August 2002

August 6
Today was a miracle; a cool, brisk, breezy August day. In my whole life, I've never experienced anything like that. I love this city. I love my life. Next week, more good things. I start a new job, as a real editor, a job that's going to let me stay here and follow whatever my dreams turn out to be, at least for a little while. I feel like I've conquered the world. Or a very, tiny, miniscule part of it.

And a good friend, a woman who never thought she would find someone who was her equal and that she could love, is marrying that very person next week. I will attend her wedding without misgivings about her choice, without worry that she's settling for something less. She knew what she wanted, and she found it, and she waited a long time. She deserves as much happiness as she can get. And he seems to know how lucky he is.

Not everything is perfect; lots of the same problems remain for me and Matt. But when you're climbing a cliff face, every place where you can stop and breathe and take in the scenery is a victory.

August 9

Restless tonight, can't sleep. Matt's conked out, but he didn't get to sleep in today like I did. Someday I will scan and put my library card collection online, for my own amusement. I have about eight now, from all over; the only places I lived that I didn't get a card were Saudi Arabia and London. Which is too bad, now that I think about it, those would've been cool. Otherwise, every town and suburb I've lived, I've gotten a card, and I never throw them out. Just in case I move back there...most of them don't have expiration dates. Though the chances of my going back to Lake Worth, TX, are mighty small. (knock on wood).

So the reason I mention all this is, I got my NYC card today. I'm so proud! It's nicer-looking than my Texas ones too, but that's just because the NY library actually has a logo. The midtown Manhattan branch was a disappointment though...their fiction section is so small! Smaller than the central branch in, say, Fort Worth. But I still found stuff, because I'll read almost anything. I'm about to put that to the test, actually. A good friend recently discovered and converted to Objectivism, ie, the teachings of Ayn Rand. And he has an online forum where he dares us all to come and battle out our philosophies (or in my case, lack of them) against his. Now my senior year in high school, I made a serious attempt to read The Fountainhead. You had to read it and write an essay on it to compete for a scholarship.

Up till that time, I had never run across a piece of fiction I couldn't finish, whether or not I liked it. But Rand defeated me. My hatred for her characters, and especially her tin ear for dialogue, just built and built, and by the time I got to the creepy sex scenes (more like rape scenes) I just couldn't take it anymore. "Forget the &*^$ scholarship!", I ran away screaming, and never picked up anything of hers again. So when my friend started extolling the virtues of Objectivism, I tried to stay out of it. I knew if I got involved, I would have to read Rand, if only to try and debate him coherently. But since he's kind of a single-minded person, there was no way to talk to the man without discussing it.

And so here I am, at the NY Library, checking out The Fountainhead and Anthem. I would try for Atlas Shrugged instead but they were out. Honestly, I don't know if I'll make it. I mean, I've toughened since high school. I've since made it through Foucault, through Tom Jones, through many an unpleasant read for course credit. Anthem's shorter, so I'll try that first. The only real curiosity I feel is in trying to read Rand with some feminist theory in mind..that might be interesting, since what I do know about her suggests she wasn't terribly liberated in her opinions of other women.

Being a woman herself adds an interesting subtext to that. To tell the truth, I have trouble with philosophy in general....it always seems to end up a fight over definitions. If I say Reality is AB, and you say it's BA, well what the heck can we talk about anyway? It's never-ending, insoluble, bickering, very little of it informed with anything like a real understanding of human nature, which is messy, unpredictable, and not at all suited to tidy theorems. But my friend is a close one, and he's sincere in his struggles to find Truth, or Meaning, or whatever we're all trying to find. And I can respect that. I'll even keep an open mind for any truth I might come across, because that's only fair. Provided I make it that far without the aforementioned screaming. Wish me luck.

August 10

Today I visited the Cloisters, wayy up in north Manhattan. I've always been interested in medieval art. There's something appealing in the forced perspectives and the rich colors, something un-sophisticated that I can't help but like. I like wondering about the artists, most of whom were anonymous local carvers and painters of no great renown. If they were paid much at all, it was probably in grain or a few coins. It would amaze them to know that their work has lasted hundreds of years.

And despite what's been lost to time, the sheer volume of art we have from that era is amazing...you start to wonder if every single person wasn't engaged in weaving, sculpting, masonry, painting, or woodcarving. But of course, over several centuries, even a small percentage of the population can produce an amazing amount of beauty.

One of the most famous exhibits at the Cloisters is the Unicorn Tapestries. I didn't want to find them interesting...it seems so twee and Ren-Fairy to be too impressed by them. Yes, I was one of those little girls obsessed by horses and unicorns, but I have broadened my interests since then.

But those tapestries got to me anyway. For one thing, they are much larger than I thought, and undeniably, brilliant and beautiful masterpieces of their kind. (And why, why, by the gods, isn't it made very plain to viewers and in art books that the artist was/were most probably women? Why isn't a bigger deal made about that? When people dismiss women's roles in the history of art, things like these tapestries should shut them up for good. ) There are four tapestries total, but they are all mostly consistent in style. Each hunter portrayed has a different face, an individual expression. The artist(s) favored three-quarter profiles, even on the animals. Different breeds of hunting dog are easy to pick out (mastiff types, spaniels, greyhound types).

Like her contemporaries, the artist had trouble with realism and anatomy...no one had taught her the proper proportions of faces and bodies. Every animal and human appears to move clumsily through space. However, she evidently knew her flora better than her fauna...each tapestry is rich with varieties of flowers and herbs and trees, that look accurate, at least to my eyes. Certainly individual, not just vague background decoration.

Standing in front of these beautiful, amazing ancient things, hanging on a stone wall as they should be, I started to wonder...what was the artist's motivation in creating these tapestries? Was it just something she was ordered to do, or a creative urge that she subsumed into something the nobility would want? Why a unicorn's hunt, and wounding, and capture? Did she see the hunting and trapping and taming of a unicorn in any relation to herself? To losing the freedom of childhood and being forced into her ordained role as a woman?

It's hard not to think she might have. You may think I'm stupidly sentimental, but standing in that dim warm room, thinking all these things, made me almost cry. I couldn't help thinking of this woman, locked into the slavery of her gender and her time, full of artistic impulses she could not express any other way. Feeling trapped, feeling hunted, feeling doomed.

If you look at all those weavings together, they are like one long cry of pain and rage (especially in the gory scene where the unicorn slaughters the dogs) and despair. The unicorn is never shown when it isn't surrounded by hunters and pursuers, or a fence. You know it never has a chance of escaping. And she knew it too.

August 12

Agh. AAAGH. agh. Man. Reading Rand is one of the more painful literary experiences in my life. I got further on The Fountainhead than I did in high school, but finally just skipped to the end because I was tired of being hit over the head with ideology. Rand has a habit of dropping her political diatribes into dialogue or exposition like a bad dancer stepping on your toes. At the end, you feel battered, and not at all eager to get back out on the dance floor.

I did find a funny quote online; "Criticizing Objectivists is like hitting masochists; it only reinforces their worldview." Ha. OK, so it's obvious I'm not sympathetic to Rand. There are the philosophical reasons why I don't agree with her, but my first, emotional reaction to her is that she was a humorless fanatic with a profoundly stunted grasp of history and human behavior.

And I will add, Anthem was much easier. It's mercifully short, and fits into the more dystopian sci-fi genre of stories like Logan's Run or Soylent Green. With a happy, if implausible, ending. Perhaps she should have stayed with sci-fi insted of capitalist epics--her ideas certainly could have benefitted from a tighter, less wordy format. I was going to read her from a feminist perspective, but that's a hopeless task. There are no women to speak of in her works, except idealized maidens or worshippers at the Perfect Man's altar. Or castrating harridan moms, that favorite old cliche. There's nothing to analyze.

Meanwhile, after a hard weekend wading through the waist-deep propaganda of the Ubermensch, I had to drag out a Bill Bryson book to remind myself that humor and happiness and whimsy still existed in the world. Ah.

Speaking of humor, Matt and I were talking the other day about why it's difficult or impossible to trust someone who doesn't have a sense of humor. At first glance, that seems like an unfair prejudice. Surely a lack of humor doesn't make you a bad person? And let me be clear, I don't just mean people who don't share my sense of humor...they just have to find something funny, even if it's Benny Hill. So what's wrong with always being serious?

What I told Matt was, it signals to me that someone is unable to admit that they are ever not in control. Humor rises out of the unexpected, the botched, the failed, the misunderstood, even the catastrophic. Humor is a way of saying, Yes, I'm ridiculous, that guy's ridiculous, aren't we all, isn't it funny how we completely screwed that up? And if someone never laughs, I start suspecting, they are unable to ever admit they screw up, or to shrug it off when they do. They lack perspective, they lack humility, they lack an appreciation of their own fallibility.

I think it goes deeper than that, too,but I'm still in the process of working out why. Part of it has to do with what makes us human. All cultures, so far as I know, have jokes, or pranks, or some kind of humor. It is a form of resilience and strength, a way of not being destroyed when we fail, of letting ourselves learn without too severe a penalty for error. A person who cannot laugh refuses to let themselves look ridiculous, and therefore, they are already dangerously unbalanced in their view of themselves and the world. They are not confident...they are either horribly insecure or megalomaniacal. Either one is unattractive and alarming.