His First Birthday . . .
. . . dead.
One year ago:
I’ve been encouraged to celebrate his life today and I’m all with that in principle, but right now he just seems long gone and me in the middle of nowhere. I don’t even feel sad: just adrift.
It’s the jet lag, stupid. (Coming back from Japan it can last more than a week.) And the confrontation with financial reality, which mercifully held off somehow as long as J was ill, but now it’s time to deal. I took the bus to the accountant’s, walking through Target’s vast empty mall again and through that landscape designed only for cars, walking along road shoulders littered with fast-food trash and along sidewalks like afterthoughts that peter out in the middle of nowhere. How different everything looks when you’re on foot and moving slowly! I’ve swooped obliviously along this very stretch of highway that I’m now crossing like an ant on an overpass. I feel cast out of power in multiple ways. For no good reason I take a pratfall on the cement and spill the rest of my McDonald’s latte, which was probably why I tripped, tossing my head back to eke out the foam.
I fall asleep in the accountant’s waiting room.
On the way back to the bus, I pass the tower after which Tower Boulevard is named, a truncated glass “skyscraper” that looks absurd to a New Yorker, as if someone jammed an imitation of the Empire State Building halfway into the earth so that only the top fifteen stories stick up. In fact, whenever we passed it I’d point it out to J as “the funny building.” This memory comes to me from faraway, with a muffled pang. It strikes me that losing someone you’ve taken care of for a long time is more like losing a child than an adult companion. You miss the routines of your own tenderness.
On the bus I fall asleep again and sleep way past my stop, waking up in “downtown” Chapel Hill. I had been craving a deli sandwich, and the bus deposits me right in front of a deli, which seems fortuitous. Except it isn’t a real deli. The “rye bread” is some kind of fluff, they have no coleslaw, they have to put the thing in a nasty styrofoam container, and they insist on giving you a choice of sides; I choose applesauce which I guess correctly will be sweetened, in fact with high fructose corn syrup. I leave the applesauce on top of a trash container for one of the surprisingly many homeless men sitting on the street in front of the terminally cute stores and restaurants among the red-eyed, self-indulgent-looking students, the young joggers who keep bouncing in place during the long push-button lights, and the older people who come in three flavors—drug-dissolute, counterculture-complacent, and Christian-prim. I realize that I hate Chapel Hill.
There is another reason why sleeping through my bus stop was a lucky break: I needed to come downtown to the place Chris took me for my new glasses, and get them adjusted, because in another bout of jet lag a few days ago, I woke up to find the glasses under me. They’ve been slightly askew ever since.
Glasses on straight again, I climb on a bus going back the other way, and what does the driver say to me but, “Didn’t you just get off the bus?”
When I tell him I slept through my stop, wishing I could explain that I’m not just your garden-variety befuddled old lady — I’m Kung Fu Granny, befuddled by jet lag from training in Japan! — he tells me I should have asked for a transfer, and says that if someone gives him $2 in cash he’ll refund my fare. That doesn’t happen, but it does remind me, in the midst of stropping my contempt for Chapel Hill, that there are some sweet things about living in a small town.
And that’s why they call it Greenwich Village.
(And with that, Jacques smiles.)
UPDATE: “Don’t Cry Because It’s Over, Smile Because It Happened.”
Commenter Mockturtle sent these words in a different context, but they’ve put a smile on my face. If something was good enough to make you sad when it’s gone, it’s worth being grateful that you had it! Mockturtle wrote:
This is a sign a woman in Seattle posted on a wine keg as her wine-making business was folding due to the economy. Her husband died of Alzheimer’s a couple of years ago. She created a special wine in his name, put his face on the label, and will give all proceeds from the sales, estimated at $100,000, to Alzheimer’s research.
Since there were no buyers for her business, she put that sign up for her customers who were disappointed she was closing. I have been pondering those words since I read them.
Yikes Wow!!
Note: I drafted this post while fact checking several articles on epigenetics, and then thought I had lost the post when my computer crashed. Now that I discover a draft of the post was saved, I can’t retrace my steps to the links that gave me such an electrifying view of the subject.
So you probably bought the notion that we are organisms physically crafted by DNA’s direction of protein assembly, whose memories, habits, and character are encoded in the electrical “wiring” of our brains.
It goes even deeper.
Turns out that the expression of our genes is almost certainly shaped and reshaped throughout our lives by our own experiences and choices. It’s beyond neuroplasticity. The very stuff of ourselves in in play.
Two paradoxically related and stunningly powerful insights spring from this. One is how profoundly life experience shapes us, and not only us: many “epigenetic” changes, as these modifications of DNA expression are called, are (are you ready?) heritable. Lamarck is smiling in his grave, and the Biblical patriarchs who noted “The father has eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” are looking smarter than we thought.
The companion astounding fact, however, is that many of these epigenetic changes are reversible, or further modifiable. That means that by changing our behavior (not that this is easy, but it is possible) we can not only change the wiring of our brains, as my friend Jeffrey Schwartz has long asserted; we can change our very substance. As profoundly as experience shapes us, that deeply can our own choices reach into ourselves and change what we’re made of.
I Am Not a Gadget. [UPDATED]
Jet lag proves it.
Awake against my will at 5:30 a.m., I didn’t plunge into the search for tax documents that is my most pressing obligation, because this wasn’t real time, this was jet-lag time — time out from sleep but also, given the wooziness, from productivity. So I started reading Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget. Tim, formerly “Theo Boehm,” read this book if you haven’t yet — you will find yourself consoled and vindicated. If you don’t want to buy it, I’ll send you mine when I’m through.
I was intrigued from the get-go, but Lanier really had me on page 27, when he nailed the most annoying characteristic of Microsoft Word, a program with a stupid, wayward arrogance that I always attribute to and blame on the personality of its creator:
If you believe the distinction between the roles of people and computers is starting to dissolve, you might express that — as some friends of mine at Microsoft once did — by designing features for a word processor that are supposed to know what you want, such as when you want to start an outline within your document. You might have had the experience of having Microsoft Word suddenly determine, at the wrong moment, that you are creating an indented outline. [Yes, yes, oh yes! This is when I yell, “I HATE BILL GATES!”] While I am all for the automation of petty tasks, this is different.
From my point of view, this type of design feature is nonsense, since you end up having to work more than you would otherwise in order to manipulate the software’s expectations of you. The real function of the feature isn’t to make life easier for people. Instead, it promotes a new philosophy: that the computer is evolving into a life-form that can understand people better than people can understand themselves.
Exactly. One of Lanier’s many insights is that this information-worship is for all practical purposes a religion, offering its own hope of immortality (the “Singularity,” when human consciousnesses will be uploaded into a machine). His response to the “digital Maoist” slogan “Information wants to be free” (even at the price of enslaving people) is, “Information doesn’t deserve to be free . . . Information is alienated experience. . . . Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information. Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn’t get what it wants.”
On pages 29–31, Lanier has a little elegy to on Alan Turing that is breathtaking and heartbreaking, “The Apple Falls Again.”
And here’s a bit of provocation for you: “Wikipedia . . . works on what I call the Oracle illusion, in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in precisely the same way and present many of the same problems.”
Read this book, so we can talk about it!
UPDATE: I’m in the middle of the book now and finding some things to criticize about it. For one thing, though Lanier has some libertarian leanings, he is basically a liberal who puts the lion’s share of the blame on the Bush years for America’s current troubles. For another, he is (like most prophets) a better diagnostician than prescriber; some of his ideas for how to fix the free-content problem (which is pauperizing journalists, musicians and the like) are pretty lame. Can you imagine paying, even pennies, every time you read your favorite blogs? How would you find new ones? Would your intellectual curiosity be constrained by budgetary considerations?
Granted, no one has come up with good solutions to these problems.
Ne’er So Well Expressed.
I’ve heard this good writing advice before (I don’t always follow it, to my detriment), in words like “Your prose should be as invisible as a pane of clear glass.” But I’ve never heard it put quite like this.
Having beautiful imagery, vibrant vocabulary, and full sensory-immersion is a good exercise for authors, but four or five hundred pages of it is too much. It’s tiring for the reader to process. Ideally, for most authors, your words should become invisible, and the story should take center stage. If the reader is continually awed by your linguistic gymnastics, your prose is competing with the story for the reader’s attention.
Bingo!
(Driven to desperation by the mismatch between the 13-hour plane flight and my 5-hour laptop battery, I read a dragon fantasy book by Patricia Briggs. I enjoyed it more than I like to admit.)
Tokyo Hello!
Sitting in a Starbucks in the subway station under Narita Airport. One of our group took a different flight via someplace cold like Minneapolis or Detroit (to score miles) and is delayed an hour and a half; our trip leader left her backpack somewhere, she thinks at the currency exchange. There goes a beautiful drug-sniffing German Shepherd . . . It’s 3:42 a.m. in your world, 5:42 in the evening here. I’m a vampire at home so my circadian rhythms are nicely in tune with Japan’s.
We traveled via NYC. Having had 1/2 hour of sleep last night (we left for the airport at 3:30 a.m.), I fell asleep in the little commuter plane, like being inside a toothpaste tube. Was awakened by a blaze of light: sunrise pouring in the plane’s right-side windows. Looked out the left side and saw the windblown blue-green estuary they call the Gateway, recognized Sandy Hook, NJ on the left and, way up at the narrow end of the funnel, dwarfed by the contours of land and water, a modest, dark, preoccupied little cluster of spars giving off puffs of smoke and the glint of one sunstruck skyscraper: Manhattan!
What an amazing reintroduction! Then we disembarked, walked into the airport and smack into a huge sign: WELCOME TO NEW YORK. I took it very personally.
(Couldn’t find my camera last night or would be showing instead of telling.)
Antidote to Islamomania and -phobia. Both.
At last! Ali Eteraz’s Children of Dust is out in paperback. Here’s the best introduction to it that I’ve seen, from The Australian.
True, Ali’s my friend. But my Amazon review is as objective as any I ever wrote:
I think it’s a pity that this book is being marketed as a memoir of Pakistan. That’s far too limiting. Yes, it gives an inside glimpse (and sniff) you won’t find anywhere else of life in a desert town in Baluchistan before and after the region began to be terrorized by militant fundamentalists. But you must realize that when he was sent to a harsh madrassa in that desert hometown of his relatives by uprooted parents seeking the anchor of piety, Ali Eteraz had already lived in Saudi Arabia as an infant and in the Dominican Republic, where his father attended medical school, as a small child. This is really a memoir of the postmodern condition of displacement, the quest for a home and a self through multiple identities, the diametrically opposed temptations of absolutism and absolute freedom. It is as much about America, an America seen through the looking glass of Islam — a stew of opportunity and spiritual danger, from Wallah Wallah to Allah-bama — as it is about Pakistan or about Saudi Arabia, where Eteraz’s life’s trajectory is conceived at the beginning and movingly consummated, in a way he himself did not expect, at the end.
While this book will give you a very particular, unsparing, sometimes very funny inside look at Islam, it also takes on universal issues: the antagonism between religion and sex; the secret collusion between zeal and ego; the profound difference between a top-down intellectual synthesis and an upwelling spiritual unity. What may be most unusual about this book is that rather than mainly satirize the follies of others, Eteraz flays himself first, mercilessly anatomizing the mixed motives that powered his precocious achievements as a scholar, lawyer, activist, writer, and reformer. He never utters Baudelaire’s words — “Hypocrite lecteur,–mon semblable,–mon frère!” — but his honesty unmasks the insecure vanity, and the tenderness and longing, that we all share.
Kafka said “A book should be an ax for the frozen sea within us.” This book shattered my defenses and softened my heart. I laughed and cried.
Shrinking Pains
(from an e-mail and a journal)
I miss J on so many levels, whether as a problem, challenge, or joy — it was all one. I feel sort of shrunken and diminished. My nervous system is used to being stretched almost beyond its limit, my heart stretched wide — passively. I didn’t have to go seeking challenge and stimulation, I didn’t have to generate it — it was plopped down in the middle of my life. My life force was entirely a response to one which was so outsized. My nervous system is just dead in the water in the absence of that. It doesn’t know what to do with itself, except put itself in the way of trouble, and there’s no kind of trouble it likes worth a damn. J was some high-class trouble.
Flashback to Birmingham!
More about the Egyptian protests, including the immensely touching role of women.
This is one of those stirring, spirit-rousing moments, like 1956 and 1968 and 1989, and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. Let’s hope and pray it doesn’t meet the fate of Iran’s green one. But even when such surges are beaten back, as at Tiananmen, they are not broken.
More. I wonder why Secretary Clinton is speaking out forcefully in support of the rights of Egypt’s protesters, as no one in the Obama administration did for the Iranians. Well, clearly the difference is strategic. But it also underscored, rather than helping to undermine, the Iranian regime’s power, no? I am notoriously naïve about these things, please enlighten me.
Must See.
The lost and found photographs of Vivian Maier. And the story, via Althouse.
Mary Poppins with a Rolleiflex.
Clumsy
If I hadn’t read this set of symptoms in a book on grieving, I might think I was coming down with a neurological disease:
Bewilderment, confusion, indecisiveness, clumsiness, forgetfulness, inability to concentrate, a reduced attention span.
I am so unbelievably disorganized. (I only notice this when I am home alone, back from distracting and engrossing visits, trying to take care of business.) I stagger around here, tripping over my own feet, completely defeated by mounds of unsorted papers, unable to find documents I could swear I put away carefully, unable to remember what I just set out to do. All tasks, regardless of size and urgency, seem to have the same bland proportions, so I can’t prioritize, I can’t put them in any kind of order or hierarchy. I mean, I do — I get things done — but it’s a senseless, blundering process, like wading blindfolded through a warehouse full of empty cardboard boxes.
Today I suddenly got why this is. God knows I’ve received enough education, here and here, to put the pieces together. It isn’t only emotional. It is, in a sense, neurological.
I’ve lost my habits.
Given the high energy cost of running the prefrontal cortex, the brain prefers to run off its hard drive, known as the basal ganglia, which has a much larger storage capacity and sips, not gulps, fuel. This is the part of the brain that stores the hardwired memories and habits that dominate our daily lives.
“Most of the time the basal ganglia are more or less running the show,” says Jeffrey M. Schwartz, research psychiatrist at the School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles. “It controls habit-based behavior that we don’t have to think about doing.” . . .
The interplay between the basal ganglia and the prefrontal cortex helps explain the resistance [to change]. . . . Doing [something] the way [you’ve] always done it draws upon the basal ganglia and burns less fuel than making a change and involving the prefrontal cortex.
What this passage doesn’t quite capture, but what I’ve read elsewhere, is that the basal ganglia are not only incredibly pervasive in our lives, but incredibly good at running things. Not all habits are bad. In fact, getting actions down pat and then hooking them to the brain’s automatic pilot enables us to function smoothly, gracefully, and efficiently much of the time, and frees up the prefrontal cortex to deal with novelty, beauty, and trouble. The habit system is what we call “second nature.” How almost unconsciously you drive a car (usually coming off autopilot in an instant if there’s a threat), how briskly you run through your daily routines, how nimbly you navigate the familiar terrain of your house and neighborhood (probably tending to take the same paths day after day), are all examples of the huge role habit plays in our functioning. Unconsciousness gets a bad rap, but you really wouldn’t want to try to drive a car on the highway with just your conscious mind.
I could intone “Habit is a good servant but a bad master,” and talk about bad habits and addictions and our power to break them (the subject of Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Rebecca Gladding’s forthcoming book You Are Not Your Brain), but that’s another post. This one is about clumsiness, disorganization, and grief. Are you starting to put the pieces together?
Fortunately, I’m not trying to drive a car with just my conscious mind. Driving and editing are among the few activities in which I still feel competent and collected. I don’t want to do anything but work because that’s the one place (other than behind the wheel) where I still have a sense of mastery and orientation.
Getting around my apartment and neighborhood, through my errands and my day, on the other hand, are all new. I have no habits that aren’t bent around taking care of Jacques, and those habits are now useless, severed, their loose ends trailing on the ground and tripping me, often into wells of pain. Here’s where I used to . . . this is when I used to . . . The emotional part of it is that relationships, once they settle in, are about habit, and habits are about relationship. There’s safety and familiarity and companionship and an almost sacramental ritual repetition in the routines you share with or perform for the other person. You inhabit those habits, and all you need to be conscious of is how comfortable and dear they are. When they’re gone, they are much of what you miss and the way you miss the other person, the way he or she is built into you.
Then there’s the neurological part.
I am trying to get through my days without habits. That’s why I’m getting through them so badly. My prefrontal cortex is really cranky at having no routines to rest on and rely on. It doesn’t want to handle all those petty decisions itself any more than the head of the household wants to mop the floor or the CEO wants to do the filing. For years my life was organized by the imperative urgency of taking care of Jacques and, if I ever did anything else, rushing it so I could get back to Job One. Outside of work, I have as yet no other driver or organizing principle for my actions, no governor on my time.
So, like a beginning driver, I lurch around spasmodically, in fits and starts, grudgingly and intermittently putting my skittish thoroughbred prefrontal cortex to the brute task of mapping out workable pathways and rhythms — making lists, having “bright” ideas like “Clean out one drawer a day.” It doesn’t help that this is not going to be my home, this place strewn with the raw ends of amputated habits like downed live wires. Any structures I set up will be strictly temporary, soon to be struck like circus tents.
It certainly is a time between.
Ambiance 