Books Life Blog

Books Life Blog tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2009-01-17:/mayas_blog//1 2012-09-25T09:20:53Z Movable Type 5.04 Inexhaustability: drink it up tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2012:/mayas_blog//1.252 2012-09-25T08:33:29Z 2012-09-25T09:20:53Z

Maya

In "Snow," Louis MacNeice wrote of "the drunkenness of things being various," but I also enjoy a drunkenness of things being synonymous. Take, for example, Karl Ove Knausgaard's experience of a painting of clouds by John Constable, recounted in his memoir, My Struggle:

[S]uddenly he is in tears, arrested by "an oil sketch of a cloud formation from September 6, 1822," and unable to explain his reaction. What is he feeling? "The feeling of inexhaustibility. The feeling of beauty. The feeling of presence." He has always been unsettled by paintings, but he has never found it easy to describe his experience of them -- "because of what they possessed, the core of their being, was inexhaustibility and what that wrought in me was a kind of desire. I can't explain it any better than that. A desire to be inside the inexhaustibility."

This passage from James Woods' The New Yorker review of My Struggle stayed with me because I did not understand Knausgaard's use of "inexhaustibility." An avid devotee of visual art myself, I did not identify with the quality that Knausgaard found so salient.

And then, as chance provided, I read Louis MacNeice's poem, "Poussin," and I understood. In "Poussin," MacNeice describes the experience of gazing upon "that Poussin" in which "the clouds are like golden tea" and "cupids' blue feathers beat musically." The motion in the painting he characterizes as "still as when one walks and the moon / Walks parallel but relations remain the same":

And thus we never reach the dregs of the cup,
Though we drink it up and drink it up and drink it up

Yes, exactly: the experience is inexhaustible. Return always and be nourished again. Our only counterbalance to mortality: drink it up while we can.

Image of John Constable's "Cloud Study: evening," from the National Gallery of Australia; image of Nicolas Poussin's "Rinaldo and Armida" from WikiPaintings.

]]> Birds of a feather tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2012:/mayas_blog//1.251 2012-09-11T15:19:14Z 2012-09-12T06:28:09Z

Maya

Among the pleasures of reading a good book is reliving the pleasures of other wonderful texts it evokes. Among the pleasures of reading The Age of Innocence was the breadth of references it summoned. More than a hundred years -- and a gulf of sensibilities, aesthetics and styles of humor -- separate the two that resonate most deeply for me: Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady, and Stephen Dobyns' "Spiritual Chickens."

Wharton's novel owes so much (including its protagonist's last name) to James' Portrait that mentioning the debt borders on pedantry. Wharton would likely be so appalled by Dobyns that the connection risks absurdity. And yet the two references serve to reinforce the same idea: that our choices about how to engage with the multi-layered nature of reality (to perceive, to deny) define us.

In Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer takes the measure of unyielding reality in a scene when she sits thinking long into the night. She has deluded herself into marrying the wrong man. She sees through her illusions to the unpleasant substance of her husband Osmond's personality. She realizes also an intimacy between Osmond and a family friend, Madame Merle, who introduced them. The sleep-deprived and hermetic intensity of her thought succeeds in disturbing the surface of her reality and rearranges the relations between herself, Osmond and Merle. Although Isabel is not ready to articulate her newfound understanding to herself, she comprehends that Merle and Osmond are collaborators in some manipulation against her.

The scene finds its parallel in The Age of Innocence when Newland Archer hosts the first formal dinner of his marriage to mark the occasion of the departure of the love his life, Madame Ellen Olenska. Newland has been blindsided by Ellen's announcement of her return to Europe, and he is barely functional:

Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd imponderability, as if he floated where between chandelier and ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings. As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless looking [dinner guests] . . . as a band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale woman on his right [Ellen] as the centre of their conspiracy. And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers . . . . He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything . . . .

Like Isabel Archer, Newland Archer arrives at this moment of revelation after a process of delusion. Unable to possess Ellen Olenska physically and share his intellectual and emotional intimacies with her in the course of quotidian living,

he had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned among his secret thoughts and longings. Little by little it became the scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him, his judgments and his visions. Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absentminded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room. Absent -- that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.

This habit of absenteeism reaches its apotheosis at book's end, when Newland Archer opts not to meet Ellen Olenska again, after 27 years. "'It's more real to me here [on a bench outside her flat] than if I went up [to meet her]', he suddenly heard himself say."

In this behaviour, Newland Archer anticipates the unnamed protagonist of Stephen Dobyns' brilliant poem, "Spiritual Chickens." Confronted by a chicken he has eaten seven years ago, a chicken returned to the earthly plain because of overcrowding on the spiritual one, a man "runs out of his house / flapping his arms and making peculiar hops."

Faced with the choice between something odd
in the world or something broken in his head,
he opts for the broken head. Certainly,
this is safer than putting his opinions
in jeopardy.
. . . .
As it is he is constantly being squeezed
between the world and his idea of the world.
Better to have a broken head -- why surrender
his corner on truth? -- better to just go crazy.

Sadly for Newland Archer, he's not as interesting as Dobyns' protagonist. He has opted to go AWOL instead of crazy, abandoned his life instead of cracking it. But the fault runs along the same line: cowardice.

A little more than a hundred and thirty years ago, Henry James set out to tell the story of a woman colliding with her destiny; today we might describe her less grandiosely, as a woman "constantly being squeezed / between the world and [her] idea of the world." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose: however worded, the situation remains the crucible of our character, and the measure of our worth. Embrace of the depths of reality yields the only guaranteed rewards of this existence ("the flower of life" in Wharton's words); avoidance reaps failure.

And The Age of Innocence? By providing the opportunity to draw a line between Isabel Archer's gloomy insomnia and Stephen Dobyns' delightful ghost chicken, the harvest has been sheer pleasure.

Image of Edith Wharton from The New York Times website; image of Henry James from New York University website.

]]> Decency above courage tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2012:/mayas_blog//1.250 2012-09-10T02:07:09Z 2012-09-10T03:33:35Z

Maya

Moralizing around Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence is difficult to resist. The book's unsatisfying resolution defies attempts to file it away under "well-constructed story about the age-old conflict between individual self-realization and familial constraint." Wharton makes so concrete Newland Archer's sacrifice of the love of his life, Ellen Olenska, that the mind demands some purpose to redeem the carnage that has deprived Newland Archer of "the flower of life." The affront of the novel's conclusion begs the question: what is the meaning of this?

Closing the book and musing on what I had learned, I was most immediately struck by how The Age of Innocence illustrates that courage is not so much a quality as a discipline. Without practice, a person cannot exercise it.

In giving up Olenska, Archer capitulates to "the old New York way" of placing "decency above courage." Decency arises from the discharge of duties, and duties in turn convey dignity: as Wharton explains, Archer's two-and-a-half decade marriage "had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty."

Dignity, of course, is necessary for human happiness and the realization of individual potential. But the dignity deriving from duty, though critical for social stability and integral to moral engagement with one's family and community, is not without its drawbacks: "The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else."

Specifically, it "unfits" one for acts of courage: by the novel's last page, Archer cannot face meeting Olenska again; cannot face his emotions so long under wraps ("He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime"); cannot face modernity ("Say I'm old-fashioned: that's enough"); cannot face reality ("It's more real to me here than if I went up [to meet her]").

The dignity of duty is necessary, but not sufficient, for a fully lived life.

Of course, in the choice between courage and decency, dignity is a common element: it flows as much from acts of bravery as from the discharge of duty. The difference arises elsewhere. Courage is a more destabilizing value to cultivate: courageous people are much more difficult to control than decent ones. But courage is also more nourishing than decency: courageous people have a much better chance both of attaining "the flower of life" and of simultaneously being good people.

Ellen Olenska herself demonstrates this possibility. She is courageous: defying social convention, and at personal and financial loss, she leaves her husband. She tries to establish a satisfying life in New York, and (again, flouting conventions) she negotiates various degrees of independence (physically and geographically, though not financially) from her family, who find her difficult to control. She is, at the same time, a woman bound by duties: she undertakes the care of her aunt, Medora (who had raised her), and she refuses any betrayal of her cousin, May Welland, despite her love of May's husband, Newland Archer. When May manipulatively reveals that she is pregnant, Ellen abandons her efforts at living in the United States and retreats to Europe so as to snuff any possibility that she and Newland can consummate their love.

Although Ellen Olenska's flight snaps the bud of Newland Archer's life before it can bloom, she herself is not so disabled. He has lost the love of his life and spends the next twenty-six years in a tomb ("a deathly sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over direct action, and of silence over rash words, closed in on [Newland Archer] like the doors of the family vault").

The indicators suggest that her fate is otherwise. She has suffered a grievous loss, certainly; but her balance of courage, dignity and duty have enabled her to enjoy a full life before Newland Archer (one enriched perhaps more by pain than joy, but she has known ecstasy as well), and she will continue to do so after Newland Archer.

Courage has fitted her for life.

Image of Daniel Day-Lewis as Newland Archer in Martin Scorsese's film version of The Age of Innocence from Gonemovie.com.

]]> Gordon's hammer tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2012:/mayas_blog//1.249 2012-05-29T14:27:57Z 2012-05-29T17:05:03Z

Maya

Gambling is a turn-off for me on a variety of grounds. First, boredom. If I make an effort, I am capable of enjoying a game of chance, but fundamentally outcomes determined by chance, rather than effort, frustrate me. And frustration is boring. Second, aesthetics. Las Vegas is vulgar. Race tracks are ugly. OTB is seedy. Lotteries are cheap.

Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule overcame my prejudices -- captivated me before prejudice came into it -- by pointedly undermining both these objections. I loved spending time in this novel -- "in" being warranted by its transporting prose that invoked a fresh imaginative space, as well as a seemingly altered physical state. I didn't take my pulse while reading, but I bet it slowed, so relaxed was the pleasure I took in the plot's unhurried unfurling. So: not boring. And: not aesthetically offensive. To the contrary, though the novel canvasses an impressively broad array of ugliness, the writing imbues life with that rare and treasured quality: beauty.

What most impressed me, though, was the novel's gentle inversion of my hierarchies. Roughly speaking, I don't respect the way addicts deal with the world. I recognize that not all gamblers are addicts, but I respect non-addict gamblers even less than the addicts: the non-addicts, at least, have some control over their behaviour.

And yet what I felt for the gamblers in Lord of Misrule was not contempt, but empathy. Luck is the nasty wild card in the pack from which we all draw. However meritorious our hand, the unworthy get lucky, and the deserving go unrewarded. This situation is reality. It's also very difficult to accept. Nor do we like to discuss it or remember it. The role of luck in the lives of every successful person is not unlike the diagnosis of a venereal disease: unspeakable, forgotten or ignored if possible. For this condition, Chekhov prescribed his hammer ("At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people").

Gordon discusses it unforgettably. Her gamblers are the unrewarded. Worthy and unworthy alike, they are undone by chance. Gambling is part of their ritual for trying to keep it together, part of their fight to thrive. Their stakes are no different from those of the Greek and Roman protagonists wrestling fate: life and (sometimes) death; but, even if not death, unbidden metamorphosis, radical change, upheaval.

Yet despite the epic stakes, these gamblers have none of the distancing glamour of mythic forerunners. Losers, all of them, they are above everything accessible. They invite embrace and seem to reciprocate, even without being lovable, or even particularly likable. In their company, the enormous role of luck comes to seem, if not acceptable, at least bearable. Even, at times, beautiful.

Image of young Jaimy Gordon from a 1983 interview in Gargoyle Magazine.

]]> Happy endings, horror-style tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2012:/mayas_blog//1.248 2012-05-27T13:36:38Z 2012-05-27T15:39:36Z

Maya

The Haunting of Hill House casts a pleasant pall, inducing in the reader a physical state of mild anxiety that seasons, as much as it quickens, the page-turning. And the book contains one truly dreadful scene that left me revolted: in the middle of the night, Nell and Theodora sit up in their beds, holding hands in the dark and cold -- holding so tightly they can feel the bones in each others' hands -- listening to ghostly babbling from the next room. Then the sound of a child being hurt and crying interrupts the babbling, and Nell summons the courage to shout, "Stop it!" At which point, the dark dissipates, the light is on, and Theodora wakes, asking Nell why she is shouting. Nell (and I!) are overcome by the question: "whose hand was I holding?" (p. 120.)

But for all the marvelous frightfulness of The Haunting of Hill House, the scary aspect of the story is not the supernatural manifestations of evil. To the contrary, the terror arises from the profound -- ordinary, realistic -- isolation that Nell suffers. Although Nell tells herself that she is a "human, . . . a walking reasoning humorous human being," (p. 120), humans are social animals, and Nell consistently endures deprivation of normal social contact. Instead of being mothered, Nell must nurse her mother through illness. Friendless and jobless, Nell lives on the despised periphery of her sister's family. Nell is so without succor that when she needs support, she thinks back to an encounter with a stranger, an old lady who promised in passing to pray for Nell.

Nell's exile from the terrain of familial, communal and social human interaction -- from the web of human connections against which our identities emerge -- from the context humans need to be human -- evokes another heroine of another iconic ghost story: the governess in Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. The governess also appears without recourse to necessary human support: her boss has instructed her never to contact him, and she seems to lack intimates (parents, siblings, friends) who can provide her with guidance. That neither woman has a paramour or husband goes without saying; indeed, the implicit assumption is that both women are virgins -- unloved, unwanted, adult innocents.

The significance of these protagonists' ambiguous social standing is not, as Edmund Wilson would have it, that socially neglected women are likely to be sexual hysterics prone to hallucinations, but that the liminal space both women inhabit is the horror in these stories. Nell and the governess belong nowhere -- no lover, people or home claims them (with the caveat that evil Hill House does exert claim over Nell, which explains part of her attraction to it) -- but they have done nothing to warrant such exile: they lack even the definition of the banished. The mechanics of their bodies function, and their physical existence confirms "life," but human life has only theoretical existence outside the context of human society. As social animals denied the "social," Nell and the governess live in earthly purgatory; like the category-transgressing "dead restored" (p. 64) -- Quint and Miss Jessel -- in The Turn of the Screw, Nell and the governess are, in a sense, themselves ghosts.

In both stories, our horror derives from the plausibility of such a fate. The supernatural manifestations and the deaths they precipitate in both books are a relief -- a venting of the tension arising from the unavoidable risk we all bear of occupying in our life times a purgatory, of finding ourselves in the borderlands between the living and the dead. By this measure, death, with its unambiguous finality, is a kind of happy ending.

That thought brought me lingering sadness as I closed The Haunting of Hill House: what a miserable person Nell was, and what a pathetic life she led. The total absence of redemption -- neither cruel nor sentimental, but simply fact -- is the scariest aspect of this book, and the way Jackson guides the reader to this culminating truth and supports our absorption of it is a triumph.

Image of Shirley Jackson from www.shirleyjackson.org.

]]> Beautiful and useful tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2012:/mayas_blog//1.247 2012-05-26T01:38:09Z 2012-05-27T01:32:11Z

Maya

David Orr: a likeable critic in my book. I've read him in The New York Times Book Review for years now, and I find him reliably worthwhile. He supports his critiques clearly and logically. His writing is impartial, light and entertaining. When he says something's good, I understand why; and when calls a bad poem a bad poem, his judgment seems fair, not mean-spirited or ungenerous.

These wonderful qualities are present in abundance in Orr's book, Beautiful and Pointless. It's a quick and lovely read, a kind of beach book for poetry lovers, and I mean that as a highest compliment. The pleasures it affords have more in common with, say, badinage enjoyed at a lively, rejuvenating high tea, than with the rewards of solitary repose in the presence of depths of emotion and intellect. Which is not to say those depths aren't there: just that their weight doesn't intrude on the fun.

All the same, I do have a complaint. In Beautiful and Pointless, Orr does not say about poetry what I think is important about poetry. And I want to have my own opinions reinforced by this delightful and knowledgeable public expert. I really wish he would have accommodated me.

What do I think is important about poetry? I'm glad someone asked. I read poetry for two reasons. First, poetry enables access to irrational terrain. Humans are hard-wired for rhythm, perhaps because of the heart, our fundamental drum. Rhythm is our sixth sense: it enables us to absorb and process information from our surroundings in a manner similar to the other five senses. And just as the taste of a madeleine sent Proust into the reverie of À la recherche du temps perdu, perception of a rhythm can guide us into the often-unnavigable regions of our irrational selves. Music and poetry are our arts of rhythm, and they open us in ways that remain closed when our approach is strictly rational, verbal and logical.

Second, the relationship between poetry and prose is one of mutual enrichment. I recall Kay Ryan saying (where, I wish I could remember) that, after waking, she would return to bed with tea and toast and prose, and read until something sparked an impulse to write a poem. Her description of her method struck me because, at the time, I was reading poems each day before sitting down to work on my second novel, The Swing of Beijing.

Nor has it escaped my notice that my favorite contemporary writers are poet-novelists: DM Thomas and Stephyn Dobyns being two of the most prominent. In The White Hotel, Thomas delivers in the long form narrative the visceral experience typically reserved for poetry. In so doing, he affords modern readers the closest opportunity they're likely to have to know how ancient listeners of epic poems felt. In Winter's Journey, Dobyns writes deceptive rambling monologues that seem like stream-of-consciousness portions of a novel, but in the aftermath resonate as if one's insides have been washed through a stream and sun dried in mountain air. I don't know if reading poetry will make me a better novelist, but I'm willing to overdose on poetry in a quest to find out.

While I'm not surprised that Orr fails to list "will make Maya a better novelist" as a reason for reading poetry, poetry's capacities to support a richer and fuller experience of our own lives (through access to the irrational) and to augment our experience of literature (through its dialectic with prose) both strike me as core competencies deserving of mention.

But Orr's focus is elsewhere. A person who writes a book called Beautiful and Pointless is, logically enough, not so engaged with the functionality of his subject. Also, notwithstanding the book's subtitle, "A Guide to Modern Poetry," the book might more accurately be termed, "A Guide to Modern Poets' Motivations." Throughout his chapters on "The Personal," "The Political," "Ambition," and "The Fishbowl," Orr explains the conditions under which modern poets work and their mindsets and goals (to the extent they can be gleaned). Orr's empathy for, and identification with, the poets is obvious and engaging.

All the same, people have been writing, reading, reciting, and enjoying poetry for all of human history. A medium capable of commanding that kind of attention is unlikely to be pointless. David Orr is a great person to make that argument. I wish he had.

Images of David Orr and Stephyn Dobyns from The Poetry Foundation. Image of DM Thomas taken by Maya Alexandri.

]]> Nameless, but not a stereotype tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.246 2011-05-18T09:48:54Z 2011-05-18T20:36:48Z

A New York Times article drew a comparison between Roman Polanski and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the connection prompted reflection on media treatment of women and girls who allege rape.As Jeffrey Toobin reported in his 2009 New Yorker piece about Polanski,...

Maya

A New York Times article drew a comparison between Roman Polanski and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and the connection prompted reflection on media treatment of women and girls who allege rape.

As Jeffrey Toobin reported in his 2009 New Yorker piece about Polanski, in 1977, Samantha Gailey - the 13 year-old girl who Polanski raped - was subjected to invasive grand jury questioning about her prior sexual activity and drug use. Her lawyer was sufficiently concerned about the trauma she would suffer on the witness stand that he advocated for a resolution to the case that would absolve her of testifying.

Thirty-four years later, the woman alleging rape has been - and will continue to be, if the law prevails - afforded a much wider scope of privacy protection. Her name has not been released in the American press (although it has been in France). Her face was not exposed to the press when she identified DSK in a line-up at the police station. And if she gives grand jury testimony, she will not be subject to irrelevant questions about her prior sexual activity.

Nonetheless, although our law has made some strides, our discourse seems to have a way to go still. Speaking to the press, the woman's lawyer, Jeffrey J. Shapiro, referred to her as "simple," as in "She is a simple housekeeper who was going into a room to clean a room." Considering that Mr. Shapiro also offered this gem - "Her story is her story, which she has told to everyone who asked her" - legitimate questions arise as to who is simple.

Mr. Shapiro also admitted ignorance about the facts underlying her asylum claim (which was granted despite the stringent interpretations given by U.S. judges to already high standards), and - even more unprofessionally - answered a question about her immigration status by saying he was "unsure," thereby potentially opening his client to a visit from the INS.

I know only the barest outline of this woman: she is 32. A widow. She is refugee from Guinea. She was granted asylum in the U.S. She has a 15 year-old daughter and a brother who owns a restaurant in Harlem. She has been employed at the Sofitel in Times Square for 3 years. She is a Muslim. She speaks French and English.

Although not mentioned in any media I saw, one reason U.S. courts grant asylum to Guinean women is that they have been subjected to - or fear they or their daughters will be subjected to - female genital mutilation. Apart from this concern, Guinea is a politically unstable country, overrun with cocaine and violence. An example: in 2009 security forces controlled by junta leader Moussa Dadis Camara opened fire on protesters, killing many and brutally raping women.

Even this scant information suggests that the woman in the center of the DSK storm is not a "simple housekeeper," but a human being who has weathered intense experiences, a survivor with capacities for adaptation and resiliency, a person who has known pain and grief, a mother, a believer - in short, a woman entitled to dignity, respect and the assumption of individual complexity that we enjoy about ourselves and that we extend to others for whom we care.

Regardless of the outcome of the legal inquiry into her accusation, whether the law vindicates or castigates her, she is not Aunt Jemima. If our discourse cannot capture her more accurately, the stereotype will not be her, but us: racists.

(Image of Jeffrey J. Shapiro from his website)

]]> IMF, international aid: screwed tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.245 2011-05-18T07:58:19Z 2011-05-18T09:23:52Z

Maya Dominique Strauss-Kahn is an economist, not a lawyer, but I nonetheless feel that he would have done well to have held himself to the lawyer's standard of avoiding even the appearance of impropriety.

Without weighing in on his guilt or innocence, I feel compelled to condemn the apparent impropriety in which he engaged. I do not refer merely to the sexual assault charge, but more broadly to the situation of the head of the IMF being accused of coercing sex from a Guinean refugee granted asylum in the U.S. and working as a hotel housekeeper. The symbolism is unmistakable: the IMF rapes Africa.

Regardless of the outcome of the legal inquiry now underway, DSK has sunk the credibility of his organization and its mission. The IMF is now an organization that overpays horny white men so they can fly first class and wear $7,000 suits and, when they get out of those suits, rape hard-working, devout, socially-disadvantaged people of color.

And by extension, the same applies to the World Bank, the UN or, for that matter, USAID. They are no different.

One's opinion of the IMF (or any of the other foregoing named institutions) - whether for good or for ill - is no matter. The IMF is a public institution, and one that exerts control over much of the global economy and its wealth. As such, the ethics of its institutional behavior, and the actions of its representatives, must be impeccable. Public institutions owe the public guarantees that their operations are ethical; otherwise they are illegitimate and have no claim to public funds.

To have betrayed this obligation to the public so flamboyantly and vulgarly is unforgivable. No verdict of innocence can expunge this breach. Whatever else DSK may have done, he has set back the cause of international development.

(Image of DSK from The Telegraph)
]]> Happiness is not all tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.244 2011-05-17T13:18:12Z 2011-05-17T14:10:41Z

Maya It's not every day that one's psychological analysis extracted from Hamlet finds confirmation in The New York Times. But today appears to be that day.

Having blogged about how the paralysis Hamlet suffers because of his existential and epistemological crisis parallels my experience in the face of unyielding rejection and failure, I then read in the Times that

when animals or people were given a series of arbitrary punishments or rewards, they stopped trying to do anything constructive. "We found that even when good things occurred that weren't earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people's well-being," [Dr. Martin Seligman] said. "It produced helplessness. People gave up and became passive."

I can relate. My experience of the world is that, regardless of my merit, effort or desert, luck - that is to say, arbitrariness - is the deciding factor in my accomplishments, both personal and professional.

Because, as Dr. Seligman says, "accomplishment [separate from happiness] is a human desiderata in itself," my situation is not conducive to satisfaction:

"'Well-being cannot exist just in your own head,' [Dr. Seligman] writes. 'Well-being is a combination of [happiness] as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.'"

Accomplishment must not, therefore, always be based on luck; but achieving this happy state requires a certain redefining of "accomplishment." For example, as a well-intentioned friend said to me of my novels, I finished them - never mind that they're unpublished and no one reads them. My friend isn't the only one to employ this technique: in Hamlet, the Danish prince makes "readiness" his accomplishment: "the readiness is all." The rest? "The rest is silence."

This coping mechanism may provide some solace, but the larger relief comes in the recognition that the paralysis is not madness: it's normal. Well being requires certain objective external conditions that, when absent, sabotage one's enjoyment of life.

That's what the doctor says. And, I suppose, anticipating that advice through recourse to Hamlet might be considered some sort of accomplishment.

(Image of Dr. Martin Seligman from Princeton Alumni Weekly)

]]> The readiness is all tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.243 2011-05-16T09:52:11Z 2011-05-16T12:16:41Z

Maya

Seven months ago, I saw the (British) National Theatre's production of Hamlet in London, and it was brilliant. The director, Nicholas Hynter, dropped the royal house of Denmark into the security apparatus of modern governments. In addition to imbuing the play with the excitement and suspense of a political thriller, this present-day setting made the power dynamics of the play come violently alive.

In keeping with the modernity of the production, Peter Holland - writing in the program's playbill - offered an interpretation of Hamlet's dilemma that seems tailored to today's psycho-analyzed, cosmopolitan, post-deconstructionist, alienated audience:

[Hamlet] approaches a paralysis of will that is the consequence of an impasse reached by his thinking: the more he is able to grasp his awareness of how he knows anything the less it seems possible to know anything at all. The process of knowing makes all truth only relative . . . . Confronted with the enormity of that crisis of truth, the only response is to "Let be," to accept the impossibilities of being human and the limits of knowing and to wait patiently for whatever comes.

The quote to which Holland refers comes at the end of the play, when Horatio is exhorting Hamlet to listen to himself and decline to fight Laertes: "If your mind dislike any thing, obey it." Hamlet responds by dismissing his feeling of foreboding, saying - in essence - we're all going to die and we don't know when, so what does it matter if it's soon? "The readiness is all . . . Let be."

I don't know if Shakespeare ever ran a marathon. I doubt it.

Nor do I have any insight as to whether Peter Holland ever ran a marathon, but he has a goatee, so I think it's unlikely.

Nonetheless, both men seem intimately familiar with the modern marathoner's mindset. After months of single-minded physical labor, abstinence from late nights, booze and any semblance of vice, the marathoner surrenders to reality: the preparation is all you can do; after that, as my brother says, "anything can happen in a marathon."

In fact, the "anything" that happened to my brother during last Sunday's marathon in Prague, was a pretty damned impressive "anything." He ran 3:15:57, which is not the kind of fate one can complain about. Had my brother gone off to fight Laertes, the play would have had a different ending.

Not so with me. My legs all but shattered, and I staggered across the finish line 5 hours, 9 minutes, and 54 seconds after I started. I never ran slower in my life. Indeed, during training, I ran 22 and 23 miles in roughly four hours; but the race was nothing like training: blisters on my toes, leg muscle cramps, and an extended stretch of walking were all present during the race and noticeably absent during training. Had I been tapped to duel with Laertes, death would have arrived on the playwright's schedule.

While I've had enough exposure to truly rotten fates to refrain from describing mine as one about which I can complain, my situation is nonetheless dispiriting - all the more so because, from the outset, I saw running the marathon as a metaphor for how I live my life, a microcosm that reveals the whole. I became attracted to this idea last year, when I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and discovered that the key to reaching the peak was going slow and surrendering to the limitations imposed by the environment. I blogged about the inspiration I drew from my mountain experience to persevere in my writing.

Unfortunately, the take-away here is less upbeat. Months of planning and work, tireless effort, deprivation of socializing and fun, dieting, forswearing alcohol, money spent on clothes, shoes and supplements - not to mention all the acupuncturists, physiotherapists, chiropractors and masseuses who toiled to get my legs race-ready - resulted in a completely disastrous performance. Enthusiasm, willpower, investment of resources: all easily come to nothing.

I thought I'd already learned this truism the hard way. Six years of work, discipline and sacrifice to write novels have yielded (a) four novels on the shelf, as of yet unpublished and unread, and (b) a state of near bankruptcy. Rejection is the only constant, and my life is so unstable that I've come to feel for rejection a wry and perverted gratitude: it's the only thing I can rely on.

It also make me want to vomit. Not just vomit, but curl up in a ball on the curb and stay there. When your rock is rejection, maybe you're better off under the stone.

Of course, I'm not the first to feel this way. I refer to the aforementioned "paralysis of will that is the consequence of an impasse reached" when "the more [I am] able to grasp [an] awareness of how [I] know[] anything the less it seems possible to know anything at all. The process of knowing makes all truth only relative" - although I add, no less painful for being relative. "[T]he only response is to 'Let be,' to accept the impossibilities of being human and the limits of knowing and to wait patiently for whatever comes."

While I'm constitutionally constrained from waiting patiently - the best I can muster is waiting in a state of thinly-veiled neurosis and sincerely-felt misery - I take the larger point. "The readiness is all" because it's all we can control. The loss of control reduces us to paralysis - metaphorically, literally or, if we're really unlucky, both. Though being without control is an aspect of reality, living in that reality without being sabotaged by it requires a mental discipline of preferring, and prioritizing, what you can control.

That's our choice: lopsided or frozen.

And here, at last, is the metaphor I'll draw: even a lopsided runner (like myself, suffering from a biomechanical breakdown in her right leg) can finish a marathon.

(Images of Maya Alexandri and Talmon Alexandri running the Prague marathon on 8 May 2011 compiled by Maya Alexandri)

]]> Bad stories about a bad man don't explain great art tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.242 2011-04-20T06:36:35Z 2011-05-02T08:51:39Z

Maya

Great artists are so frequently assholes that I have learned to compartmentalize. Ok, so Lord Byron was loathsome in his relations with women; doesn't stop me from admiring his work unstintingly.

Whether such compartmentalization is difficult to maintain or distasteful - probably a bit of both - it's not a popular approach. People prefer judgments. There's a pleasing equanimity in being able to say, for example, that because Picasso hated women, Cubism amounted to a visual violence against women - cutting up the planes of their faces and bodies and rearranging them - and that our assessment of Picasso's achievement should be accordingly tempered. In a world where bad produces bad, we find stability.

Such a world is not the one in which we find ourselves.

As a result, many people require a certain amount of creative narrative to rationalize situations in which bad produces good. Maurice Malingue is one such person.

Malingue was the editor of Paul Gaugin's letters to Mette Gad, his wife, and others. Working in the middle of the last century, Malingue attempted to reconcile aspects of Gauguin's life that were in some tension: on the one hand, he was a genius painter; on the other hand, he was an asshole.

The facts supporting Paul Gaugin's categorization as an "asshole" are as follows: After fathering five children, he quit his job, lived apart from his family and contributed little to his family's support or upkeep. He was openly unfaithful to his wife. He did not return home either when his favorite daughter, Aline, or his favorite son, Clovis, died, both in their early twenties. That Gauguin had syphilis, apparently of the variety that leads to madness, is something of a mitigating factor, though he seems to have contracted it after he set himself on the path of abandoning his family.

What Malingue made of these facts is laugh-out-loud funny to today's reader, who is at least 150 years too removed from the Romantics to be reflexively sympathetic to Gauguin's choices. Malingue has no such scruples. With a zeal unknown to generation acclimated to a divorce rate of roughly 50%, Malingue - in the Preface to Letters to his Wife and Friends - attacks Gauguin's wife, Mette Gad, and condemns her for expecting Gauguin to support his family:

[Gauguin's] letters constitute the most . . . overwhelming indictments in the trial of Mette Gauguin, who can now be charged with incomprehension of the artist, indifference towards the man, and with having as a wife failed the father of her five children.
. . . .
Mette, in contrast with wives of innumerable artists, found it difficult to contemplate poverty for herself and her children.
. . . .
It is probable that Mette, the daughter of an official, brought up with some degree of mental freedom but in the observance of somewhat rigid moral principles, never could understand how a father of five children could throw up a comfortable position without bothering what was to become of his family.

Of Gauguin's abandonment of his children, Malingue remarks:

[Gauguin] is a father who suffered keenly in living apart from his children. Obviously, he could have had them with him if he wanted to. He renounced his paternal duties deliberately, because constrained to do so by the demands of his art. The presence of his children would have imposed on him paternal obligations.

As for Gauguin's infidelity, Malingue takes a (dare I suggest typically French?) brazen line:

[Gauguin] plunged into casual amours at Pont-Aven, set up house in Paris with a Javanese, and in Tahiti bedevilled hussies invaded his bed every night.

These "bedevilled hussies" were 14 year-old girls who Gauguin took as his live-in companions. (In Mario Vargas Llosa's telling - in This Way to Paradise - far from finding his bed "invaded" every night, the aging, broke and syphilitic Gauguin, whose legs were covered with sores, and who lacked money necessary to feed even himself, struggled to find girls willing to live with him.)

Of course, Malingue is full of shit. Mette might not have been a creative woman, but she was in no way wrong (or even "rigid" in her morals) to expect financial support from her husband and the father of her many children. Caring for five children might be inconvenient for Paul Gauguin, but the existence of children - not their presence or absence - imposes parental obligations; abandoning one's children geographically does not absolve a parent of responsibilities, however much one's time needs to be devoted to art. As for adulterous husbands, at a minimum one can demand that they be discrete and steer clear of minors.

In fairness to Malingue, he lived in a different era, when he was not alone in being relatively receptive to justifying the bad acts of a genius, done in the name of his art. All the same, Malingue's thinking - in any age - is slavish and lazy, the automatic "yes" of a dazzled fan.

Today, the trend is towards the opposite error, of dismissing Gauguin's mastery because he was an adulterous pedophile and a deadbeat dad. But such reasoning would be equally slavish (to PC standards) and lazy.

We live in a world in which good can come from bad. In which - Malingue is almost certainly right - Gauguin could desperately miss his children, and yet do nothing to be with them or help them. In which Gauguin's actions can be wrong and sick, and still the general public is much the better for them.

The accurate narrative is the critical and rigorous one, the one that describes the world in its ambiguity, and that captures and conjures what beauty there is in such a world as ours. It's not an easy narrative to tell or to absorb, not a narrative that likely to gain popular currency. And yet it's the narrative in Gauguin's painting; it's the reason, in fact, that Gauguin is great.

(Image of Paul Gauguin's Self-portrait with the Yellow Christ from the National Gallery of Australia website)

]]> Audiobook recording the hard way tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.240 2011-04-10T09:52:20Z 2011-04-10T10:57:15Z

Maya Back in January, I blogged about recording my second novel, The Swing of Beijing, as an audiobook. I am sorry to say that the experience has taught me several life lessons in the manner through which I most commonly learn: the hard way.

First lesson: location, location, location! Eureka, California is about as good a place for recording an audiobook as coastal Japan is for a nuclear power plant. Quite simply, the audio engineer talent isn't in Eureka. If you want an audio engineer who is incapable of recording the spoken word inside a booth without also recording himself zipping up his hoodie outside the booth - along with picking up other technical noises, like 60-cycle hums, which shouldn't be on the track - then by all means, record in Eureka.

Second lesson: notwithstanding my default assumption that most people in the world are basically well-intentioned and doing the best they can, the world is occasionally peopled with unprofessional, unethical scoundrels. Such folk may be disguised as soft-spoken, physically-pathetic, socially-awkward sound engineers to whom one may be predisposed to show kindness. But for reasons known best to themselves, the mask slips, and they reveal themselves: in my case, the incompetent sound engineer held my master audio file hostage and demanded a ransom of more than a hundred dollars in excess of the hundreds of dollars I'd already paid him . . . for an ultimately unusable recording.

Third lesson: people who deserve to be sued don't have to be sued by you. I didn't pay the ransom, but I did retain a lawyer. And another sound engineer. The lawyer sent a demand letter, which threatened to sue the first sound engineer if he didn't return the master audio file to me. The second sound engineer meanwhile analyzed some mp3 files made from the master audio file, a process that revealed that the master was hopelessly flawed and useless.

Thus, when the first sound engineer responded to the demand letter by refusing to return the master audio file, I found myself without much reason to pursue litigation. I could ask for a refund, yes, and punitive damages, as well; but the impetus for the suit had never been money: the audio recording was my voice, my novel, my creation - and I wanted it back. If it was, in fact, unusable, then I wasn't much interested in being the instrument of punishment for the Eureka-based, unprofessional, unethical sound engineer: let adult-onset diabetes, or some other lifestyle disease related to his obesity and general decrepitude, finish him off.

Fourth lesson: the fact that I paid $1,150 to two sound engineers and an attorney and ended up with nothing isn't the kind of fact that I should dwell on. Financial loss is an unavoidable fact of life, especially for artists, and apparently for me in particular, and acceptance is the only manner of dealing that isn't going to impair my quality of life (to say nothing of my emotional calm). Instead, I will focus on this soothing, amusing quote from E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, in which Aziz says:

If money goes, money comes. If money stays, death comes. Did you ever hear that useful Urdu proverb? Probably not, for I have just invented it.

The Swing of Beijing will be available as an audiobook at some future, but as-of-yet undetermined, date.

(Photo of Alice Forney personifying the Goddess of Frustration in Relation to Sound Recordings by Maya Alexandri)
]]> Adventures in ba guan tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.238 2011-04-01T01:20:20Z 2011-05-19T11:08:31Z

Maya

"Do you fear pain?"

The woman asking me this questions was a cute, young migrant worker named Nana. She was wearing a white lab coat, and standing - with a lit firebrand in one hand and a glass cup in the other - in the cramped back room of a hair salon. I, meanwhile, was lying in my underwear on a massage table, my hair easily within combustion proximity of the flame.

"No," I replied, figuring that amusement was the only reasonable response. Nana looked confused, but after muttering how most clients were scared of pain, she proceeded with the treatment.

For the record, getting ba guan (usually called "cupping" in English) had not been my idea. Rather, a Chinese friend at the gym had recommended it. I'd been explaining how I was trying to lose ten pounds before a marathon (lighter is faster), and she told me that her ba guan practitioner guaranteed ten pounds of weight loss in a month. She added that she had purchased a series of treatment that she wasn't going to use, and that I could take her sessions for free.

Thanking her and open to trying - well, just about anything - I thus found myself in the aforementioned posture, flesh exposed to fire.

The fire was not mere theatrics. Ba guan practitioners insert the firebrand into the cup to suck the oxygen from the space and create a vacuum. They then apply the cup to flesh, and the vacuum draws blood to the surface of the skin. (In my experience, the treatment doesn't hurt.) In theory, the treatment kickstarts one's qi, getting stagnant blood moving and generally supporting enhanced metabolic functioning.

In practice, the cups were falling off my body.

Nana was becoming increasingly flustered. "Maybe ba guan is not appropriate for you," she offered. "Or maybe I'm doing it badly."

"Did you study Chinese medicine?" I asked.

"说实在的,我不好学," she replied. What she said was ambiguous: it could have meant either that she didn't study at all, or that she had studied, but had done poorly. Either way, it didn't inspire confidence.

After two sessions, I'd actually gained weight. "That's not possible," Nana objected.

"It's not a question of possible," I said. "It happened."

Nana seemed unwilling to accept this distinction. She wanted me to see her boss, who was a Chinese medicine doctor.

Dr. Tan was serious, but skeptical. "Our method shrinks the stomach," she said. "But you're eating more because your training for a marathon. Our method won't work."

I assured her that I was eating very little, and Dr. Tan began the treatment. The cups fell off my body.

"Was it me?" Nana poked her head into the treatment room.

"It wasn't you," Dr. Tan announced. "Because she [that's me, folks] is a foreigner, she has body hair that prevents the cups from sticking. Ba guan is not appropriate for her."

I didn't bother protesting that my arms and (shaved) legs were unlikely to pose body hair obstacles to cupping. Amused acceptance seemed the only reasonable response.

I didn't manage to lose the 10 pounds before I ran the marathon.

(Image of ba guan treatment from Confucius Institute Online)

]]> The books ain't helping tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.236 2011-03-31T02:46:34Z 2011-04-05T11:44:06Z

Maya I attended law school during tumultuous years when affirmative action was being phased out, and my legal education is indelibly fused with a serious dose of American race-based identity politics. I accepted the paradigm and my place within it because I believed (and continue to believe that) doing so is morally necessary; the unfairnesses of the alternatives are intolerable.

Since law school, however, I've lived overseas in environments where American-style race-based identity politics appear absurd. Racial classifications in China, India and Kenya - where I've spent most of my time since 2004 - exist, of course. Broadly speaking, such classifications are enormously crude, relatively overt and highly-tolerated by the societies. Jargon and academic methodologies haven't yet throttled these inequalities: they are facts of life. If one chooses to engage them, one does so concretely, not conceptually.

As a result of my experience, I stubbed my reading flow on the following passage in Dan Chiasson's otherwise fine New York Review of Books review of Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois' book, The Anthology of Rap:

Only in hip-hop is the age-old comedy of grown-ups trying to understand young people yoked so uncomfortably to the American tragedy of whites trying and failing to understand blacks. Age incomprehension is comic, since everyone young eventually grows old; race incomprehension is tragic, since nobody knows what it is like to change races.

I'm guessing that, thirteen years ago, when I was in the fishbowl of American race relations, these sentences would have seemed moderate and sensible. My view now is a bit different.

What strikes me first is the lack of proportion. American race relations certainly has its tragic dimensions, most saliently its violence and its capacity for depriving large swathes of humanity of the fundaments of life - including recognition of their humanity. But whites trying and failing to understand blacks isn't high on the list of "tragic" elements in the American race relations saga.

Next is the lack of precision. Chiasson begins talking about whites trying to understand blacks, but then recharacterizes the issue as "nobody knows what it is like to change races." In this shift, problems abound.

First, people do know what changing races feels like: people pass (for instance, Anatole Broyard).

But the larger issue is that achieving understanding across the racial divide and "chang[ing] races" aren't equivalent. "Chang[ing] races" is not the point: being another race is.

The question is not one of whether whites can understand blacks, but whether anyone can understand being a different race than the one into which he or she has been born. In assigning whites an empathetic task without a reciprocal role for blacks, Chiasson assumes a typical, American identity-politics "moral white person" responsibility that manages nonetheless to dehumanize blacks by exempting them from the empathetic tasks inherent in the social contract.

The obvious situation in which this variety of one-way empathy works is in the animal rights context: we're supposed to feel compassion for the rat in the cancer drug trial, but the rat has no burden of empathy for the cancer patient whose life is saved by the drug. I'll admit that I have doubts as to whether this paradigm is appropriate for animals; I have no doubt that non-reciprocal empathetic relations are not suitable for humans.

Once Chiasson's issue is framed in terms of anyone's capacity to understand the racial experience of anyone else, the issue isn't tragic, but universal. (I doubt that Chiasson would have written, for example, that blacks trying and failing to understand whites is tragic.)

The problem isn't even particularly American, but one that has arisen between peoples interacting for eons. Power and wealth imbalances between the groups are better indicators of the extent of eventual understanding that any member of either group will achieve (or not) than are classifications of "white" and "black." Only unusual people (and never the group as a whole) will deviate from the pattern set by his or her group's demographic profile.

Which brings me to my final observation about the quoted passage: its disconnect from actual interactions between white and black people. Indeed, Chiasson's next sentence is: "Growing up in Vermont, I met a total of one black person."

An empathetic attempt grounded in the concrete, rather than the conceptual - and Chiasson goes on to discuss looking up "afro" in the dictionary - seems likely to have yielded a different insight, perhaps this one: Only in hip-hop is the age-old comedy of grown-ups trying to understand young people yoked so uncomfortably to the reality that too many American whites and blacks are willing to settle for superficial relations defined by commercialism, vulgarity and distanced hyper-conceptualization.

This abstract compartmentalization of race matters doesn't defend us or protect us from whatever we fear from engaging the issues concretely. To the contrary, such extreme conceptualization only corrupts our thinking. Inevitably it implicates books in our dirty work: in this blog post alone, an anthology, a book review and a dictionary have been caught aiding and abetting.

American race relations may be the only topic as to which I would advocate: Read less. Engage more. Don't settle.

(Image of Dan Chiasson from Wellesley College website)
]]> If only "only connect" . . . tag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2011:/mayas_blog//1.235 2011-03-30T23:13:58Z 2011-05-17T11:53:16Z

In his Express review Wendy Moffat's biography, EM Forster: A New Life, Duncan Fallowell wrote that "the great and beautiful theme of all [Forster's] work [was] 'the search of each person for an honest connection with another human being.'"Certainly Forster's...

Maya In his Express review Wendy Moffat's biography, EM Forster: A New Life, Duncan Fallowell wrote that "the great and beautiful theme of all [Forster's] work [was] 'the search of each person for an honest connection with another human being.'"

Certainly Forster's theme is no secret. Indeed, his formulation of it in Howard's End is endlessly quoted:

Only connect! . . . Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Although "Only connect" obviously resonates with many people, I prefer Forster's statement of the principal in concrete terms. Here he is, explaining in A Passage to India, how "only connect" works in action, without any of the abstract "beast" and "monk" references:

There needs must be this evil of brains in India, but woe to him through whom they are increased! The feeling grew that Mr. Fielding was a disruptive force, and rightly, for ideas are fatal to caste, and he used ideas by that most potent method - interchange. Neither a missionary nor a student, he was happiest in the give-and-take of a private conversation. The world, he believed, is a globe of men who are trying to reach one another and can best do so by the help of good will plus culture and intelligence - a creed ill-suited to Chandrapore, but [Fielding] had come out too late to lose it.

Forster's description of cross-cultural connection through conversational interchange is something I recognize from experience. But the more important reason for preferring "good will plus culture and intelligence" to "only connect" is that, in A Passage to India, Forster illustrates something else I know from experience: the limits of his doctrine.

"Only connect" just isn't enough. Abstractly stated, it's easy to romanticize; contextualized in A Passage to India, it's exposed as wishful thinking.

A brief summary of the plot of A Passage to India is here useful: Fielding and Aziz manage to become friends despite the British raj. When Adela Quested accuses Aziz of making criminal sexual advances, Fielding maintains Aziz's innocence. Fielding resigns from the British club in protest of the colonial community's racist presumption of Aziz's guilt. Adela receives vulgar support from racist colonials, against which her intrinsic decency recoils. On the witness stand in court, Adela dramatically retracts her accusation. In the aftermath of the trial, Fielding houses Adela at the school where he teaches, and he urges Aziz not to sue Adela for libel. Aziz accuses Fielding of helping his [Aziz's] enemy, and years later refuses to see Fielding when he returns to India with his new wife. Upon learning that Fielding's wife is not Adela Quested, but in fact Stella Moore, the daughter of an elderly woman who Aziz loved and honored, Aziz relents in his anger, but the rupture in their friendship is permanent.

In the book's last scene, Fielding and Aziz meet, "aware that they could meet no more." Aziz asserts, "if it's fifty-five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then . . . and then . . . you and I shall be friends." Fielding questions this perspective: "Why can't we be friends now? . . . It's what I want. It's what you want." But Forster makes clear that everything in the environs - the horses, "the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion . . . they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, 'No, not yet,' and the sky said, 'No, not there.'"

As even the plot outline clarifies, the connection between Aziz and Fielding does not make manifest "human love at its height." It reveals that individual human connections devoid of social support are fragile, fleeting and unstable. The flip-side is shown by Adela Quested, who is propped up by people she loathes: social support devoid of human connections are equally fragile, fleeting and unstable. Both - as demonstrated by the ostracization of both Fielding and Adela - lead to loneliness and isolation.

I have lived this saddening dynamic myself. The vast majority of interactions that I've had over the last seven years have involved some attempt to connect across a cultural divide. The connections so achieved don't mean what I hope, or wish, or think they mean; they're superficial; they evaporate with a hint of pressure; they continually disappoint. Falling into the trap of blaming myself - I didn't try hard enough, I didn't have enough compassion - is easy, but the truth is hard.

What EM Forster could have said - what's accurate - is "Only connect, in a context that supports connection." The drawback to truth, of course, is what Forster describes at the end of A Passage to India: contexts often don't support connections. The temples, the sky, they don't want it. And if you're in a context that doesn't support the connection you want or need, then you must remake your context, which is vastly more difficult than making a connection.

To describe Forster's "great and beautiful" theme as finding individual connection with another human being does a disservice to Forster, I think. In his own life, he knew that what he needed was not an individual connection, but a gay-friendly social context. And in A Passage to India, he suffused his art with that more complicated version of his theme: "Only connect, although the connection will fail, fragile, fleeting and unstable is our portion."

(Image of EM Forster from The Daily Mail)
]]>