, the social justice crusaders, who know better.

Today, I ran across a term that’s become ideologically popular, “intersectionality.”  From what I’ve read, the term started as a divisive term among feminists.  Yet,  intersectonality was precisely what I was trying to get to in the following, and the narratives woven in this photo, which are many and strikingly complex, have been flattened by social media and the self-righteous.  Returning to the photo, I’m even more convinced that if the thought police hadn’t gotten the upper hand, this particular composition, either intentionally or unintentionally, provides a singularly brilliant portrait on intersections of race, gender, and, most important, class and labor relations.

Thanks to the taste police, that dialogue has been shut down.

All that remains on the Russian website is a privileged white woman staring into the camera.  Irony much?)

During the 2012 Republican Convention, Clint Eastwood famously lectured an empty chair.

The evening could not have been a  better scripted summary of the Republican party’s seeming raison d’être — structural patriarchy monopolizing the stage and lecturing into thin air,  remarkably emblematized by Eastwood’s tortuous rambling to a chair.

To see these moments as simply a bizarre Republican convention moment missed the larger point: the status quo is stubborn, and not likely to leave the stage, even when it’s a dying animal.

That seemed the implication of Mr. Eastwood’s soliloquy, an unintentional satirical performance of the status quo, in the theater of convention politics.

 

This past week, we had another chair moment, one whose implications and social perspective were even more stunning.

There was no laughter.  The photo caused massive controversy, the wounds it touched were too deep.  Meanwhile the photo’s deepest revelations of pain and subordination seemed too subtle for the most devout of our thought police, the ones yelling ‘foul-play’ the loudest.

The ones who sit in earnest well intention with just enough information to give them moral superiority, yet apparently not enough experience to dive deeper into the narrative.

Feminists (men and women) were out in droves on my Facebook feed, the predictable social media suspects were ranting about the nasty inhumanity of it all.

I paint with broad brush strokes, so please indulge me.

I first saw the photo on The Guardian.  I thought it was a brilliant and insightful critique; I posted so on my Facebook page.  According to The Guardian, the photo’s subject “Zhukova . . . defended the image in a statement: ‘This photograph, which has been published completely out of context, is of an art work intended specifically as a commentary on gender and racial politics. I utterly abhor racism, and would like to apologise to anyone who has been offended by this image.’”

I took Zhukova at her word as reported in the article, and her claim corresponded to how I originally read the photo.

The din that transpired on social media left my head in a blur.  I wasn’t sure who the artist was.  I was not certain if the original work in question was the chair or the photo.  I originally thought the photo was the object d’art, but it was the chair.

My concern is for the photo.

Because of my work, I find the photo extremely compelling, be it a conscious or unconscious product.

In my mind, the photo emerges as a kind of emblematic revelation that few are taking seriously because the chair has been summarily dismissed as sexist and racist.  End of story in this version.  Move on to the next controversy du jour for offense consumption.

Unfortunately, it’s not the end of the story.  The stories inhabiting the photo reflect deeply engrained collective ways of being.  Erasing them in an ideological triumph of personal offense won’t make them go away: repression exacerbates the problem.  Moreover, this easy dismissal seemed to me indicative of class privilege.  Some of the loudest and most virulent voices on my feed were the same old players:  white feminists, and the sympathetic to feminists white male, proving yet again their social sensitivity.

Not a single sex worker in the lot.  Nada.

The photo is a not so humorous comedy of errors, the racist — sexist chair being the morally objectionable fulcrum, the photo an egregious editorial decision.

Though photo stands was a horrible editorial choice for a fashion magazine, its composition and elements still demand consideration: its contortions scream for our attention, like a bad dream that we take to our therapist for interpretation.  Or a compulsive fantasy that leaves the imagination senseless to all else, until mitigated by art or intimacy.  It’s a cultural snapshot, a compendium of class-gender-race references, folded into an image with proliferating implications, none of which are being unfolded by the “holier than stilettos,” as I referred to them on my Facebook page, in a quite conscious metaphorical swipe.

The following is only illustrative, representing the salient features that I believe are being buried under political correctness.

The photo’s most abhorrent feature is the privileged white woman sitting on the dehumanized, fetishized, sexualized black female mannequin, white privilege comfortably bolstered by exploitation of the black woman — it’s a straightforward racist narrative.  It is also the racism implicit in the exotic other, a trope too long populating the collective imagination, and still unshakably rampant in popular culture: the sexualized exotic.

The exotic other transverses gender, as I hear over and over.   The black male or female as highly sexualized and existing for the consumption of white pleasure is so old and deeply woven into the collective unconscious, that I don’t need to elaborate it here.  Google if you need.  If we can understand the sexualized, fetishized, and dehumanized other as being gender neutral, and a function of deeper social anxieties and realities, perhaps you’ll allow me to enlarge the interpretive lens.  Let’s assume that race is one construct buttressing the class system, privilege and economic power being the invisible, ubiquitous culprit.  As Toni Morrison writes, “[t]here is no topic on anybody’s table which does not involve black people. . . . And when that disappears in time, then they have to do what they have been avoiding, which is talk about poor people.”  Race and gender are the most obvious constructs that keep the economic status quo self-perpetuating, but without a broader lens, we diminish what’s at issue.

Because of my work, when I first saw this photo, I immediately saw (or projected) the systemic Madonna – Whore trope, which is an economic and class structure, not a race or moral issue.  Race narratives often obscure class narratives; morality stories give authority to these class structures, leaving the whore socially invisible.  In this particular photo, race, class, and morality strikingly collide: the well-bred white girl is the Madonna, the black woman is the sexualized, fetishized, dehumanized doll on which privilege asserts its moral high ground and economic comfort, embodied by Zhukova and her princess countenance.

The dehumanized fetish doll, i.e., the underclass strikingly typified in the bound, black exotic other, supports the class system’s comfort and morality, typified in Zhukova’s unsullied demeanor.  But there’s an important caveat here, because Zhukova herself unintentionally emerges as one dimensional, a passive, cosmetically flawless, asexual creature whose existence and comfort depends on the bound, fierce, sexualized woman on whom she sits.  One commentator wrote on a Marie Claire blog, “[e]ven if the skintone was [sic] different, the photograph would still be offensive. Women seem to be the brunt of society, and no one deserves to be sat on,” the implication being that what is at risk isn’t necessarily race, but something deeper.  Unfortunately,  the writer stopped here.

The photo is a snapshot of the status quo, a construction dominating all women: in its specificity, art carries a universal message, arguably then, this photo unintentionally rises to the level of meaningful cultural artifact, a rendering of a near universal invisible system that casts women one dimensionally, be it Madonna or Whore.

Let’s draw the interpretive lens back a few more inches.

The photo’s most powerful character is the one who remains invisible; the narrator-photographer, the one framing this story.  Who frames this picture?  Who frames this woman of privilege, the dehumanized fetish object on whom she sits, and who has the most to gain by remaining unseen while flattening out these two embodied cultural constructs?  I would argue that patriarchy’s invisible structure dictates the overriding narrative, a structure which still knows only two ways to understand women: the Madonna and the Whore.  The safe women is rendered asexual, obsequious to norms, a mannequin of civilized milquetoast engagement; her counterpart is the fierce, sexual being full of so much strength that she must be strapped down, controlled, and made plastic in sacrifice to the anemic caricature who sits on her.

I’m going further than expected, so I beg your indulgence, just a bit longer.  No, I am not black.  But I have still been that woman who has been strapped down by economics and class privilege, the one who has taken care of other women’s homes, other women’s children, other women’s men, a familiar trope in the “black” experience.

Defending the photo, an African-American woman wrote in The Guardian comments section on Facebook, “Don’t tell me how to feel.”

Indeed. Please don’t tell a woman who has sold sex how to feel about a photo with an objectified, fetishized, plastic doll who is portrayed as a comfortable chair for a privileged woman.

“Don’t tell me how to feel.”  I know how I have felt and what I have experienced, and this photo captures it.

Yet the taste police are doing just that, telling me how to feel, informing me of the photo’s real racist and sexist meaning, all in the name of moral indignation.

No human is a mannequin of privilege or subjugation, rather, they are part of a system of nefarious cultural forces that seeks to support itself through flattening narrative histories, the repression of what doesn’t support its world view, and good old morality, which usually does little more than temporarily displace our cultural demons.

Narratives that love to create victims, narratives that repress histories for a moral greater good which is no greater good, just an indignant posturing that conveniently buries a poignant snapshot of how far we haven’t come.

From where I sit, in my warm apartment, on a comfortable couch, listening to patriarchy’s sexual repression in between the moments I take to wrestle amateur stories from my imagination’s rough waters, this photo stunningly captures multiple realities, including the vapid weakness of privilege, which is as much of a trap as being an objectified fantasy object.  There’s nothing to admire in a woman who reclines and finds comfort on another woman’s plasticized pain, a woman whose raison d’être is blankly staring in Stepford perfection waiting to be consumed by camera and audience while reclining on the depiction of another woman’s exploitation.

The social censure of the narrative changes nothing, and, like sexual repression, makes the problem worse.  Because of the social media outrage, the photo has been cropped, all that remains on the Russian site is a beautiful white woman of immense privilege sitting in serene beauty with a pair of stilettos bizarrely waving in the air next to her.  Society’s invisible woman remains, quite literally, invisible again.  She’s not even allowed her plastic pain in all its objectified glory, because she offended the taste police, who know better for us all.

To the taste police I say:  fuck your moral indignation.  You’re now literally talking to an empty chair, pontificating like Clint Eastwood, lecturing me about my feelings, and the feelings of those who have been radically objectified, flouting your censoring status quo, successfully eliding any alternative narratives in your the shrill of well intentioned empathy.  I would love to know more about your personal experiences of radical objectification, but for the time being, you have shut that dialogue down, and made me suspect of you, whom I now see as a privileged animal, protests not withstanding.

Meanwhile, Zhukova is getting all kinds of flack from the feminists for this editorial faux pas.  She’s not even the chair’s artist.  Dasha’s a woman sitting in a photo who has a billionaire boyfriend, a woman more than likely rendered for what she is, a trophy, probably psychologically miserable for it, but materially comfortable in her gilded cage, and getting shit because the thought police have a story and they are sticking to it, morality forbidding a deeper dive into meaning.

The chair’s artist is Bjarne Melgaard, a white male who describes himself as “a worn out faggot,” an artist who relishes controversy, and who gets mixed critical reviews.

I’ve not been able to find out who took the photo: no surprise that the most important player in this photo narrative remains conspicuously invisible.

 

 

 

References:

‘Bench of Memory at Slavery’s Gateway,’ an interview with Toni Morrison, published in The New York Times, July 8, 2008.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/arts/design/28benc.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=tonimorrison&

‘Russian Fashion Site Apologizes for Outrageous Chair Modeled After Black Woman: Apologies are apologies, but we can’t unsee this one,” Llana Satanstein:  http://www.marieclaire.com/fashion/buro-24-7-chair-dasha-zhukova?src=spr_TWITTER&spr_id=1449_40959396

‘The chair man:  meet Bjarne Melgaard, the artist behind the Dasha Zhukova seat.’
http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/the-chair-man-meet-bjarne-melgaard-the-artist-behind-the-dasha-zhukova-seat-9079716.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to Chinese astrology, 2014 is the Year Of The Horse.

Not coincidently, I received a card in the mail from my godfather, New Year’s Eve day.  “Thought you might enjoy this,” he wrote, “I found it while packing boxes, and decided to send it on.”

Tucked inside the card was a note written to him from my mother when I was three months old, thanking him for agreeing to sponsor me at my baptism.  I pushed the single page back into the card, her loss still unbearable when confronted with it head on.  “Not now,” I thought, “I can’t do this, now.”

After a few hours, I returned to read it, and, taking a slow deep breathe, I let her cadences rise from the words that she wrote decades ago.  The note was brief, but on the last day of the year, the final lines managed to find their way into my hands, “. . . and I told her that they had a little girl cousin she could play dolls with and she laughed like she knew exactly what I was talking about.  Last night her and Walt carried on quite a conversation.  I must close now.”

A conversation.  I once had a conversation with my father, three months before he left my mother, six years before his death.  For the first time, I see myself as his infant daughter.  He’s cooing in an affection laced gibberish, prattling on with the child who carries his DNA and these buried moments in her, even today.

That this bit of my mother’s storytelling arrived on the day before New Years as we enter the Year of the Horse, shimmered with epiphany.

Allow me to explain.

Over a decade ago, my journaling transformed while working with dreams and unconscious imagery.  What persistently appeared, the image running through my journal for almost a decade, was a black horse.  This animal was a beautiful untethered creature, running on an ocean beach as though its heart were ready to burst, mane and tail flowing, nostrils flaring in rushes of wind, scorching sand under its gallop, eyes burning in the sun’s glare.  Reminiscent of Coppola’s cinematic images in “The Black Stallion,” my unconscious creation was an animal of remarkable power and beauty.

I viscerally sensed something about this animal, and wrote, “I am the horse,” a line punctuating my journal pages, over and over through the years.

“What does it mean?”  I had no answer, and, over time, I began castigating myself for my overactive imagination, these silly exercises of unconscious journaling, and my obtuse assertion about my identity. I increasingly came to loathe the decades of journals haphazardly stuffed in my bookcases, hodgepodge documents of the inconsequential, chronicles of mania, ruminations on suicide, too soulful love poems, aphorisms wanting context, meaningless affirmations, uncompleted sketches, banalities in the extreme.

Inelegant excursions strewn on pages whose end eluded me.

Then there was the horse.

Irredeemable tripe.  What would-be writer puts pen to paper to write, “I am the horse?”  I tried imagining any self-respecting, or respected, author so doing.  My inner critic reprimanded me, “you’re an unskilled, talentless neurotic wasting her time, spewing self-absorbed psychobabble onto the page.”  The hoard of journals, and this strange imaginative creature appearing on their pages, became emblematic of my self-loathing, and a life that I imagined was beyond my reach.

A shift in my critical declarations would come.  One clear New England autumn afternoon, about a week or so before my birthday, I came home and found a box on my porch.  I opened it.  “You seem to want to know about your father.  I found these.  Maybe you will want them,” my father’s younger sister scribbled on a loose piece of paper, with no salutation or signature.

Wrapped inside crumpled newspaper were two items.  The first was a tooled and painted leather purse made by my father, with two handsomely executed large black horse heads facing each other on the front flap.  The second was a copy of “Black Beauty: The Autobiography Of A Horse,” given to him for Christmas when he was seven, inscribed by his uncle.

As I removed newsprint from handiwork and book, an inscrutable bond between my father and myself revealed itself.  I had never before held objects caressed by his hands, yet these two objects, now tenderly stroked by me, mirrored that animal appearing in my journals, a creature unconsciously forged, and with whom I instinctively if disparagingly identified.

I didn’t know what it meant — I only recognized an enigmatic tie between my father and myself, peculiarly embodied in a splendid black equine.

I set the revelation aside, though not forgetting it, and regarded my journals with a kinder if still skeptical eye.

Fast forward. A little over a year ago.  I am leaving Cambridge in a whirlwind exodus.  On the surface, all was chaos — a pending eviction, a pro se bankruptcy, selling everything that could be sold, giving away what could not.  All in less than two months.  I shed most of what I owned.  Reluctantly, I even sold my mother’s diamond from her second marriage.  Though I received less than a fraction of its value, I needed the cash.

Yet I was calm and conscious.  I felt my mother’s presence.  I felt her assurance that the ring’s only value now was to serve me.  When I write, “my mother’s presence,” I mean a knowing, an awareness, a shimmering behind immediate sense experience.  This elusive perception was connected to a larger one: everything unfolding in my life was a necessary dissolution.  The circling storm of circumstance was merely an illusion — life was changing, a new landscape emerging.  There was room for drama, but no need or desire to fill it.

In that rapid flux of conditions and choices, with little time to think through details, decisions seemed unfamiliarly random and arbitrary.  Seemed random.  Seemed arbitrary.  What I failed to recognize is what we tell ourselves and life when we’re pulled along by something larger than ourselves.

Not until I received the letter from my godfather New Year’s Eve day did I see the significance of my decisions a little over a year ago.  Everything gone.  Yet I saved my journals.  Those chaotic chronicles filled with embryonic dreams survived the dissolution, because I chose to save them, above all else.

I see clearly now that they were the reason for the dissolution, or, rather, the dreams and desires nestled in their pages were the reason for abandoning a life not worth hanging onto, and entering a new one.

By keeping decades of pages filled with myself, that self-absorbed, neurotic animal whom I had loathed for so long, I embraced my deepest self, a creature whose power and beauty I have yet to understand.  I never saw the depth and breadth of those decisions before that note — humans being expert at burying life’s brilliance under the mundane and inconsequential.

In saving my journals, deep in my psychic recesses, I decisively chose to become the strangest of all animals, a writer.

I have felt painfully alone in these decisions, too often reaching for my comfortable blanket of self-loathing and insecurity while second guessing myself, wondering about my judgement, or lack thereof.

Financial pressures and uncertainties press hard.

Skills and creativity want.

But a note written when I was three months old traveled through time and landed in my hands, arriving on New Year’s Eve.  In its lines, I feel my mother standing behind me, smiling.  My father with whom I share an obscure connection appears and urges me on.  Storyteller and artist stand together behind me, and they are as perceptible to me as that creature who for years ran on an ocean beach, sun burning its eyes, heart bursting in an untethered stride, a singularly magnificent beast forged in my unconscious that found its way into my journal pages.

A note written decades ago arrives on New Year’s Eve, and I understand that I am not alone.

Then, in a moment lit by an epiphanic sun, and bitten by the mysteries of sand, wind, and water, I realize that 2014 is the Year Of The Horse.

And I understand, I am the horse.

 

It’s hackneyed to quote Dickens during the holidays.  But Dickens is a seasonal habit for this writer, my Dickensesque upbringing making him a favorite companion during the holidays.

When I write, “Dickensesque upbringing,” I’m not being self-indulgent, but self-effacing.

My father abandoned my mother when I was about 6 months old or so, and she raised me on her own.  Mom was uneducated, having barely made it through high school because of a learning disability, which I believe would now be classified as dyslexia.  She was a keen reader of people, however, and an animal of singular survival instincts.  Both native abilities equipped her to be an extraordinary caregiver, and she stumbled into nursing by way of being a nurse’s aide.

Those hourly wages were negligible, at best.  Until my father’s death, and the arrival of my Social Security survivor benefits, it was a less than meager existence, and a routine of constant sacrifice for my mother, who cherished me more than her own life.

For this reason, when I was four or so, Mom sat me down and had an earnest talk with me.

“I may not be able to keep you,” she said, “I don’t think I can afford to raise you.”

It was a well-intentioned if catastrophic moment when a parent recognizes that their beloved and only child would fare better in other circumstances, immediate needs and fear obliterating all else.

Dickensesque.

Despite the trauma that she created for both of us in those earnest moments, she did not give me away, nor did the daily economic pressures subside, because we were like those who populate Dickens’ best works.

Mom never read Dickens, never entered one of his literary landscapes — and I don’t remember her having much use for a film adaptation of any book, either.

Apart from the Bible, Mom didn’t read, because symbols on a page eluded her.

Books were humiliating, a reminder of life’s unfairness, not a portal to freedom.

Rather, Mom told stories.  She collected them.  Saved them.  Kept her ears open for any and all that could be subsumed into her narrative compilation, a repository of myth and meaning coloring our existence.  Bible stories.  Family stories.  Friends’ stories.  Our stories.  She told them over and over, sharing them like familiar songs, queuing one and then another, stories that grounded our existence, their subtext almost always pointing to a larger redemption.

I doubt she was aware of their subtext.  I wasn’t until much later in life.

The bills, the anxieties, the heartaches that oozed like puss from a wound that day when she told me that I would soon be living as one without a home or a history, those limitless worries were eventually buoyed by her faith narratives.  Despite herself.

Mom had a favorite story that she told during the holidays, especially later in life, when middle class comforts surrounded her.  Though my life choices were a source of confusion and disappointment until the day she died, these stories reminded her of where we had been, what we had survived, who we were, and the roads we had traveled.

It was Mom’s version of our wilderness wanderings, written in my youth.

The story went something like this:

Dad was in prison.  Mom was working as a nurse’s aide.  She wasn’t eligible for food stamps or assistance, because she was working — and, by God, she was going to work, because she had a sense of pride, even if it meant wiping asses for a living.

Come Christmastime, I would see advertisements for Mattel this, Mattel that.  She knew that she couldn’t afford anything Mattel, so she sat me down and had a talk with me.  [Another sit-down.]

“We’re poor people, and can’t afford [theme and variation] all these toys that you’re seeing on the television, so don’t be surprised if you don’t get everything you’re asking for.”

“What about a cup of tea?  Can I have a cup of tea,” I asked.

“Yes, you can ask for a cup of tea.”

Mom was relieved that she had settled that problem.  She wasn’t expecting what followed.

As the story went, when people would ask me what I wanted Santa to bring me for Christmas, I pulled out my eager to accommodate script, looked at them with my big eyes and would politely answer, “Oh, we’re poor people, all I want for Christmas is a cup of tea.  Just a cup of tea, please.”

Mom was mortified.

“I should have put her in front of the bank with a tin cup,” she then added.

That Christmas, to use Mom’s words, I made out like a bandit.  Dolls, clothes, stuffed animals, an Etch-A-Sketch, Mattel this and Mattel that, everyone had a present for the big eyed child who was asking only for a cup of tea, please.

The Rotary Club gave me a tricycle.

Christmas dinner with a month’s worth of turkey graced the table.

It was one of our best Christmas’ because we were so overwhelmed with generosity.

That was pretty much the story’s substance, as I remember it, and it was one of Mom’s favorites from Christmas’ past.

Despite her mortification, Mom received as much joy that Christmas as I did, seeing promise in that outpouring of kindness, finding temporary comfort that she wasn’t all alone in trying to be the best she could, by herself.

She recited that story every holiday, to whoever would listen, as many times as possible, not because she loved hearing her own voice, not because she remembered the girl that I was, and not simply because she was remembering the woman she was, the woman who overcame innumerable obstacles, and survived.

The events were a cornerstone of meaning in her life, they lifted the hardship of our existence into the miraculous, the unexpected, the redemptive.  Her telling that particular story during the winter holidays was an emotional reenactment of light coming into darkness, the heart and meaning of Christmas, a story she repeated in an act of sacred memory.

To those in need, my mother was one of the most generous humans that I’ve known, having learned the true spirit of giving, during our years of wandering the wilderness.

Yes, it was a Dickenseque youth, in its hardships and hopes, oppression and good will.  Mom never read Dickens, but she wrote her own Christmas carol, that she offered to anyone willing to listen, and most were happy to accommodate her good natured literary performances, hearing the story’s heart and soul quite clearly.

I offer that story here, repeating her tradition, and I lift a cup of tea in my Mother’s honor.

Thanksgiving Day, I had eleven visitors with the sunrise.

I’ve never seen these creatures before, and they have not returned since.

I’m trying to get in the habit of posting stuff I may not be comfortable with sharing, because it’s what I should be doing — and I’ve avoided posting poetry because the WordPress interface doesn’t give itself to keeping the structure.  This time it seems to be working, if the excessive spacing is a bit distracting.

 

 

Day Of Thanks

 

Come from the mountain,

behind the house,

eleven turkeys arrive in the yard.

 

 

Auspiciously,

they come to feast.

Today,

the day of thanks.

 

 

Eleven visitors,

come with the sun’s rising

to celebrate themselves

and their ancestors,

the ones who taught

this land’s first dwellers.

 

 

 

Under my windows

they parade and strut,

owning the landscape

as once before,

royal plumage mat

against their grand bodies.

 

 

Eleven visitors

reminding me of their

heritage.  Revered by this

land’s first dwellers,

before those people lost their tales, their stories,

a history in which these eleven masters

held a sacrosanct position.

 

 

 

They’ve come today

to tell me that tale:

they are revered incarnations,

of pride,

abundance,

generosity,

awareness,

fertility,

life in its magnificence and glory,

the unashamed dance of life

and all its hallowed moments.

 

 

 

With the sun’s rising,

they’ve descended from the mountain,

in a ceremonious mystical progression.

 

Eleven masters come to teach,

holy beings reminding me

of life’s luminous endurance,

and the perfect play pulsing

radiant behind existence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(I wrote this while working briefly in the mainstream earlier this year. [See the series “Reality Bites” for more on my jaunt into these nether regions, if interested.]  As with everything else, it needs work, but I’m posting it today because there’s apparently a new movie on Bettie.  And because she deserves it.)

I was not trying to be shocking, or to be a pioneer. I wasn’t trying to change society, or to be ahead of my time.  I didn’t think of myself as liberated, and I don’t believe that I did anything important. I was just myself. I didn’t know any other way to be, or any other way to live.

— Bettie Page

Bettie Page was one of a kind, light years ahead of her time.  The quote above illustrates why I love her dearly.  Bettie was innocent, direct, uncomplicated, yet one of the edgiest and sexiest women to emerge during an era obsessed with good girl social mores.  Unlike the era’s most glamorized sexual icon, Marilyn, who used sex and persona quite smartly to lift herself from poverty and become the  quintessential sex product, Bettie’s sexual approach reflected a lust for life, simplicity, and, most important, to this writer, her free spirit.

Bettie really was no man’s woman, without even thinking about it.  Bettie was just Bettie, doing what she loved.  Marilyn became every man’s victim in achieving icon immortality, hitching herself to the most famous men of her generation:  the Kennedy brothers, DiMaggio, Miller.  She was for at least three of these men, a trophy.  Seemingly not much more, if you prod a little.  (Miller has said some pretty shitty and inappropriate things about her, leaving a nasty taste in my mouth for any of his so-called literary achievements.)  By most accounts, Marilyn’s career behind the scenes belied an intelligent if not shrewd woman who sold the illusion of innocent, helpless female sexuality, a deliberately played angelic persona that still besots most of us, and was famously worshipped by Norman Mailer.

But Bettie, who made her own fetish clothes and bathing suits for her photo shoots, lived freely.   She simply loved being nude and healthy, loved the camera, saw nothing wrong with the body’s beauty, didn’t use her own beauty with ulterior motives.  She exercised on the beach, every day.  She made her own clothes.  She modeled, and then she paid her bills, most of the time.  She lived with an open heart and free spirit, no strings attached.

Marilyn knew what to do with her gifts, and became their slave while writing herself in the collective imagination; Bettie enjoyed an off-beat dialogue with the fringes of culture, and overcame a painful personal history while remaining true to herself.  Bettie never played the victim, on or off camera.

Her life was beautiful, poetic, tragic, and quasi-heroic, though I have off-beat ideas of heroism.

I admire Bettie’s sweetness, her guilelessness, and her joie de vivre.  In front of the camera, she often portrayed the vixen, a smoldering cauldron of dark sexuality and all things forbidden, the fallen angel ready to escort you to the recesses of hell.  In fact, she never saw the same morality boxes as others, and she lived her life as Bettie, a beautiful woman who saw no shame in G-d’s creation, including her own.

In her later years, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia.  She was unaware of her impact until much later in her life.  She lived quietly and anonymously, and only when a very persistent journalist managed to eventually track her down, did she learn of her popularity.  Her uncomplicated, straightforward egoless approach left a star less bright than many of her mainstream blonde contemporaries, but her personal life was just as riddled with pain and hardship.   Failed marriages, a gang rape, overwhelming financial difficulties, miscarriages.

In her later years, after discovering her cult status, she avoided having her picture taken, for fear of disappointing those who had come to know and love her as she was in her youth.  Vanity?  Perhaps.  But I think she really was afraid of disappointing her fans — it was a vanity of sentiment, a respect for those who held an image of her in their hearts that she didn’t want to ruin.  Not female vanity, but human generosity.

Bettie Page, an angel unaware.

Sex is a part of love.  You shouldn’t go around doing it unless you are in love.  —  Bettie Page

 

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.  And that is why I succeed.  –– Michael Jordan

 

I spent last night being a good girl and relentlessly self-castigating over misreading David Trumble’s critique of the Disney princess sheroes.

I’ve read many business and professional books this past few months, including, Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In,” Louis P. Frankel’s “Nice Girls Don’t Get The Corner Office,” and “Play Like A Man, Win Like A Woman.”  Of the many takeaways, I was able to apply one last night: professionally, women blame themselves for their mistakes and needlessly stay in that space.  According to female executives and entrepreneurs who’ve been looking at male and female behavior differences in the corporate world for decades, men brush themselves off, and, worse case scenario, project, blame, or deny (“I did not have sex with that woman”), or, best case scenarios, creatively move on with the wind, no worries.  Women call it the male ego.  Men call it life, shrug their shoulders, and say “no big deal.”

I was a very good girl, though, and spent most of the night berating the failings of my intellect, thinking myself a fraud for having made it through a graduate program, let alone, one of the world’s best, bemoaning my cultural illiteracy for not knowing who and what David Trumble is and why he did what he did, and consequently embarrassing myself on my fledgling platform, taking myself oh so seriously.  Because, as Ms. Sandberg correctly writes, “women are promoted on achievements, men are promoted on promise.”  As a writer who is building a platform, with multiple creative interests, I am convinced that I can’t make this kind of mistake, because I must get it all right as I go along.

Wrong, again.

So now I am putting on my big boy boxers, and acknowledging what I did wrong, and what I did right.  Creatively recasting, and making the points that serve my voice, because I am metaphorically wearing my Michael Jordan Hanes and exploiting the opportunity that a so-called failure provides.

First, as a responsible writer I should have taken a few minutes to Google Mr. Trumble’s name and learned more about his background, which is impressive.  I didn’t.  I wanted to post something on the blog, this seemed like content worth spending time with, and so I took the ball and ran, gender allusion by way of sports metaphor intended.

According to a brief bio on the Huffington Post:

Twenty-six year old David Trumble is an award winning artist, cartoonist and illustrator, working in diverse media from graphic art to caricatures. Critically acclaimed as a political cartoonist for Trevor Kavanagh’s column in the Sun Newspaper with a readership of eight million, he worked under the name: Trumble. David won the Dan Hemingway Prize for Creativity for his 265 page graphic novel, Climate: A Cinematic Novel in Three Parts, which was published by the Blake Project. Trumble’s work of greatest acclaim to date, are his illustrations for the upcoming Simon & Schuster publication, Random Book: About the Power of ANYone by Talia Leman—a guide for everyone who dreams of making a difference in the world. As the book’s illustrator, Trumble creates 200 unforgettable cartoons, making the art and the text almost inseparable in this publication that is expected to be a blockbuster in the U.S..

Courtesy the same HuffPo bio, I learned that Mr. Trumble’s also working on a

“[c]artoon & animated educational film curriculum” venture with Alec Urbach—social entrepreneur, filmmaker and Founder/Executive Director of the international organization Giving from the Ground Up. Together they are creating revolutionary animated science and math film curricula for elementary schools that are changing the way children are educated in developing nations. The curriculum will serve 80,000 children in Ghana by spring, 2012, and is then being translated into Spanish to serve Central and South America.

So, Mr. Trumble is one of the good guys, not merely one of the well-intentioned who don’t know better. Everything I wrote about Mr. Trumble’s work was spot on, and lies at the heart of his critique about Disney’s commodified, homogeneious princess machine.

But I didn’t read it as satire, and I erroneously accused him.  In fact, I did exactly what gets on my nerves when many feminists write on sex work.  They jump the gun about objectification, without really understanding the economic-relational-social structures that unnecessarily keep sex work stigmatized.  They don’t see that sex work is primarily an economic issue, the shame residing not in the work itself, but in society’s fears and socialized judgements.

Which leads to my second point of self-flagellation: why didn’t I see the satire?  I am adroit at irony, sarcasm, and iconoclasm. If not successfully employing it, at least seeing it and heartily respecting it.  Those who have known me since my Word Bandit days know that the Guthrie family rebel gene (Arlo and Woody, for the few who haven’t heard already) is unapologetically wired in my system.  Ambrose Bierce is also a relative — and I wear these DNA alliances with too great a pride for my own good.

Why didn’t I get it?  More telling, why aren’t so many intelligent and sophisticated women getting it?  Are we looking through a jaded lens that assumes the worse worst?  Perhaps.  But I think not.

Mr. Trumble has stated about his princess sheroes:

“The result was this cartoon, which earned equal parts praise and ire from readers. Some didn’t get the joke, some disagreed with it, others saw no harm in it at all and wanted to buy the doll versions of them… it was a polarizing image, but I suppose that’s the point. The statement I wanted to make was that it makes no sense to put these real-life women into one limited template, so why then are we doing it to our fictitious heroines?”

So while drowning in an ocean of personal failing and professional humiliation at 3:30 a.m. — SAD kicked in weeks ago, so I am ratcheting up every failed personal and professional interaction with healthy doses of drama until March or so — it occurred to me that my original blog post was as insightful as I originally thought it to be.

The knee jerk reactions to Mr. Trumble’s cartoons have merit, but not because he engaged satire. Women are used to being fixed and fixing themselves within a given set of social constructs, almost constantly.  We’re not seeing satire in these cartoons, even if it hits us upside the head.  If we’re filtering through a lens, it’s one that we wear daily, that is, we need “fixing,” a constant social adjustment here and there, to make everything better. On top of that, there’s the new bottom line for women: we need to fix that we don’t need fixing.  Yet, paradoxically, women must get it right, constantly learning new codes and rules to play by, because “women are promoted on achievements.”  Women who want to do well while doing good are constantly learning what the rules are in order achieve.  For example, we’re still schooled in the difference between assertiveness versus aggression.  Ms. Frankel writes at length on this, arguing that women in the workplace (or building a platform) must understand that aggression is still not a woman’s professional prerogative, period.  Similarly, Ms. Sandberg quickly assumes her responsibilities in outlining all she did “wrong” on her way to the top.  With her book, she’s emerged as a paradigmatic face of women’s accomplishment, for, unlike Oprah, Ms. Sandberg has always been successfully ensconced among the boys.  Her powerfully personal yet self-correcting narrative  suggests the constant social reading that women respond to daily — from the media, other women, men, the workplace, and the list goes on and on.

We need to fix that we don’t need fixing, yet those of us striving to develop our creative or professional voices find ourselves being told to adjust our behavior in order to “Play Like A Man, Win Like A Woman,” to state the problem simply and succinctly.

So it seems to this critic.

Sound exasperating?  There’s the knee jerk reaction, right there.

As Kay Adams-Corleone would say, “This behavior adjustment thing must end.” 

I wrongly accused Mr. Trumble yesterday.  But my knee jerk reaction to his satire belies what I believe to be a deeper social reality: women are tired of fixing themselves, and of being fixed in metacritical social narratives.   Perhaps it’s my all to early onset of Seasonal Affective Disorder here in the north, but it’s old and tiring, from all quarters.

Meanwhile, I’ll be waiting for the critique on Disney princes, thank you very much.