Random

The beach is quiet in the early morning. Early is 7:30am. We finish our coffees and complete a bit of work. I’m writing something though I don’t know how to define the pages yet. It is hard work and the beach calms me. This morning we were sitting alone; there was no one else in chairs or on towels or blankets. Walkers and runners moved quietly along the sand with some grace; I note that the tide has begun to come in and soon where we now sit will be flooded with water and we will move our chairs back a yard or two.
            Most enjoyable is to watch children at the water. I see them run down the beach—apparently young children do not walk and almost always head out in a run to and from the water’s edge. The littlest children just plop themselves down in the shallowest part and shout out loud their joy. Often there are adults following them down, but the ocean here especially in low tide is shallow and the danger of drowning low. The children splash about, slapping their hands in the water, turning over to lie on their bellies and allow the tired waves to wash over them. Theirs is an innocence I enjoy. Older children dive into the waves splitting the waters with their arms and head. Theirs is a happiness I envy.
             Slowly the beach comes alive. Umbrellas and beach chairs are planted in the sand by attendants from the beachside hotels. We have not ventured into one of the supposedly rentable chairs yet: we set up our rickety beach chairs from the Airbnb and they are sufficient. Surf schools set up their canvas tents and unpack the rentable surfboards. When the tide is high enough and the waves roll in more forcefully than they do now, the schools become active and as high tide waves in mightily there can be thirty or forty surfers out their attempting to stand up on their boards and ride the waves. Most surfers manage only a few seconds upright and to my mind, limiting as it is, the effort seems greater than the pleasure. Ord maybe the effort is the pleasure but usually the surfer falls awkwardly off the board and into the wave and the board flies upwards only to be pulled back by the cord wrapped about the surfer’s ankle. And I consider that maybe the surfers are playing in the water the same as do the children, splashing about and diving into the waves and allowing them to wash over them. Occasionally, someone with greater skill surfs in twisting and turning about on a high wave. Even so, the ride last ten seconds . . .  

I’m trying to write here and unlock something though I do not know what that something might be. I’m vomiting up whatever seems to be in my mind hoping the force will unblock the reservoir. Austerlitz says, “But now I found writing such hard going that it often to takes me a whole day to compose a single sentence, and no sooner had I thought such a sentence out, with the greatest effort and written it down, than I saw the awkward falsity of my constructions and the inadequacy of all the word I had employed.” I know the sentiment well, but I recall that Austerlitz is responding to severe trauma and I am just merely frustrated. Every word Austerlitz puts down, he says, sounds false and hollow but mine just seem empty. I think of Prufrock’s worry when he wonders if she will say, laying her head upon the pillow, “That is not what I meant at all;/That is not it, at all.” Sometimes when I cannot find the words to say I let someone else talk for me. And sometimes I read so that someone can help me learn what to say.

I read in the paper today that a spacecraft the size of a phone booth has landed on the moon. I wonder who of a certain age would know what size that might be since phone booths no longer exist except in television shows or films. I am certain that my daughters, aged 35 and 30, have never seen a phone booth and certainly have not tried to make a phone call in one. Phone booths today travel with us, as it were. Sometimes people even make calls on them. Many beach goers carry their phones photographing themselves—selfies and videos, as they voyage down the beach, sometimes on foot and sometimes on horseback. Very few arrive to the ocean without their phone. It intrigues me. Making a video and taking photos seem to validate the experience yet seem to me to be a substitute for it. Ah, but I am aging and crotchety, and sometimes can’t make sense of the choices of a generation that is not mine. Hell, I can’t understand the choices of my generation either! And I discover that my own choices are not immediately comprehensible, and then I have to write a story to understand myself.  

 

 

Beach Tar on My Feet

For Joni Mitchell the issue was her filthy fingernails and her beach tarred feet. I have a few other issues. The sunscreen I purchased (SPF50) lays white on my skin like a thin sheet of stiff armor. I suppose there is a soap created specifically to manage layers of such sunscreen (SPF50 and above) but no one as yet has recommended such a brand to me. I am sufficiently white without the sunscreen layer that I apply daily diligently to control the coloring of my pale skin to what I consider a healthy shade of brown. I’ve always appreciated Melville’s chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale,” and have long associated whiteness with illness, with a sort of nothingness, like the arctic white into which Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym sails. The applied sunscreen dries and seems glued onto my body though I stick to no one.

            Mostly, I walk about in dirty clothes which is not my usual attire. We are in Costa Rica for nine weeks and despite overpacking I maintain a limited wardrobe here: a blue and black pair of bathing trunks; slate blue and gray pairs of ‘dress’ shorts (when we decide to eat at a clean well-lighted place); three pair of underwear to wear under the dress shorts; eight or ten tee shirts, colors varied; and two pair of old running shorts I purchased in past younger years when I was a distance runner; and two pair of pajamas, of course. (As I list the clothes I have brought with me, I am surprised at the seeming quantity of them, but everything gets sweaty and dirty quickly: the beach is sandy, and the water though warm is still quite salty and rolls in with dirt from afar. The temperature is high here—92 degrees during the day and the sky is clear and sun filled: we go twice daily to the beach wearing mostly in the afternoon the clothes from the morning. Sitting in the sun slathered in sunscreen, sweating in the sun and heat, wearing the same tee shirt several days consecutively and switching out yesterday’s tee shirt (now dried) for bedtime, I am not the model of cleanliness and odorlessness. Much of what I have brought with me requires regular laundering. I suppose if I were more of a true hippie and less of a bourgeois I would tolerate my dirty clothes for longer periods of time; though I have in my life inclined toward hippie-dom, I am also now seventy-six years old and quite set in my cleanish ways. There is available for us a laundry service and we schedule pick-up and delivery weekly. Our laundry bag at the end of the week is always full. 

And yet I am dirty everywhere. I feel dirty everywhere. Yes, I shower every day, sometimes even twice a day, and I try to scrub the sunscreen, sand and salt from my body, but I am only ever partly successful. I suspect that when I get home I will have to shower for a week before I begin to feel clean again. Sometimes I smell from sunscreen, sometimes from sand and salt, and sometimes from just plain body odor.

I am out of my comfort zone, as the cliché these days says. 

I have not for some time felt comfortable with travel. I apparently do still travel but for a number of years traveling has been an aversive activity. I am geographically fixed, situated geographically as an ocnophile, in Michael Balint’s terms. The ocnophile, recovering from the trauma of birth and separation from the source of all sustenance, makes the painful discovery of the independent existence of important objects. Ocnophile wants to hold object close but then can't give up object because subject inhabits them; introjected objects means the object is inside and cannot leave. The strategic life stance of the ocnophile to deal with that original trauma is by clinging to objects, holding them close, and magically imagining that there has been no separation. The ocnophile feels confident that his 'object' will 'click in' with him and protect him against the empty, unfamiliar, and even dangerous world. I hold my coffee mug close. I have drunk my morning coffees out of the same crafted one for almost two decades now. I will not travel with it for fear it would crack but the mugs here are an unsatisfactory substitute.

So, traveling challenges me because I have to leave behind my objects, though I still pack heavy even for weekend excursions. This practice is in an effort to carry with me the significant objects and recreate as best as possible my environment away from home. It is a hopeless attempt; my fingernails get filthy and there is beach tar on my feet. What I need to learn to do is plant my flags in the new location earlier. 

Frogs in the Pot

The cliché confirms that if you place a frog in a pot of water and increase the temperature a degree at a time that the frog will continue to acclimate itself to a raising temperature high that will eventually boil it. The suggestion seems to be that if the increments of change are slow enough that a species can learn to tolerate anything. Austerlitz, the eponymous character in W.G. Sebald’s novel says, “We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.” Frogs in the pot on the stove: such might we be when I look to the incremental changes that have been wrought in our lives and our consciousnesses as a result of the pandemic. I wonder about the choices we now make in response to and because of it. For example, we now travel everywhere carrying our wearing our K95 masks. Many of us travel with bearing several COVID tests. We sanitize our hands and faces regularly and maintain in our packs and bags small tubes of personal sanitizers. In every bathroom accompanying warning the “Employees must wash their hands before returning to work!” is posted new instructions saying that hand washing for the rest of us should take at least 20 seconds. I suppose the same time frame governs the sanitary habits of the workers returning to work. We have learned to work remotely, much to the horror of the real estate moguls who charge high rent for office spaces no longer necessary and employers who worry that their workers are sloughing off. People wear lovely tops to zoom meetings but often sit in their underwear or shorts during them. During the pandemic we employed delivery services to get our foods and other necessities, like toilet paper, because attendance in public indoor spaces was dangerous. I ventured there anyway. I remember how at the beginning of the pandemic I was shopping at the local supermarket during the half-hour or so reserved for adults who were over the age of 62 or 65 years old, I do not remember which,  and I was walking masked down an aisle—maybe the one with boxes of cold cereal or frozen foods—when from the recommended six feet distance, someone called out “Hello, Alan.” But both of us were both masked and I did not recognize the caller’s upper face or voice, and I did not dare move any closer than the required six feet or to admit to the pseudo-stranger my ignorance of her identity. Because the restaurants were closed, we had our food delivered to our doors. These services exploded in size. Now having learned to employ delivery services to bring our shopping lists and dinners and sanitary supplies to our doors we can avoid 1) the effort of schlepping home from the stores the overfilled bags, 2) the anxiety-causing presence of crowds, and 3) the necessity of driving to the restaurant to pick up the take-away. We remain inside. Today, when I go to the supermarket the aisles are heavily crowded with unmasked professional shoppers, carrying lists emailed, I suppose, to the store. I like to browse the aisles and buy more than I ought to carry home. I baked a great deal of bread during the pandemic: the number of loaves in my freezer was a measure of the level of my anxiety; I cooked a wide variety of soups, many of which tasted too similar. Not dining out my culinary skills developed. Of course, then we dined out less frequently, and today we continue not to dine out preferring remarkably enough, my prepared foods. And breads, of course. Streets in many urban and suburban areas are now spotted with almost permanent outdoor heated structures that had been constructed during the pandemic when seating in restaurants was declared too risky for indoor dining. Winter al fresco dining has become now available. Incremental changes too slight to notice even as our lives outside our awareness have been irrevocably changed and we continue on, as Fitzgerald might acknowledge, “boats against the current,” under new conditions that we assume now are normal. I guess we think we are heading forward but really we haven’t the faintest idea our direction. We haven’t yet begun to seriously considered the impact on our psyches accompanying those overt physical changes in our environments. But at our backs we hear and fear the next pandemic. And the temperature of the water rises degree by degree.

A nor’easter storm (I think that is a redundancy) headed toward, yes, the northeast, and threatened to drop a great deal of snow in New York, and the Department of Education ordered the schools closed and ordered the teachers and students to activate and engage in remote learning, the latter a practice begun during the pandemic when schools and classrooms were deemed too dangerous for students (but not necessarily for teachers)to be in attendance. I raise this issue because what has been lost is the possibility of SNOW DAYS, when schools closed because the transportations systems could not get students to the school building and students who had to walk were placed too much at risk. Television and radio programs would report the various school closings as the notices would arrive, and I remember watching assiduously for the appearance of my school district to appear on the screen. Or alternatively, I could await the call from the phone chain The call would come in early from the phone chain established for such emergencies; The phone might ring even before I had awakened and the voice on the other end would say, “Snow Day, go back to sleep.” I would sleepily call the next person on the list, announce the surprise holiday and return to bed for a short time. As a teacher, I remember school days as my favorite holiday, better than Winter or Spring Break. Snow days happened unexpectedly, and they were contractually negotiated and so teachers need not use sick leave or personal days to enjoy the day.  Though in a severe, snowy winter too many snow days might be declared, and the school year needed to be extended: the Board of Regents had mandated that the length of a school year be measured in the number of days students were in attendance. Hence one important factor for the significance of reporting to the state daily student attendance: that is one way school districts received state aid. The snow day was moments of perfect freedom. Snow day school closings were unexpected and many of us had left the tools of our trade at our desks: we had at home no papers to grade, no lessons to deliver or prepare, no more futures to decide. But with the arrival of computers soon the phone calls turned into mass generated emails and with the advent of cell phones and text messages, it seemed to me that the joy on the phone line announcing a snow day was lost. As was the personal connection the phone call made possible. For students, of course, the loss the snow day meant no sledding, no building snowmen and women and binary snowpersons, no snow forts snowball fights. Shoveling walks and driveways for pocket monies became unworkable. Incrementally, the temperature of the water in the pot rose had risen and we didn’t notice really notice but just accepted the change of practice. We didn’t consider perhaps the consequences.

            Snow days are no more. The day proceeds almost as normal. The significant word here is ‘normal.’ The temperature in the pot has been raised; the environment is changed. And we again grow cozy with the heat. Until, I suppose, it kills us, or changes us forever.

Thought and MAGA

I read that N. Scott Momaday has died at the age of 89 years. Sometime in the early 1990s I had read his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The House Made of Dawn. I was then reading a bit in Native American literature for a study group I was to lead organized by the town librarian. I was wondering how the Native American tradition of storytelling would translate into the Western novel-tradition. I was curious.

The death of Momaday subtracts another from the world in which I have grown. I have lost aesthetic touch of the contemporary world and wish the political world were beyond my hearing, and I am not overly familiar with many of the names and places that grace the pages of popular magazines. Once at the hair stylist or dentist office I would catch up on celebrity gossip in People magazine, but now I don’t recognize the people highlighted in People until someone of my era dies and there is a report of the life with a display of photos.. Now while I’m having my hair styled rather than reading the gossip mags I enter into conversation with the hair stylist. This conversation troubles me slightly me because I believe she should be attending to my head and her work with it and be not distracted by my talk. But Amanda is a wonderful stylist and a good conversationalist. To continue with the decline, I am averse to much contemporary fiction. What I have read in this literature doesn’t seem to scratch very many of my itches, and I have taken to rereading tomes from the 19^th and early 20^th centuries—Henry James, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens and George Eliot, and studying works by a Portuguese Nobel laureate, José Saramajo and an English writer W.G. Sebald whose deaths (2010 and 2001 respectively) and lives I do not recall reading about in People magazine. Though the peopled world I know shrinks apace, both writers have been during the past year or two new to me, and so at least my imaginative world has exponentially grown. My imagination has expanded. Oh, and I also consume a whole shelfful of detective novels.

But I want to think about something else. Melanie Klein suggests that thought developed as a way of testing reality. What I think that this means requires some explanation, first, of course, to me.  Phantasy, Klein says, is the mental expression of instincts: we are hungry and we phantasize the breast or, perhaps, a chocolate chip cookie.  When there is a good enough mother the breast appears and the infant phantazises it has created it. Later, when the breast doesn’t appear, the child, frustrated and not happy, will have to negotiate with reality to discover satisfaction for its hunger: hence, the cookie. Hopefully it will exist in the pantry. Google search will suggest that there are four, seven or eleven basic instincts. Whatever. In any case, we start with unconscious phantasy that appears through the medium of the ego, itself composed of internalized good and bad part-objects, and is built, as it were, on phantasies about these objects. Phantasy, Klein avers, is the mental expression of instincts and is composed of objects and part objects. Now, phantasy is not an escape from reality but a constant and inevitable accompaniment of real experiences. Hanna Segal writes “that an infant going to sleep, contentedly making sucking noises and movements with his mouth or sucking his own fingers, phantasies that he is actually sucking or incorporating the breast and goes to sleep with a phantasy of having the milk-giving breast actually inside himself.” Libidinal instincts phantasize a partner with whom to satisfy those sexual urges. When I was younger I went out to the bar scene, but now I beg. However, unconscious phantasy remains inarticulate and requires reality to be visible. There has to be the possibility of an actual breast or partner in order for the phantasy to become evident. Infants are born with unconscious fantasies that help the infant make sense of the world. 

Now, Klein’s phantasy seems identical to my sense of Desire: that force that sends us out into the world seeking. Desire, unconscious and inarticulate, requires reality to be realized, though as Winnicott says, reality is always an insult and it does not exactly meet our phantasy. Klein suggests that the reality principle is only the pleasure principle modified by reality testing. We seek that which pleasures us, but perhaps not fully. Language offers that developing ego resource for expression, but words must come from that which has been made already available in reality. Here is the point to which I have headed: Klein says that the depth and accuracy of a person’s thinking will depend on the quality and malleability of his unconscious phantasy life to the things available and the individual’s capacity to subject that phantasy to reality testing. Thought was developed in the service of reality testing and as a means of sustaining tension and delaying satisfaction. Language can be the avenue for thought. 

Makes me wonder. Sustaining tension and delaying satisfaction are both anathema to the pleasure principle in the absence of reality aspires to instant gratification. The hungry screaming infant wants the breast and it wants it now! And so I am wondering how this theory might help me understand the MAGA phenomenon that ontinues to baffle and alarm me. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they refuse to accept the results of the last election; they continue to hold to conspiracy theories no matter how weird and even impossible I think of Marjorie Taylor Greene who posted in 2018 absurd accusations implying that a company owned by the Rothschilds, the wealthy Jewish banking family, had started a California wildfire from space using laser beams. She and Lauren Boebert screamed obscenities at President Biden during his State of the Union Speech in language they would never suffer from their own children or those others about them. From their seats in Congress and on national television they acted without testing reality. They were not employing thought. Or I consider Donald Trump who continues to deny any complicity in the events of January 6 when he incited the mob to storm the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power and maintain his office in the presidency. His repeated assertion after election day that the election despite all evidence to the contrary that the election was stolen from him, despite innumerable court cases refusing to overturn a single vote in a single state, were all lies that incited the MAGA base to march on the Capitol to demand that they not certify the legally elected candidate. His behavior was hardly the operation of thought but rather the product of phantasy. And the adherence of the MAGA base to his lies and violent rhetoric did not occur because the mod was engaged in thought. Absolutely no evidence has been found to support the illusory claims. I consider that the MAGA mob who without thought accept whatever they are told by the foundation that supports the MAGA spectacle. Kleinian psychology suggests that these people aren’t thinking: irregardless of reality they refuse to postpone satisfaction. They act on unconscious and untested phantasy. Like the child, they want the breast and they want it now. 

Reality might be an insult but it must be acknowledged as inevitable. Thought allows phantasy to confront reality by allowing the individual not to reach for the chocolate chip cookie or the lie until reality will be tested against it and a relatively informed course of action can be taken. Winnicott will say that creative action will result from this event. What I am saying is that the MAGA crowds are not employing thought. They are not thinking. Listening to Trump and his minions continue to espouse lies and accusations that fly in the face of all reality belies Trump’s and his sycophants’ competences to govern. Or to even stand for office. The violent assault on the Capitol was an action inspired by instinct and unconscious phantasy but was not a result of thought. The mob attempted to reduce tension and gain instant satisfaction. They were destructive and resistant to reality-testing. The MAGA mob continues to avoid thought for the pleasure of phantasy.