Ruminations on Exhaustion

.".. in the centre of our lives, this time, this day... this spring among the politicians playing cards. In a village of the indigenes, one would have still to discover. Among the dogs and dung, one would continue to contend with one’s ideas." Wallace Stevens, The Glass of Water.

RUMINATIONS ON EXHAUSTION

Just when I think it can't get worse, it does. 'It' is the current state of world politics, particularly the western world with which I'm familiar. More specifically, the US and the UK. A crushing sense of weariness threatens to drown out my belief that futility is not an option. At the moment, it feels like everything I assumed is no longer correct. In short, all bets are off.

How could I have been so stupid as to believe in the idea of progress, things getting and staying better? How could I have thought if I struggled hard enough, I'd be happy instead of tormented by an endless hunger to comprehend? How did I naively assume I'd cease struggling to reconcile endless contradictions? From what can I draw sustenance as I confront my own personal mortality along with the knowledge of the infinitesimally small part I play in the unfolding human drama?

Okay, this is a wail of anguish from a person whose own life is in pretty good shape. I'm a member of the intellectually elite middle class. I live in a city-state I love (London) with another house in northern California from which I emigrated. I have more than enough money. I have a loving life partner who emotionally supports me despite his difficulties with my restless searchings. I have surrogate sons and daughters and grandchildren who fill the gap left by own (unregretted) childlessness. I have much for which to be grateful. I try to practice this difficult emotion.

But along with gratitude and weariness, I'm enraged. I cannot take in how two such despicable human beings as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are leaders of so-called first world countries. I cannot forgive Jeremy Corbyn's stand on Brexit, (rigid spinelessness [sic] ), his refusal to make clear what a disaster Brexit will be for this small island. I'm baffled that an old white guy like Joe Biden, who plays to destructive nostalgia for the good old days, looks like the Democratic frontrunner. I'm overwhelmed by finally understanding how corporations really do run the world, how Big Tech and Big Pharma are nearly untouchable behemoths.

I'm sickened by fake news, false advertising, relentless distortion of truth, shilling on all sides by those with more money than they'll ever need extracting even more from those who can least afford it. And I'm stunned as I realize it's not inconceivable climate catastrophe will wipe out multiple species, including humans.

I react out of my own temperament which is quick to judge, to form opinions. to insist on my rightness. I recognize this to be a limitation as well as a strength, so I struggle to take in views of others who are not in agreement. I try to take a longer, larger view, and sometimes succeed. I strive to nurture others and to be generous. I find my smallness comforting. The realization I'm insignificant in Deep Time is less a matter of distress than of comfort.

I believe if history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes (as Mark Twain reputedly said). Human beings are continually messing up but then finding ways forward. And I think there are wondrous things happening in discoveries around space, time, connectedness--enlargements of the human imagination that will lead to new openings.

That is if--if we don't destroy ourselves and our earthly home before the next period of stability arrives--whenever it does and however it looks. It will take some time for this tumultuous upending of the old order to balance into new solidities. I'm sad and furious I won't get to witness what arises from the ashes of today's crumbling certainties.

Rose Levinson, July 2019

Remembering Things Past

Max and Florence

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Tolstoy; Anna Karenina

Family: Oxford English Dictionary: A group consisting of two parents and their children living together as a unit.

Not a useful concept for us psychological orphans. While later definitions broaden to include variations on the primal unit, like single parent families, there’s lots left out. And as gender identity becomes more nuanced, leading to as yet unrealized possibilities for human closeness, the conventional notion of family exhibits its meagreness even more.

In addition, for some of us the word ‘family’ is loaded with near overwhelming associations, many of them crazy-making.

My crooked life’s journey in pursuit of elusive wholeness began with the ongoing attempt to escape my family of origin, those who brought me into the world with, I assume, the best of intentions.h Actually, they didn’t have intentions. In those days, and until relatively recently, when you married, you produced children. Period. You didn’t think about what it meant to have children, how you would rear them, pay for them, guide them--let alone psychologically what they would do to you and you to them.

So in the early nineteen forties in Orange, New Jersey, my thirty-two year old mother Florence and twenty-seven year old father Max did what was expected: they produced two children. They were not young when they had us, certainly by the standards of that time. And it was not easy, constrained as they were by the demands of their parents, upon whom they relied for material support. Emotional support was in short to no supply.

Their marriage was arranged by my grandparents who met at a Jewish resort in the Poconos, each lamenting the unmarried status of one of their offspring. Pressure was brought to bear on two people whose emotional fragility might have made it far more sensible for each to forswear if not matrimony, at least child bearing. My father, I was unintentionally informed by an aunt, had been married once before. I speculate the childless union ended when his partner discovered his depression, often debilitating.

My mother, the middle child, was sandwiched between older brother Carl and ten years younger sister, Truda. Carl was awarded pride of place, a position often accompanying the status of being eldest child, comma, male. Truda was the bright-eyed baby, indulged and adored. Mother Florence picked up the pieces of a family business needing an extra pair of hands. In my grandparents’ small New Jersey inn, she helped the housekeeper polish silver, set tables, prepare rooms for guests. All this done under the commanding presence of her mother, Anna, whose steely resolve and domineering temperament made it unwise for anyone to cross her.

My mother never did challenge her, living much of her life under the weight of this unyielding matriarch, born in Russia and part of the early twentieth century’s Jewish emigration to America. Anna’s husband, my beloved grandfather David, was a benign figure, spending his days reading the Talmud. I still remember him with love and my grandmother with fear. But looking at all of this from my strong womanist position over seventy years later, I wonder how he managed to let her do most of the work while he studied and kept aloof from the business of the inn.

My father finished grade eight, and made his living as a labourer. My mother, a secondary school graduate, was a bookkeeper. When I was six, the inn was sold and we moved to south Florida.There we all lived in a house with my maternal grandparents, where Anna’s controlling presence made itself felt daily. My mother kept books for small businesses, writing numbers neatly on ruled sheets. My father unloaded trucks, chopped vegetables in the overheated kitchens of small restaurants, delivered furniture. They all lived and died in that house. I left for university and didn’t look back.

A writer’s memory is both a blessing and a curse. However inaccurate, memories of my early struggles feel like yesterday. Now there’s an urgency to put things in place, the wind no longer at my ageing back but in front of me.

Almost everything has changed since childhood and early adulthood-and way beyond that now. I’ve found enduring new families--more than one, for I have collected new families of one sort or another ever since I fled my early one. They helped make me whole. But my origins remain vivid. I look back over a wide chasm at mother father grandparents. Their imprint remains strong. I no longer wish to run away from them; harder, though, is loving them. Now I understand their agonies, I seek a more compassionate heart with which to honour my long-dead forebears.

I’ve come to believe nature plays a dominant role to nurture. The conviction comes from my struggle to be a different person leading a fuller life than my ancestors. I’ve worked hard breaking out of restricted places; progress has ensued. But I cannot escape the genetic lottery. I see a line of domineering women stretching back in time. There’s my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother’s youngest sister and myself. My mother, alas, couldn’t compete in the strong female category. Her frustration came out in anger, continuous jabbing at her husband and eldest daughter--me.

Unlike mother, I occupy a place in the strong female category, a perch often challenging-- to myself and others. I’ve forsworn trying to be the appealing ‘girl next door’ or the friendly grandmother who hands out cookies and smiles kindly upon noisy, messy children. I’m desperate to be liked and put out endless energy to engage others (using intellect and charm, not beauty). But if I have to choose between being liked and being opinionated, between being served or being heard, between being pretty or being strong--I choose the second option every time.

To the memory of my parents, I give a wistful salute, a begrudging thanks, a lingering, never-to-be-completed good-bye.

Rose Levinson, April 2019

…………………………...

---

This is the way the world ends...

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper. -- T.S. Eliot The Hollow Men 1925

Choking on Brexit, Trump, climate catastrophe; reappearance of nuclear weapons; right-wing populism; lost refugees. Grasping for a way to live with profound disorder. No matter what happens in the next decades, things will not go back to where they are in 2019, let alone where they were earlier. Too much breakage, a dismantling of a world order that held fairly steady since the end of World War II. The Enlightenment is finished. We can no longer be buoyed by belief in a steady march toward progress.

I try to envision the world fifty years from now, and can't do it. Part of this is lack of imagination; another is the limitations I experience as someone not easy with computers. I'm in awe of these relatively new technologies, how they communalize the world, their nearly unimaginable uses in medicine, space travel, artificial intelligence, art. As with the ancient discovery of fire, computers are irreversibly re-making the world. Awesome is the apt word. And this rapidly shifting world is also overwhelming, exhausting, confusing.

Topping the list of what keeps me up at night is Brexit and its toxic uncertainties. Powerlessly, I await the next steps in this self inflicted mess, dread mingled with fury.

Many have said this is the biggest crisis facing the UK since World War Two. Now, as then, the integrity of the UK is at stake and questions as to how--and if--it will function as a solitary island in a huge sea are unanswerable in full but horribly distressing in part.

The Tory Prime Minister, Teresa May, and the leader of the Labour Party opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, are both enablers of a disastrous process which began with the stupidity of David Cameron. They are not villains; neither of them wishes to do evil. Ironically, though,they are shadow images of one another. Both are rigid and unimaginative individuals whose skills are all wrong for coping in today's multi-faceted world. May and Corbyn blunder their way through a difficult situation relying on old truths they each internalized over many years.

May believes it is her duty to deliver Brexit, no matter the costs. She is, if nothing else, dutiful, a beaurocrat to the core. Corbyn, on the other hand, though a lifelong rebel against the establishment, is trapped in his own unalterable belief systems. Not adjusting core principles in sixty-nine years is less a strength than a symptom of stubborn inflexibility. May has sold out to her right wing, those who jeer her into ever more treacherous decisions. Corbyn remains true to himself. The other side of this self-regard is an inability to comprehend there are other truths worthy of attention. He argues from rigidity, May answers in the same coin, the world watches as the drama unfolds.

Where to seek comfort at least, meaning at best? My temperament drives me to forego futility as an option. Fueled by an ongoing sense of outrage (a challenging yet energizing temperament), I engage. Bravehearted Extinction Rebellion has a great slogan: 'Hope dies. Action begins.' I don't have any hope. Things will not get appreciably better in my lifetime. I'm old now, and my personal narrative will end before the next period of stability arrives--if it ever does.

Books are where I go for solace, scribbling random bits of poetry and prose. I believe language can save me, though my rational self knows words are simulacra. That's not how it feels when a sentence miraculously makes sense of the incomprehensible.

E.M. Forester is among those who bring me succor. His 1951 collection of essays Two Cheers for Democracy ( democracy doesn't yet rate three he wryly notes) was written during the run-up to WWII and just after it ended. In that time of crisis and foreboding, 1939, Forester wrote:

“Those of us who were brought up in the old order...know that order has vanished from the earth. We hope of course that a new tune, inaudible to ourselves, is now being played to the young...But on that point we get no evidence, and never shall get any. We do expect though that those who chronicle this age and its silliness, and look back from their intellectual day upon us, the tongue holders, will accord us not only pity, which we fully deserve, but disdain. “

In that same year, he observed: “...all the decent human relations occur during the intervals when force has not managed to come to the fore. These intervals are what matter….I call them ‘civilisation.’”

In between intervals, there’s light in Forester. Read him. It may help.

Rose Levinson, February 2019