Wareham, Massachusetts

There’s a deeper malaise going on, physically and spiritually, in the air, maybe long covid or long lyme, microplastics. Point five percent of what we now eat is plastic, they say. An alarm I’ve been sounding for about twenty years: from the Bahamas, its protected beaches strewn with plastic. In Chicago, in the aughts, I have a distinct and virtuous memory of using a carbon calculator. At a yoga studio in Mattapoisett, more recently, where a shiny-legged woman wrinkled her face at the hand and foot stains on my long-used and not-replaced mat, to which boat paint still adhered.

The physical pain I think sometimes is the pain of giving up writing, as sometimes I fear I am doing. I go days without penning a word, not even in my journal. Maybe that is what is accumulating in my gut. Or maybe instead I am an overwrought effete dilettante and the pain comes from giving up the idea that something will rescue us, that if I string the right combination of syllables together the world will unfold like origami, and all will be saved. The pain is my body’s realization that it is too late to be saved.

I am grieving the world we have lost, a world that is dead. Half of earth’s creatures have died in my lifetime, as I have watched, as I have tromped in Chicago boots and exhaled in Cape Cod yoga.  It is ongoing. We accelerate over the cliff, blindfolded. In Crudo, Olivia Laing writes:

We all see it coming, we are all sick, me and everyone else, the first casualties of the oil wars.

So the physical pain and the spiritual trauma are one: the flayed flesh of fish perches on my fridge rack.  Bought with someone else’s money. Bought with this green fiction that shapes our ends while life goes on around us, life goes on around me. I watch the weeds grow in the garden, unable to pull them up. The wind builds. I watch the neighbor’s house rot.

In her exegesis of Joan Didion, Elisa Gabbert says writing finds grammar for the pictures that haunt our minds. As Didion says, "The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement." Then, Delillo—"sentence by sentence into the breach." I align that hunting for the grammar of the idea with George Orwell's third reason for writing, the historical impulse. It is not enough merely to have the idea, the shimmer of an image or a story, but the story must be recorded, to the best of one's ability. The cave painters of Lascaux imprinting the record of their consciousness on the walls of caves. 

Gabbert continues:

"Writing isn’t hard the way physical labor, or recovery from surgery, is hard; it’s hard the way math or physics is hard, the way chess is hard. What’s hard about art is getting any good—and then getting better. What’s hard is solving problems with infinite solutions and your finite brain."

"Why Write?" in The Paris Review

Does sharing the ideas itself help? Help purge the ideas? And if so is that a good thing, or is it just palliative? Allowing me to buy a new yoga mat, a new pair of boots.

trigger warning—

In this episode of the Moth, a survivor retells the story of her assault and says that in telling it, it is the telling of it that is saving her, allowing her to continue to live with the thing that could have killed her, was intended to kill her. Maybe we don’t listen to rape survivors because they have so much to teach us. But we can’t listen to them, or we would need to impeach Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, the rapey men currently deciding, again, for the insides of women’s bodies and also the constitution's future. (One thing I think gets lost in this discussion is that medicinal termination of pregnancy was the legal province of midwives and women until the enlightenment, one more thing noble men took upon themselves to colonize.)

Well it’s back to the battle today

“It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.” —Dr. Maria Montessori

we try out some Montessori

I’ve been reading a lot about Dr. Maria Montessori (Italy, ca. 1900) and Montessori-based education. I’ve written about it here before. Although it can feel overwhelming, this sense that an entire child’s future rests on my ability to do parenting “right.” I read an article recently that questioned that thinking, that said that we should be thinking of educating children more as being a gardener, rather than being a carpenter. Basically: not worrying about it so much. Not thinking of parenting as a verb, as something that you do, but as a relationship. We shepherd our children, we cultivate the ground they grow in, but we’re not actually trying to shape them, as we would a board, into a specific design.

Yet: my struggle is that I feel like there are many things being done wrong by parents today. There’s this sense in the article that most parents do things more or less right, and that most children end up more or less okay. This assertion I question. I, myself, have struggled for a long time with something I hesitate to call mental illness, because it feels more common than that. It feels literally ubiquitous, in the sense that this cosmic unease—or angst, or a kind of low-level anxiety—is everywhere. Everyone has it. I’ve written about my struggles with depression, and I’ve written about my struggles with disordered eating.

It is, of course, that eternal question of nature versus nurture. When things go wrong with our children we want to blame nature, but when things go well, we think we’re doing a great job.

And I feel like many things are going wrong with children these days, and not just children, because children grow up to be adults, and adults and children together make society. There is much I see wrong with our society right now, much I believe needs to change. Maybe if we focused a little bit more on our children, on the ways in which their needs are and are not being met (or maybe I say so because I happen to have a preschooler) we might see some changes at a larger societal level.

I just hunted online for my possibly apocryphal article (which, I believe, really did make the case that the kids were going to turn out okay), and it turns out that the research is actually from a book by Alison Gopnik titled The Gardener and the Carpenter.  Maybe I heard about it on my new favorite (that’s a stretch—I have so many favorite podcasts right—but I wish to God they’d do an episode about Carl Jung) podcast, “Hidden Brain.”

It turns out that Alison Gopnik makes exactly the point I’m trying to make, much better than I could, about the problems with the carpentry method, and the gardening method that she supports is akin to Montessori.

Referring to the carpentry model, she says: “the main harm is that it makes the process -- the life of being a parent -- anxious and difficult and tense and unhappy in all sorts of ways that are unnecessary. And I think it makes it that way for parents, and it makes it that way for children… the carpentry story is one where you're so concerned that the child come out that you're not giving the child the freedom to take risks and explore and be autonomous.”

Even though children of carpenters can be considered more successful: “in some ways, they're doing much better. They're achieving more, they're less likely to take risks, they are less likely to get pregnant or to use drugs. But that goes with a kind of anxiety -- high levels of anxiety, high levels of fear …that is what you would predict from the carpentry story.”

So, Montessori. Although whenever I mention the word, especially to another mother, I find my listener’s eyes immediately shut down: already they’re hearing, “You’re doing it wrong. Do it this way instead.”

Which, in short, is what I am saying. But I’m not saying: worry more about how you’re parenting. I’m saying: trust your children to follow their own path. Prepare their environment, make it safe, and then get out of their way. Don’t worry about whether or not they’re doing the right thing, but trust that what they’re doing meets their current developmental need, whatever that is.

I find it so difficult to put this essential Montessori principle into words. It is, as Dr. Montessori wrote herself, the “secret of childhood,” but the more I learn about it the more I see these principles borne out by research again, again, and again, not just for children, and not in work that uses Montessori terminology. It seems to be not just the secret of childhood, but the secret to happiness, to contentment, to joy.

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Take, for instance, the idea of focus. That particular intense concentration that children use in order to grow, to explore, to learn to do the things that they need to do in order to be complete human beings. The focus that a baby has when she is learning to crawl, or walk. It is one of the things that initially drew me to the practice, all the blogs with moms showing pictures of their children with what I now call Montessori face: a look of intense focus. Of inner drive and determination.

independent baking

"We cannot know the consequences of suppressing a child’s spontaneity when he is just beginning to be active. We may even suffocate life itself. That humanity which is revealed in all its intellectual splendor during the sweet and tender age of childhood should be respected with a kind of religious veneration. It is like the sun which appears at dawn or a flower just beginning to bloom. Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life.”  --Dr. Maria Montessori

I’ve begun to think of those moments when my daughter is in deep focus as sacred. To interrupt her, to ask her if she needs to drink some water, or to teach her how to construct a tower, or to say we’re leaving for the library— any of these things interrupt the neural pathways that she is building, the pathways that she will use for the rest of her life when she is deeply immersed in something invaluable to her.

In short, it is flow. I take for granted that you’ve read Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow? Or that, even if you haven’t, you know what I mean? Flow is that right-brained state an artist enters into when he is painting, or a writer when she is writing, or a violinist when he is practicing. Full immersion into a timeless eternal state, where one may as well not be in one’s body. Again and again, in study after study, in book after book, I read about flow as being the one essential element to happiness. People are happy in their jobs when they can find flow. In their lives, when they have a hobby that allows them to slip into that state. That old saw “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is about flow. I keep reading self-help books, and they constantly refer to the concept of flow, and how essential it is to recover true contentment. (Designing Your Life is the book I read most recently that mentioned the concept.)

We say what we most want for our children is happiness, but really we deprive our children of the concentration that brings it, every chance we get. When they’re born we immediately pack their playrooms with every possible brightly colored electronic gadget that sings and dances, with rotund jovial cartoon animals that never occur in life, with screens and noise and color and sensation—anything to distract them from the horror of life— that must be what we really believe, right?—and then we wonder why they’re unable to put their own toys away, why they can’t sleep, why they’re having tantrums, why they’re so upset. All they need is a calm, safe place to discover the world and all we offer them is distraction.

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Take, for another, the Montessori idea of self-reliance.

Or self-trust, self-motivation, self-esteem — whatever you call it. The idea that I can know myself, deeply, intimately, and believe, at an intuitive level, that I know what is right for myself. I have come back to this self-reliance in my own life as I’ve begun intuitive eating, learning that my own body’s fullness and hunger signals can be trusted. Again, it is something that reoccurs in my reading so often, especially on the self-help websites I frequent: the number one predictor of happiness is intrinsic motivation.  (Like here!  Link: "Self-Reliance Is the Secret Sauce to Consistent Happiness")

Anyone can be shamed into doing anything. It’s a method of force, like physical pain. As soon as no one’s looking, though, we’re going to go back to the thing that we really wanted. When we become ashamed of ourselves, we lose our ability to trust our inner intuition. For a child, self-trust depends on learning that the way I want to play the blocks is a manifestation of my own imagination, and of no one else’s. It means teaching children that their desires can be trusted, and followed, and that they lead where they should go.

It’s one of the things I’ve read about early-childhood education that has the most data to back it up: this understanding that saying “good job” actually subverts children’s sense of self, because it takes away their ability to rely on their own intuition and motivation.  Link:  "How Not to Talk to Your Kids," by Po Bronson

"In short, 'good job!' doesn’t reassure children; ultimately, it makes them feel less secure." --"Five Reasons To Stop Saying Good Job," by Alfie Kohn

"Excess praise can be damaging to our children's intrinsic motivation (working just for the pure pleasure of it -- not to please anyone else)." --"Break the Good Job Habit" by Aubrey Hargis

It’s so counter-intuitive, right? Because we’re saying that what the child is doing is good! We’re supporting him! We’re telling her she SHOULD trust herself! Aye, there’s the rub: US adults, from the outside, telling children what to do, what’s good, what’s bad, instead of allowing them to discover the world for themselves.

The reason we don’t say good job is not because we don’t think our children are doing a good job. It’s because we don’t want them to be reliant on other people to think that they’re doing a good job. We want that sense of satisfaction to come from inside, rather than from outside.

"Lest there be any misunderstanding, the point here is not to call into question the importance of supporting and encouraging children, the need to love them and hug them and help them feel good about themselves. Praise, however, is a different story entirely."  --Alfie Kohn

I continue to struggle with praise as an adult, as a writer. All I want as a writer is external validation. In the form of publication, or an agent or an editor telling me that my words are worthy of reproduction. In the form of money. In the form of an audience, of you, reading these words. It’s not enough for me simply to write them, to produce them for the joy they give me, the sense I have of order coalescing as I organize my sentences. I want you, reader, to tell me “good job.” Preferably in the comments.

So. Is it any surprise that I want something different for my daughter? Something different than what was given to us by our parents, and what I’ve consistently watched other people give their children: shame, and guilt, and constant reliance on external validation.

A brief story: we toured a Montessori school (Bridgeview Montessori) and the director said that she’d sent her daughter to Montessori preschool, but then to kindergarten at a traditional school. When she and her husband figured out that it wasn’t working for their daughter, they brought her back into Montessori school.  Even in that one brief year, she had unlearned this ability to trust her own intuition, her reliance on intrinsic motivation, her own inner sense of self. The girl would bring her drawings up to the teacher and say: isn’t this good? Is this what you wanted? Is this how it should be colored?

The Montessori-trained teacher would have to answer: what do YOU think? Is it good for you? Is that how you wanted your drawing to come out? Can you talk to me about it?

That’s after one year. Only one year of traditional school.

“...it's particularly ironic because school was actually designed as part of trying to get people trained for an industrial world. In a sense, school was designed to make robots, in that it gave people skills that now robots are capable of doing. And in a post-industrial world, exactly the skills that we need -- innovation, creativity, risk-taking -- are exactly the ones that we're not encouraging.”  --Alison Gopnik

When I say I want this self-trust for myself, I mean that I’m thinking of starting remedial Montessori workshops for adults. Because I have 41 years of that kind of programming to counteract. It’s why yoga has been my heart-song for the last however many years. In yoga, the teacher says: allow your body to be what it is today. Listen to your body, the same way in Montessori we say: follow the child. In yoga, the lights are off and I’m on my mat myself, no one to impress, no teacher to show off for. Even though 99 percent of the time, I’m thinking: did that impress her? Or: oh no, I’m not doing it right.

The other crazy thing about Montessori is how it actually works. Every principle that I’ve taken seriously and implemented consistently has had unforeseen benefits and astonishing success. It works.

The irony is that articles about teenagers all essentially say the same things. Have good boundaries and agreed-upon limits with your children. (Montessori: freedom within limits.) Teach them how to do things themselves rather than doing them for them. Give them autonomy and responsibility rather than helicoptering all over the place. It seems like so much of what we’ve done with the millennial generation, all the evils that are blamed on them, is exactly the opposite: our fault. The boomers, the Karens. We’ve given them no freedom--not to go outdoors, or to get jobs, or to hang out with their friends--and instead have given them limitless addictive technology that may literally be killing their brains.  ("God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” says Sean Parker, Facebook's first president.)

"...that parent can take on the most important role of parenting, that of teaching the child to take care of himself by demonstrating how it is done."  --"When It's Time for Them To Get a Life," by Jim Fay

"An emerging adult who takes the time to deeply reflect and raise their own self-awareness about their innermost desires can be guided by them if they have at least some clues from listening to who they are and what they value.”  --"How To Help My Young Adult Find Their Purpose," by Jennifer Miller

"While some parents may think that they are helping their children to make better decisions and to fix the consequences of their actions, research has shown that parental codependency may alienate children from their own feelings and distance them from self-determination. Ultimately, parents may want to consider setting up boundaries for their children, and also for themselves."  --"Failure to Launch," by Mark Banschick

I become more and more frustrated because not everyone shares this view. The first two essential parts of Montessori education are prepared caregivers and a prepared environment, and I fear I am giving my daughter neither. I do my best, but I’ve been taught to be a voiceless people-pleaser my whole life, and despite my attempts to the contrary, I am not always finding the courage to speak up in favor of autonomy, and joy, and creative freedom, for her or for myself. Plus, these things are effing expensive. I applied for financial aid at a local Montessori school and was told that their financial aid maxes out at 30 percent, meaning if we were to qualify for the maximum, and send Sagan to school part-time for three days a week, school would still cost $5000 a year. This, despite Dr. Maria Montessori explicitly designing the method for poor children.

Then I read the data about how important Montessori is, and how it’s even more effective when children come from disadvantaged or impoverished backgrounds.  It can erase differences between income levels.  “The difference in academic achievement between lower income Montessori and higher income conventionally schooled children was smaller at each time point, and was not (statistically speaking) significantly different at the end of the study," says the National Institutes of Health.  "The Montessori Method is not only superior to all alternatives, but categorically so," says America Magazine, in this article.  "The scientific link between executive function and school success couldn’t be clearer, but the real opportunity lies in taking that science out of the lab and putting it into practice inside the homes and classrooms of our youngest learners," says Mind in the Making, a nonprofit founded by Jeff Bezos (himself a Montessori alum).  

Still, despite the evidence of these and many other studies, education in this country is not based on science. Nothing in our country is based on actual scientific data, least of all the precious minds of our most vulnerable. As a country, we continue to use outmoded, outdated, hundreds-of-years-old traditional pedagogy.

Meanwhile, I’m watching the elementary school in our community be torn down and rebuilt with a $90 million state grant. Money that would pay for 1400 teachers, or to retrofit our public school into a Montessori one, as this low-income school in rural South Carolina did.  (Link:  "Public School Makes the Case for Montessori for All.) It feels like a purposeful attempt to ignore the reality of what is involved in good education for all children. Because a well-educated populace would mean that people have the courage to become active. They wouldn’t be consumed by anxiety and diseases of despair, cocooned inside their houses and their devices. Freedom means the courage to take action: against climate change, against racism, against children’s concentration camps.

“How can we speak of Democracy or Freedom when from the very beginning of life we mould the child to undergo tyranny, to obey a dictator? How can we expect democracy when we have reared slaves? Real freedom begins at the beginning of life, not at the adult stage. These people who have been diminished in their powers, made short-sighted, devitalized by mental fatigue, whose bodies have become distorted, whose wills have been broken by elders who say: 'your will must disappear and mine prevail!'—how can we expect them, when school-life is finished, to accept and use the rights of freedom?”  --Dr. Maria Montessori, Education for a New World

I'm on fire

Plymouth library--my new studio

I'm back now, and it feels like during the last month I slipped into an alternate dimension.  I used to have that same experience upon leaving from or returning to boarding school--this bewildering sense that one day a person can exist at one point on the planet, and, mysteriously, through an uncanny process called travel, can arrive at a completely different point 24 hours later, as if the other place never existed at all.  Of course it goes without saying that everything can change in a day.  Yet there is a real feeling of solipsism:  can this world have really existed unchanged while I was gone?  Can that other world really be existing without me?

You close your eyes and poof:  everything is transformed around you.  And yet nothing changes.  Here I am, back at the Plymouth library, my writing desk when I can get to it in Massachusetts--different and yet the same from my studio in Vermont.  Louder.  When did libraries abandon their prohibition against noise?

I listen to ambient drone to drown out the chatter:  but I did that in Vermont anyway.  I look out at snow instead of a snowy river.  I feel like my time away fed me in surfeit, a nourishing abundant meal of time, respect, creative energy, positivity.  The sheer numinous power of fifty artists independently working by following their least inner voice cannot be overstated.  Here I feel that lack.  The distraction of having to fend for myself when it comes to food and caffeine, the distraction of driving--the sensory overload in even having to walk past stacks and stacks of books in the library--all of these burdens were relieved from me in Johnson.  As Richard Wilbur said:  these things "Call to me now. And weaken me. And yet/ I would not walk a road without a scene."

The things I came back to again and again in my conversations with fellow residents are the two things I come back to again and again on these pages--my current ongoing obsessions:  climate change and Carl Jung.  I am afraid about climate change.  That inner voice of my subconscious, the voice that Carl Jung first named for me--that voice is a conscience that cannot be silenced.  It points me to ever more revolutionary, incendiary words.  The world must change or be destroyed.

And the only way for it to change is for artists to hold the mirror up to our exhausted consciousness, the tired materialist mind of our culture, and to say:  look.  This is what we are.  We are tired and we are depressed and we are sick.   We are beings made of both flesh and spirit, mind and soul, consciousness and unconsciousness.  Integration--health--for us as individuals and as a culture comes from facing that which we are most afraid of--our darkest demons, the other, the chaos of the uncontrollable unconscious, the failure of our civilization, the stark fact of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere--and absorbing this truth into ourselves.  And then awakening.  Becoming active.  Changing.

Johnson, Vermont

My room at the Vermont Studio Center

It is my fourth day here.  Every step here has felt a sloughing off of skin. On Sunday, as I moved in this direction, passing through Massachusetts and into the mountains of Vermont, I felt like I was moving back in time, or deeper inside myself. Already I find myself hungering after my work, the work that I’ve postponed for so long.

I am typing these words in a studio named after William Matthews.  Every morning, when I don't oversleep, I go to the meditation room and sit, smelling incense, doing my best to think of nothing.  After, I come to this studio with a blessed expanse of hours--thirteen, if I was to use them all--just to write.  My studio is small with a view of the Gihon River.  The Gihon, which in the Bible flows from Eden, and which here flows from Eden, Vermont.

I watch a coalesced skim of surface ice float by.  Last night it was 23 degrees below zero, with a windchill of minus 40.  I relish this cold as if were a rare wine.  I have no excuse to be outside.  Frequently the internet goes down.  I have no excuse to be there either.

Meals are prepared for me, shopping is done, I am cleaned up after.  I pace my room.  I rest my head against the window and watch the ice.  I read.  I post chapters on a corkboard.  I comb my sentences for excess words, again and again.  My fellow artists sculpt wall-hangings made of patchwork salvaged wood, sew metal, experiment with traditional oil technique and sing on the side, and take full-semester classes on Old Testament literature with Marilynne Robinson.

This morning, in explaining to a fellow resident why I prefer yoga to Pilates, I said it was not for the exercise but for the self-forgiveness it cultivates.  Last night, in a lecture on creativity and meditation, Jon Gregg, a founder of the Vermont Studio Center, told a story about Pablo Picasso.  Picasso, when asked what the most important thing was in his life answered simply:  self-trust.

These two things:  self-forgiveness and self-trust.  They're what I'm here to learn.

A poem for you today, by William Matthews, in whose spirit I write:

On the way to the rink one fog- and sleep-thick
morning we got the word fuck spat at us,
my sister fluffed for figure skating and I in pads
for hockey.  The slash of casual violence in it
befuddled me, and when I asked my parents
I got a long, strained lecture on married love.

Have I remembered this right?  The past is lost
to memory.  Under the Zamboni’s slathering tongue
the ice is opaque and thick.  Family life is easy.
You just push off into heartbreak and go on your nerve.

And the gun that’s hanging on the kitchen wall, dear

New England Christmas -- fourteen pounds!

On the beach, during my childhood in Thailand, we celebrated Christmas.  We went and ate shish kabobs and sunned ourselves.  We played ping-pong with other missionary kids from other Christian schools scattered around southeast Asia.  I read Agatha Christie novels and built sand castles.

We did not feel guilty.  Yet it was other people’s sacrifice funding our tropical vacation.  At some point during my childhood, maybe when someone else pointed it out, I realized that all of our income came at the mercy of strangers.  We went “home” to the States, on furlough, to raise money from churches.  These churches, and their elderly members, or families much like ours, working-class families, or wealthy families, or friends—all of them “supported” us.  They gave us money because they believed in what we were doing, evangelizing Buddhist Thailand, and their hard-earned savings funded our barbecue crab dinners and beachfront bungalow.

It sounds sordid, maybe—but only if you don’t believe in what we were doing.  And we did believe.  We believed with all our hearts.  My parents continue the same work, now living in Islamic Indonesia, where people keep framed photographs of Osama bin Laden enshrined on their walls.  There they run a Bible school, in a country which has a regular history of mass slaughter of its Christian minority.

Now I’m doing the same thing.  Asking for “support” from people who believe in what I’m doing, merely to fund my life, merely to fund what I believe in.  And I’m getting it.  I am absolutely blown away that today, with 6 days left of my Kickstarter campaign, I am at 68 percent support.  It feels great, and it also feels terrifying.  Because if people believe in me, then that means I actually have to do the work.  Do my work.

Books about creativity frequently talk about fear, not just fear of failure, but fear of success.  Because being successful means inviting people in, to see the work.  Being successful means that the bar is raised.  Being successful invites rejection and critique.  It means accountability.

Accountability, or the lack of it, is the hardest part of being an artist alone in the world.  I’ve never missed a day of scheduled work—and by that I mean any one of many menial office jobs, or bar-tending, or waitressing, or my numerous other minimum-wage jobs—any job where I had to clock in and report to a boss and had FICA taken out of a paycheck.  Maybe I occasionally showed up late, I took personal days—but I met my obligations.  I called in.  I knew I had to be there so I was there.  But working for myself is a different story entirely.  Why is it so much harder to meet an obligation to myself?

Also, I feel guilt.  If other people are funding my life by their sacrifice, what right do I have to sit in front of the television?  To take days off?  To eat shish kabobs or play ping-pong?  I do not share my parents’ certainty of belief.

Instead, I find myself returning an old prayer, again and again:  Lord, I believe.  Help Thou my unbelief.

After having prayed I believe for a little while longer.  This whole experiment, discovering a community of friends, friends of friends, family, blessed strangers—maybe can make me believe in myself.  One friend, an old friend, my first donor, wrote a beautiful email that said:  the patrons of your art demand such boldness.  And they do.  You do.

[Give here:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/casting-off/artist-residency-at-the-vermont-studio-center-1]

Don’t be afraid

Were Keats’ final words.  More light, more light—the dying words of Goethe.  Fear not, was what the angel Gabriel said when he appeared to Mary, and the command most often repeated in the Bible.  How many times do I have to hear it?

And still I am afraid.  Occasionally I have moments of boldness.  As today, posting a Kickstarter campaign, supporting the fiction residency to which I was accepted this month.  I’ve been at this business, trying to build a career, trying to publish, for ten years now, but this is the first time I’ve actually come out and ask anyone for money—what if all of you say no?

The Vermont Studio Center has granted me $2100 to attend their residency program for a full month:  including room, board, and most precious of all, my own personal writing studio, with desk, chair, privacy, quiet, silence, and space.  But an equivalent amount is mine to match, mine to find somewhere in the dwindling free digital economy.

In my video (watch, to hear me read you a story), I say:  "I know, from personal experience, the ways in which writers are finding it harder than ever to make a living.  Traditional publishing has been upended, and publishing companies are finding their budgets and staff cut yearly.  Yet the demand for content—satisfying, beautiful, well-made content—is at an all-time high."

I can say that I am alive, working as a writer, but am I making a living?  I am alive by the grace of God, by the grace of my dead grandmother, by the kindness of family members and strangers.  Making a living means people actually buying my work.  Choosing to spend their money on it rather than on a coffee or a donut or a mortgage payment.

Writing as a career is a diaphanous veil over an abyss.  Since I was a child, I’ve been told to give up, that I’ll never be successful financially as a writer.  My grandfather started his own publishing company to put his exegetical theology in print, a publishing company that’s slowly going out of business even now.

The things I create do not exist in any space except in your own mind.  Jonathan Safran Foer said, in an interview I attended, that writers are artists that paint on the canvas of other people’s subconscious minds.  The terror of the internet age, as Gillian Welch tells us, is that everything is free.  If everything is free, then how shall any of us eat?  But the terror of the internet comes with corresponding beauty: it puts the power into the hands of the masses.  Into your hands.  What we want is ours to ask for, ours to ask the whole universe for.

J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter while on welfare.  She trusted in her work enough to demand that the British taxpayer to pay for it.  I’m just asking you.

So go check it out.  The worst that can happen?  Utter humiliation and a big fat goose egg.  Nothing to be afraid of.

[Edit to add a link to the campaign--realizing I forgot to include it last night.  Clearly I'm a beginner at this:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/casting-off/artist-residency-at-the-vermont-studio-center-1]

Might as well keep going now

Courtesy of s/v Estrellita 5.10b

Okay, so I’m going to move on to what I’m supposed to be working on and writing about:  the boat.

Spirit, not at sea

A boat under progress is not very photogenic.  Note the pine needles, the antifreeze bottles full of tap water  used as weights, the carelessly hung rags and ratchet straps and cleaning accoutrements.  Doing boat work in the middle of a pine forest is likewise not very easy.  Every day starts with clearing the pine needles from whatever needs to be worked on.

I am resentful and angry about boat work.  I didn’t want to buy a boat.  I was happy with my little farmstead and office in Maine, and I was burned so badly by the last boat that I didn’t think I could ever trust a new boat.  I remember how my heart broke last time.

I remember that the day-to-day reality of boat life involves mammoth amounts of brute physical labor.  Cleaning.  Plumbing maintenance.  Cooking with limited ingredients and space.

And still I want to sail, not because I actually want to sail, but because I am still hungry for adventure, for travel, because my peripatetic urge is never satisfied.  I want to cross an ocean.  I want to drop luffing sails in the harbor of the Azores.  I want to traverse the Suez and Panama Canals, cruise the Mediterranean, round the great Capes, cross from Newfoundland to Ireland.  These are things I hunger after.

In Stephen King’s “On Writing” he says, of his wife:

In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I'd like to think I've done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tie-breaking vote when you just can't decide what you should do next.

As with a writing life, what really matters in cruising is who you choose to do it with.  I know, from meeting many grounded sailors, that what most often gets in the way of achieving a sailing dream is not hurricanes, or pirates, or broaching whales—but unwilling partners.  Your feet get tied up to the ground, not by roots, but by people.

And now I am one of those people.

I believe that the thing that entranced so many [elderly, male, ex-] sailors about the voyage of sailing vessel Secret is that I—the nubile female blog heroine—wanted so desperately to keep sailing and my partner did not.

This indecision has been a problem for a long time between us.

A Wharram catamaran sings her siren song for me, at her port in Phuket.  So does the idea of a beach camping cruise along the Mexican coast.  The Continental Divide Trail.  Cyprus, where my grandfather is from.  Bangkok, always.  Not to mention the best gift K. ever gave me, a writing room.  Again, King:  “Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream.”

Also, famously, he said:  “Write with the door closed.”

Virginia Woolf, much more famously, said:  “All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point — a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.”

Worst of all, I remember that a boat has no door that closes.

[Well, there’s a head, smelling of holding tank, but certainly not a private writing room, not a place where you go to dream.]

I’ve been reading boat blogs, trying to get a handle again on this life that I’m not sure I’ve quite chosen again, and all of the sunniest cruising and travel blogs open with whimsical romantic stories of carpenters meeting bookworms, or spur-of-the-moment decisions over beer and pizza, or one partner convincing the other that what they really needed was a sailboat:

“I have long had a dream of going cruising in a sailboat and have gradually lured Mark into this dream.  His response has ranged from all smiles to the rare bout of kicking and screaming, but he finally agreed to purchase a boat a year ago.”  —s/v Groovy

“In May 2011 Tammara and I made the decision to purchase a sailboat to sail and live on and eventually take her down the west coast…  It is our dream to one day voyage across oceans to distant and foreign lands.  We hope to achieve this with our new boat.”  —s/v Lynn-Marie

“Have you ever dreamt of running away to live on a tropical island, spending your days basking in the warm sunshine while sipping piña coladas? We have. In fact, our dream included running away to live on a sailboat in the tropics, even though when we started we had never even sailed before!  Zero to Cruising is the story of how we took that dream and made it a reality. Follow along... you can do it too!”  --s/v Zero to Cruising

“Our goal is to share meaningful thoughts on simple living, to help sailors with life aboard, and to inspire others to chase their own creative dream through honest and uplifting writing.”  —s/v Sailing Simplicity

I find that so much of actual life aboard—which is constant interpersonal decision-making—gets left out of these blogs.

Then there’s the much more honest s/v More Joy Everywhere, posting shortly before deciding to sell:

“These blogs are all written by people who are younger and prettier and smarter and more creative than we are.  They fix engines, install solar panels, sew cushions, grow sprouts, revarnish their teak, and understand how their systems work.  In their spare time, they sketch, make jewelry, write poetry, play the banjo, kayak, scuba dive, take fabulous underwater pictures, and never watch television.”

It’s easy to paint a romantic vision of life aboard—all sunsets and dolphins and glowing teak and tranquil anchorages.  It’s easy, when one is parsing a life a post or two at a time, to focus only on the beautiful things.  It’s why everyone, in our age of social networks, has a chronic diagnosis of FOMO.  We see everyone else’s gorgeous handmade children’s crafts, or snapshots of family vacations—we don’t see the dirty dishes, the arguments, the days spent in front of the television, the exhaustion, the chaos.

Some of the most inspirational and optimistic blogs drift slowly off into the ether with no explanation as to what exactly happened to the pina colada dream.  Some others, as with the second example above, have posts stop soon before the Sailboat Listing appears.  [Click here for a great collection of blog posts about cruisers who decide to quit.]

You’ll know, if you’ve read for a long time, that I love to write about being covered in poison oak, or boat poop explosions, or frigid Maine winters.  It’s the part of life that’s interesting to me.  What interests me about life—what interests me about travel—what interests me in literature and film and art—are the things that are difficult, the things that are hard, the challenges remaining to be overcome.

I know that I want to write, as I’ve always known, but as I said to Karl, when we first met:  I can do that anywhere.

He asked me what I did for a living, what I was, and I said:  a bum.

He asked me to live aboard a boat with him, on our first date, and I said, with no hesitation:  yes.


Sailing is a full-time job.  Boat work is a full-time job.  Writing, too, is a full-time job.  So what then?  I wrestle what time I can from the ether, and I use it to put words on paper, or onto a screen, or I stare into space and avoid putting words on paper or onscreen.  I miss my grandmother’s typewriter.  I miss my office and my desk and my view of the drained beaver pond.  I miss my literary dog and cat.

Can I really do it anywhere?  I guess we’ll find out.

And I guess, dear reader, you can always trust me, yours truly, to delve my hands deep down into the dirty painful nitty gritty of life, can you not?  I commit to you that I’ll continue to explore the dark side of life afoot or a-sail—at least a sunny post or two a month at a time.

One too many mornings

A big part of me doesn’t believe, still, that “depression” exists.  According to the New Yorker:

There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it…  There is suspicion that the pharmaceutical industry is cooking the studies that prove that antidepressant drugs are safe and effective, and that the industry’s direct-to-consumer advertising is encouraging people to demand pills to cure conditions that are not diseases (like shyness) or to get through ordinary life problems (like being laid off).

Louis Menand’s article, a review of Gary Greenberg’s book, “Manufacturing Depression,” continues:

Greenberg basically regards the pathologizing of melancholy and despair, and the invention of pills designed to relieve people of those feelings, as a vast capitalist conspiracy to paste a big smiley face over a world that we have good reason to feel sick about. The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it’s all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains—that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one. Greenberg is critical of psychopharmacology, but he is even more critical of cognitive-behavioral therapy, or C.B.T., a form of talk therapy that helps patients build coping strategies, and does not rely on medication. He calls C.B.T. “a method of indoctrination into the pieties of American optimism, an ideology as much as a medical treatment."

In other words, “depression is not a mental illness. It’s a sane response to a crazy world.”

According to Wikipedia:

The term "depression" is used in a number of different ways. It is often used to mean major depressive disorder but may refer to other mood disorders or simply to a low mood…  The diagnosis of major depressive disorder is based on the patient's self-reported experiences, behavior reported by relatives or friends, and a mental status examination. There is no laboratory test for major depression.

Essentially, it doesn’t exist, right?  But then there are days I wake up when I am unable to move.  Not literally, of course—I can roll over in bed, wiggle my fingers—but I don’t.  I lie there and I don’t move.  I think of all of the reasons I should move, or the things I could do that’d make me feel better, but I don’t do them.  I can’t bring myself to.  I rehearse a list of things I know to do, things I know help—heat, light, reading, baking, sitting in the sun, yoga, taking a long hot bath or a shower, going to a cafe or a library—but all of them, even the thought of them, even the first step towards them, feels like dust in my mouth.  I can’t move.  I don’t even pee when I need to pee because it requires too much energy to move to the bathroom.

In an earlier New Yorker article, “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” Andrew Solomon writes about his experience with his depression:  “My vision began to close.  It was like trying to watch TV through terrible static, where you can’t distinguish faces, where nothing has edges.  The air, too, seemed thick and resistant, as though it were full of mushed-up bread.”

I know that feeling.  For me the air feels resistant like mud, or like trying to swim against a current.  Motivation is a central problem.  I can think of a lot of things that make me feel better (writing, sunlight, a walk) but it is impossible to motivate myself to do them.  Or it’s possible but I can never do it.  Or I can do it sometimes, just not when I’m in the darkness.  In the hole, the bottomless pit, that Townes Van Zandt sings about above, so effortlessly.  The old lady catches me.

“Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?” asks the Psalmist.

When I’m in the pit, pulling myself out is like trying to find pull myself from quicksand, use my own body as leverage.  It’s impossible to find any purchase.

Of course I can get out of bed.  It is possible.  It is not impossible.  And yet I don’t.  I lie in bed for hours—literally—not moving, thinking about doing something and not doing it.  Some days I can.  Some days I get up and take arms against the sea of troubles, even when it feels like moving through molasses.  Like swimming while drowning in a sea of mud.  Other days it is impossible.

In the wake of Robin Williams’s death, everyone is talking about depression, but not many people are saying anything useful.  Several times I’ve heard commentators say:  “just so we’re clear, ‘depression’ is a mental illness, not ordinary sadness or ‘feeling blue.’”  And I think:  oh, so what I have is just ordinary sadness.  Even when I’m not feeling sad at all.  Even when I’m feeling nothing inside but darkness, and heat and pain inside my head without actually experiencing heat or pain.

I’m sure Robin Williams and David Foster Wallace and everyone all thought they had ordinary sadness right up till the end.  How can we tell the difference when we’re in the middle of it?

Even Solomon writes, as he recovers, with the help of a vast pharmacopeia:  “I have felt blue sometimes, and on some days I have chosen not to work on this difficult subject…”  But how does he tell the difference?

I find it challenging to talk about, not because I feel guilty or ashamed, but because I don’t believe it exists.  I do feel guilty about my coping mechanisms—computer games and television and food—all things that other people assist me in feeling guilty about.  I feel guilty about my presence on the planet, about myself as a waste of space.  I feel “all the typical symptoms—hatred, anguish, guilt, self-loathing.”  But I don’t feel ashamed of the presence of the miasma itself because I don’t believe in it.

It’s also difficult to talk about because there’s nothing anyone can do to help.  Antidepressants don’t work.  Talking to other people just spreads the disease, if it exists.  Depression is contagious.  Why should I drag anyone down inside the pit with me?  I hate reaching out for help because then I have to admit that the only thing inside is an echo because all that exists in there is a big black hole and I can’t tell anyone without dragging them down too.

I’ve been feeling this way for twenty years, if not longer.  I wept the night before I turned ten because I realized my childhood was over.  Oh, wait—I was just feeling blue, right?  Even as a child, I felt something like nostalgia, a deep eternal grief at the passage of time.  I remember learning the word “melancholy,” and the idea that someone could be a “melancholic.”  I remember thinking, oh, so that’s what I am.  I developed obsessions that I treasured close to my chest, and when I shared them, carefully, and was rejected, I plunged into despair.  I lay in bed crying, before the age of eleven, telling my mother and sister that I had people who loved me, but no one who liked me.  How could they?  I remember listening to Puff the Magic Dragon and weeping:  Jackie Paper came no more!  Therein lay the essence of life’s tragedy!

Some days I wake up okay.  Other days I wake up unable to move.  Everyone blames negative thoughts, as proponents of CBT, and the power of positive thinking, believers in the pieties of American optimism, do:  change your thinking, change your life.

Andrew Solomon writes:

Once upon a time, depression was generally seen as a purely psychological disturbance;  these days, people are likely to think of it as a tidy biological syndrome.  In fact, it’s hard to make sense of the distinction.  Most depressive disorders are now thought to involve a mixture of reactive and internal factors;  depression is seldom a simple genetic disease or a simple response to external troubles.  Resolving the biological and psychological understanding of depression is as difficult as reconciling predestination and free will.  If you remember the beginning of this paragraph well enough to make sense of the end of it, that is a chemical process;  love, faith, and despair all have chemical manifestations, and chemistry can make you feel things.  Treatments have to accommodate this binary structure—the interplay between vulnerability and external events.

Vulnerability need not be genetic.  Ellen Frank says, "Experiences in childhood can scar the brain and leave on vulnerable to depression."  As with asthma, predisposition and environment conspire.  Syndrome and symptom cause each other:  loneliness is depressing, but depression causes loneliness.

For me, negative thinking is merely a symptom.  If I feel like things are hopeless I find a reason for why things are hopeless and I can find plenty.  But the hopeless feeling comes before the negative thoughts.  Sometimes the negative thinking catches me in a cycle and drags me deeper into the hole, but it’s almost worse when I feel nothing but emptiness and just like there’s nothing inside, not even negative thoughts.  And I can’t convince myself to do anything.

Since I was a child I’ve felt like suicide is a brave move, a way of using actual physical weapons against the sea of troubles, as Hamlet is the first to suggest.  “The ultimate hallmark of depression,” an “obsession with suicide.”  I think of those who have—Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith, David Foster Wallace, Aaron Swartz, Vincent Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf—as secret brothers and sisters.  On bad days I pore over their Wikipedia pages.  Those who had the courage to tell the truth to an empty, hopeless world.

Solomon:

…the particular kind of depression I had undergone has a higher morbidity rate than heart disease or any cancer.  According to a recent study by researchers at Harvard and the World Health Organization, only respiratory infections, diarrhea, and newborn infections cost more years of useful life than major depression.  It is projected that by the year 2020 depression could claim more years than war and AIDS put together.  Ant its incidence is rising fast.  Between six and ten per cent of all Americans now living are battling some form of this illness;  one study indicates that nearly fifty per cent have experienced at least one psychiatric disorder in their lifetime.  Treatments are proliferating, but only twenty-eight per cent of all people who have a major depression seek help from a specialist;  fifteen per cent of hospitalized patients succeed in killing themselves.

Watching Robin Williams movies helps.  It’s odd to me how many of them deal intimately and sensitively with depression and suicide. My favorite movie as a teenager, and maybe still, is "Dead Poets Society," and I was powerfully affected by two of his other movies, not as well known:  "What Dreams May Come" and "World’s Greatest Dad."

In “World’s Greatest Dad” Robin’s character writes a suicide note and then gets to see what happens afterward—in some ways, it’s a suicide’s watching of his own funeral, a fantasy wish fulfillment.  He says, presciently and half-sarcastic:  “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”  But what if the problem’s not so temporary? 

In “What Dreams May Come” we get to see what happens after a suicide, too.  But this time from the other perspective.  From below the ground.

“What Dreams May Come” was horribly reviewed when it came out and still has a 44% rating on Metacritic.  I beg to differ with the reviewers.  Many parts of it terrified and entranced me when I originally saw it—joyful jumps through big messy wet swaths of color in heaven, walking on the disembodied faces of those in purgatory who don’t realize they’re there.  Since Robin’s suicide, I can’t stop thinking about the part when he dives down from heaven into hell, through an increasingly creepy and macabre dreamscape, where finally, at its very bottom, he finds his wife, who committed suicide.  She’s been sent to hell not because of her suicide but because of her own tendency to create “nightmare” worlds, the same tendency that led her to suicide to begin with.  She’s all alone, in darkness, living in a twisted version of their house, visibly tortured by her surroundings.

That part stays with me.  Because it’s what depression is.  When I’m there, I’m all alone, and nothing anyone could say could help or change anything.  Suicide and depression are really the same thing, because depression is already hell.

Jane Kenyon, a depressive and a poet, writes:  “Unholy ghost, you are certain to come again… and turn me into someone who can’t take the trouble to speak;  someone who can’t sleep, or who does nothing but sleep;  can’t read, or call for an appointment for help.  There is nothing I can do against your coming.”

In “Brothers Karamazov” Dostoevsky posits that heaven and hell are now, determined only by our frame of reference.  We are not condemned to hell in some future time;  if we are condemned to hell, we live there now.  The same with heaven.  Christ Jesus said:  “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.”  Here, now.

Dostoevsky:

“That life is heaven,” he said to me suddenly, “that I have long been thinking about;” and all at once he added, “I think of nothing else indeed…  Heaven,” he went on, “lies hidden within all of us—here it lies hidden in me now… we are all responsible to all for all, apart from our own sins, you were quite right in thinking that, and it is wonderful how you could comprehend it in all its significance at once. And in very truth, so soon as men understand that, the Kingdom of Heaven will be for them not a dream, but a living reality.”

Spoken by a character who committed murder, a murder he’s been hiding:  “I know it will be heaven for me, heaven, the moment I confess. Fourteen years I've been in hell.”

And here are words spoken by Father Zosima a prophet, a poet, a priest—someone who echoes both Christ and Buddha for me:

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending…  I ponder, “What is hell?” I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love...  there are some fearful ones who have given themselves over to Satan and his proud spirit entirely. For such, hell is voluntary and ever consuming; they are tortured by their own choice. For they have cursed themselves, cursing God and life.

Those "fearful ones" stay with me. “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a Spirit of love, of power, and of a strong mind.”  2 Timothy 1:7

I love that trinity.  Love, power, and a strong mind.  If I can have love and power and a strong mind, then I live already in the kingdom of heaven.  If I fear, then I live in an ever-consuming and voluntary hell.

But I fear so much, all of the time.  As Solomon writes:  "It’s possible to distinguish between anxiety and depression, but according to... a leading expert on anxiety, 'they’re fraternal twins.'"

A quote from Tina Berger:

I often explain it this way. If you go and visit a Western-trained psychologist for seemingly inexplicable anxiety, he or she will most likely ask you about your life and your job and your family of origin. You may receive a diagnosis and plan of treatment. The treatment will likely involve relaxation and stress reduction, perhaps some additional talk therapy to address past emotional wounding, and you may be referred to a psychiatrist for medical treatment with anti-anxiety medication. You may or may not find the source of your anxiety. Whatever the recommended course of treatment, unexplained anxiety is generally seen as a pathology here in the West. If you have anxiety and you can’t source it to an immediate and direct problem in your life, the general assumption is: something is wrong with you.

An ecopsychology-based perspective takes a much bigger picture view of anxiety, considering questions like, “How sane is it, to have no anxiety as such beautiful species of plants and animals disappear from the planet one by one?” “How sane is it to have no anxiety when we know children are dying unnecessarily from starvation in many parts of the world?” “How sane is it that we work such long hours to continue acquiring so many things that we will throw away in less than a year?”

How sane am I?  Not very.

One last Solomon quote:

At a cocktail party in London, I saw an acquaintance and mentioned to her that I was writing this article. 

"I had terrible depression,’ she said. 

I asked her what she had done about it.  

"I didn’t like the idea of medication,’ she said.  "My problem was stress-related.  So I decided to eliminate all the stresses in my life."  She counted off on her fingers.  "I quit my job," she said.  "I broke up with my boyfriend and never really looked for another one.  I gave up my roommate and moved to a smaller place.  I stopped going to parties that run late.  I dropped most of my friends.  I gave up, pretty much, on makeup and clothes."  I was looking at her in bewilderment.  "It may sound bad, but I’m much less afraid than before," she went on, and she looked proud.  "I’m in perfect health, really, and I did it without pills."

Someone who was standing in our group grabbed her by the arm. 

"That’s completely crazy.  That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.  You must be crazy to be doing that to your life," he said. 

Is it crazy to avoid the behaviors that make you crazy?

Jane Kenyon writes, of emerging from a devastating depression:  “With the wonder and bitterness of someone pardoned for a crime she did not commit I come back to marriage and friends…  to my desk, books, and chair.”  She writes, of ordinary contentment:  “What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment?  How I love the small, swiftly beating heart of the bird singing in the great maples;  its bright, unequivocal eye.”

So I make plans for a half-suicidal foray across the Atlantic.  Or I make sense of the world through art, as Townes van Zandt, the patron singer of depressives, did.  He also drank himself to death aged 53. Ernest Hemingway, with his shotgun, beat him by nine years.  Robin Williams beat him by ten.

Mawlamyine, Burma (Myanmar)

Decaying colonial mansion

Today I'm looking out over the delta and islands along which George Orwell once walked, the river heading into the Andaman Sea.  I chose to stay in Mawlamyine for three days partly as a kind of pilgrimage (see the masthead), to breathe the same air that George Orwell breathed, walk the same streets that he did.  On the day I arrived, the Breeze Guesthouse owner informed me that the building where I slept, and the surrounding buildings, are a hundred years old.  Well within the time that Orwell-then Eric Blair—lived here.  Did he drink afternoon tea in my bedroom?  (Not likely.  It was more probably servants' quarters.)  Did he make social calls on the balcony where I eat breakfast?  Did he stroll along the oceanfront boulevard, arm-in-arm with a lady and her parasol?

I wandered among the streets on a self-made tour.  His grandmother lived in this city all her life. Her house allegedly exists still, but no one knows where.  Every grand old example of colonial architecture I passed I imagined was it.  And say what you will about colonial fascism (and Blair said a lot), its architecture is grand.  This city may be my favorite example yet, better than boutiquified Georgetown and Luang Prabang.  Mawlamyine's grand old buildings are decayed, decrepit, rotting, their elegance and glamour somehow only enhanced.  Georgetown and Luang Prabang have already been recolonized by the nouveaux riches, but this town is real, authentic, hungry.

Never mind that the riverfront, below the gracious tree-lined colonnade, is covered in heaps of garbage, a festering noxious street-side landfill.

“Shooting an Elephant,” an essay I've never managed to read all the way through (do it yourself, if you dare—it's out of copyright, free for the reading, but I quail about the eleventh paragraph—see if you can make it farther) is set here.

It begins:  “In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people.” 

Critics believe his five years in Burma shaped the rest of his life, shaped his constant and unflinching opposition to totalitarianism, in all forms.  His first three years he spent farther to the north, in perhaps less polarized conditions, the setting of Burmese Days, his first novel.  There he learned Burmese, with friends saying he was able to converse fluently in “high-flown Burmese” with priests.  During his early rural posting he imprinted himself with blue circular knuckle tattoos, a common preventative against bullets and snake bites.

He continues in his essay:  “The sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.”

I feel echoes of the same visibility now, in the attention paid me.  The comments hooted after me are “helloes” and “I love yous” but it still gets badly on my nerves, on occasion.  Annoying occasionally, but not really so much, not in this town isolated from tourism for so long.  Mainly what I feel is gratitude for my presence, for the coming presence of tourism.

Attraction and hatred, two sides of the same coin—the same inability to see each other merely as people.

Blair was a cop, an ambassador of the system he despised:

At that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.  The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been bogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts.

For one thing this paragraph is perfectly written.  Each sentence follows the next as inevitable as a windstorm.  The entire essay is perfectly written, fierce profluence, one thought following the next inevitably.  That's why I can't finish reading it.  Especially the distance in his tone, a distance that allows the unsayable able to be said.

But he is graphic about how the unsayable affected him, and despite any internal conviction to the contrary he was hated and hated back.  Maybe the Stanford prison experiment has become a cliché, but in case you haven't heard it:  in the seventies a psychologist staged an experiment that set two groups of college students against each other—some were assigned as guards, others as prisoners.  In less than a week, the guards began inflicting psychological torture on the prisoners.  They took away their clothes, attacked them with fire extinguishers, prevented them from emptying buckets filled with human waste, confined them to dark closets, and refused to allow them to use their own names.  After only six days the psychologist discontinued the experiment intended for two weeks, as a third of the guards began exhibiting truly sadistic qualities.  The conclusion being that setting one group in power against another alone instills violence and hatred between the two groups.

I have a nascent political theory about post-traumatic stress and culture, that entire groups and subsets of oppressed and oppressors experience post-traumatic stress as collective entities.  We have a sense, in the west, that these ex-colonial countries just need to get their acts together, find democracy, the same way believers would tell people they need to find religion.  But the way most ex-colonial countries govern themselves—specifically, Burma—was modeled to them by us, by the colonial powers, with our white man's burden and noblesse oblige.

In Dawei, a Burmese friend Caroline (not her real name) showed me a pdf presentation for a business she’s enlisted in. 

“Taiwan,” she said, as if that proved its legitimacy.

I hope it’s not a pyramid scheme she’s bought into, but I have no way to know.  It involves door-to-door sales, a la Girl Scout cookies or Amway, of things like healthy herbal teas and skin creams made from odd plants.  One slide showed the arches of McDonald’s as a golden symbol of franchised success the world over, and she displayed it proudly to me on the same day I read of a riot in front of the Oak Brook corporate headquarters of McDonald’s, right down the street from where I used to work at a development organization.  I’m fairly sure I ate lunch at the same plaza where the riot happened.

I showed her images of the riot, trying to explain.  She looked bewildered.  McDonald’s is the Holy Grail here, as all American companies are, beacons of the kind of success Burma is reaching after.  I was able to explain with judicious use of my Myanmar phrasebook.

“McDonald’s president rich,” I said.  “Workers poor.”

“Same in Myanmar!” she exclaimed.  “Government rich.  People poor.”

I could have adapted Orwell’s line:  “All people are equal.  But some are more equal than others.”

Maybe we don’t torture anymore, unless it’s of accused terrorists in Guantanamo, or girls enslaved for our sexual pleasure, or Bangladeshi sweatshop workers locked in firetraps for our cheap clothing.  We have our own cowed, grey-faced prisoners—they’re just all black drug dealers.  We hold ourselves at a distance from our crimes so we can justify them.  Ignore the coming Holocaust brought about by our carbon dioxide waste.

Oppressive oligarchies are the same everywhere.

Our new capitalist colonialism, our consumer empire--the future tourist onslaught--is a welcome distraction for people here from the “younger empire” that supplanted the British.  But when every restaurant begins selling banana pancakes and every shop elephant pants—when Burmese people realize that, despite our dollars, their culture is dying, I wonder what their response will be.  I am still a colonialist, colonizing with my culture and money.  I float in the ether of my class, a class that allows me to travel for pleasure even with an income below poverty in the west.  I bring change.

The metal road was building and where it was impassable the Ford car took the bullock track;  here and there we splashed through shallow streams.  I was bumped and shaken and tossed from side to side;  still it was a road, a motor road, and I sped along vertiginously at the rate of eight miles an hour.  It was the first car in the history of man that had ever passed that way and the peasants in their fields looked at us in amaze.  I wondered whether it occurred to any of them that in it they saw the symbol of a new life.  It marked the end of an existence they had led since time immemorial.  It heralded a revolution in their habits and their customs.  It was change that came down upon them panting and puffing, with a slightly flattened tyre but blowing a defiant horn.  Change.      —Somerset Maugham, Gentleman in the Parlor

 I feel I have more to say about this--a lot more.  But no matter how much I write, I can't find a way to express just how Orwellian both modern-day Burma, and its counterpoint, the industrialized west, have become.  It's one of these things that takes time to tease apart in words.  It took Orwell ten years for his essay.

Beach Retreat Day 7

Women carrying bamboo

On my second day here, a woman and her two daughters approached me on my porch for water.  I gave them most of what I had, a full liter.  Then they asked for tobacco, or the betel-nut-tobacco combination that most people chew here, giving them mouths like blood.  I didn’t have any, of course, but at that moment the delivery man showed up with my lunch:  two boxes of food, a coke, and a cooler full of coconut water.  I felt so guilty, like I had done something wrong, just with my plenty.  He gave her a banana-leaf-wrapped chunk to chew, and they walked on, unable to communicate.

As the week has progressed, my solitude has begun to feel less so.  I am not alone.  This beach is for people who work, who fish, who carry water-logged bamboo logs cushioned on their heads, who gather shellfish and hermit crabs at low tide.  One day, as I lounged, watching the sunset, I saw a man hunting something along the water:  he would spy something and then tiptoe, high-legged, towards it, like a parody of someone hunting.  He dug into the hole he found with a stick, and if he found what he was hunting, he’d pull it out and throw it against the sand, hard, with surprising violence.  Then beat it to death with his stick, then coil it—a sea slug or sea snake?—with others in a plastic bottle.

Others walk among the garbage, collecting glass.

This culture is one of hunter-gatherers, people living on the verge.  Two dogs adopted me, primarily because I give them fish scraps.  I don’t think anyone else feeds them.  They have bony ribcages, lean frames.  They spend most of their day sniffing around for snacks amid the refuse.  When I don’t have bones to give them, at night they whine quietly in the sand.  I think they’re hungry.

Beach dogs

And here I am, amid this scrounging society, a writer.  My purpose begins to obscure.  What good am I, Bob Dylan asks, if I say foolish things?  Anything I sang, he says, you can say it just as good.

Today, my last afternoon, I found a bench along the ocean and lay alone with my iPod, listening to Ray Bradbury, an audiobook I brought along.  When I sat up I was surrounded by women in longyis, one of them the old woman from that first day.  I noticed now that she is also missing an eye.  Her socket sagged empty, the skin closed around it.  She asked for tobacco, I think.  I didn’t have any.  She asked, from what I understand, if I was alone—bringing her two fingers together and then separate.  I motioned to my heart, to my bungalow, saying:  just me.

I don’t feel the envy of my alleged wealth here, not nearly as much as in Laos, or even in Thailand.  Instead I feel pity from Burmese people.  I may be rich in material goods—but I suffer from a poverty of companionship.  The woman nudged my ridgerest, feeling its cushion, grazed my bag with her fingers, then went to work, knocking barnacles off the bamboo logs she had stacked nearby.  She seemed to be the forewoman, and hacked notches into the bamboo, so other women could drag them down to the surf, could carry them on their cushioned heads.  All of them had lean, hungry, chiseled muscles, supermodel physiques.  For what reason they carry the logs I don’t know.  It seemed arcane to me, mysterious.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I pulled out my sketchbook and drew.  I thought of ripping out my drawing and giving it to her, but what good would that do?  Would she even understand?  And besides, I was selfish of the pages in my sketchbook, the book I’ve carried for four months and only used for the first time today.  I was selfish of my own drawing.

Beach drawing

She could see what I was doing, but I can’t imagine what she thought.  Did she think:  stupid fat farang thinks that’s work?  Or did she think, as I did:  she’s doing her work, and I’m doing mine?

Some days I can think of it like that.  On good days, when I can think of what I do as a kind of calling, when I can face the truth inside that cheesy cliche.

Another book I read this week, an ebook, was Dodie Bellamy’s the buddhist.  A quote:  “The buddhist once asked me if writing was my religion, and I said no, writing is not my religion.  I don’t know what religion is for me. Writing is my calling.”

My kingdom for that kind of confidence.

I came here for solitude, for writing, and all week my solitude felt invaded, compromised, by well-meaning solicitous Burmese people.  My friend from Dawei showed up with three companions and took me out for coconut and crab.  Various people invited me for rides on their motorcycles, invited me to share meals with their families.  I refused them all,  attempting graciousness.  Other than garbage-pickers, I haven’t seen anyone else alone.

People here don’t seem to understand being alone—my loneliness confuses them.  Is it just that I’m American?  Have I fully absorbed rugged individualism as an ideal?  The one part of Asian culture I could never get behind is communalism.  While I applaud the idea in principle, I could never live the way Thai people do, multiple generations crowded beneath one roof, everyone up in everyone else’s business.  In Thailand, people have children just so they have a place to live when they get old.  They plan their children’s births based on astrology, so their golden years will be comfortably padded.  I don’t think I can live with my parents, or with any fictional children, long-term.  Even living with one person  I love gets to me, most days. Small-town gossip destroys me.  I love my anonymity, and my desire for travel rears its head as soon as I lose my status as a stranger.

As the lone representative of my culture here, what must they think?  That Americans are a lonely breed.

I’ve chosen this loneliness, and still my longing for companionship exists inside me like an ache.  Yet I know:  if any others were here with me I’d be turning towards them for validation, approval, comfort.  What does he think?  What does she want me to do?

I’ve written about artist dates before, the prescription given my Julia Cameron in Artist’s Way:  two hours, alone, each week, to do whatever the hell you want.  Truly alone.  No children, not even a dog.  Just yourself to please.

My favorite artist date in Chattanooga was the independent film series at the movie theater downtown.  I loved everything about it:  driving downtown along the curving highway in my Miata with the top down, parking in the garage, the adrenaline rush of walking down the concrete stairs alone, each time remembering that horrific rape scene in the Sopranos—and then sitting all by myself, in the darkened theater.  Even there I got strange looks, the occasional come-on.  Who’s that strange girl here all alone in the middle of the day?  But I adored it, the silence, the popcorn all for me, and the response to the movie utterly my own.  Even now, the movies I saw then are among my favorites.

Once I convinced my friend Ellen to come along.  I really wanted her to; I practically begged.  I thought it could only make it better.  And though I loved seeing the movie with her, sharing it with her, it changed the experience completely.  Instead of being fully enveloped in my own response, I was thinking about her.  Did she like that line?  Did she get that joke?  What did she think?

Being alone sharpens my attention to my own desire.  But it also makes me feel shame.  Spending a week alone at the beach, just like going to a movie alone, feels utterly profligate.  What good can it possibly do?

Another side of communalism:  the shame it engenders.  I hide in my room when I see Burmese people outside because I’m ashamed of my bathing costume.  I had to walk down the beach, out of view of prying eyes, to lay prone in the sun (something I was brave enough to do only twice).  My favorite part of watching the movie alone was that it was in the dark—no one could see my profligate selfishness.

I’m an alien in a strange land.  I still don’t know why I keep putting myself in these situations where I am completely alien.  I like to think it’s because I’m more comfortable inside when the alienness of my exterior matches the alienness of my interior.  I’m more comfortable when everyone else can see that I don’t belong.  In the States, when I do things wrong because I don’t belong, no one understands.  Here I have an excuse.  I am unique by definition.

Still, uniqueness breeds isolation.  Isolation breeds loneliness.  And I am lonely.  This is what I’ve wanted for so long.  Meals delivered me.  Complete freedom to make my own choices.  And yet…

The truth is that I still don’t know how to balance being alone with being around other people, how to balance others’ needs with my own.  I don’t know how to do that, and it makes me sad, because I need other people in my life, but as soon as I let them in they consume me.

Tonight, a giant cricket lands on my mosquito net.  Other crickets croon outside.  The surf rolls, unceasing, to my right.  I have leftovers in styrofoam boxes for dinner, leftovers I’m afraid to eat on my porch because I have to hide them from the dogs.  Tomorrow, back to civilization.