Live for Love

I want to posit something to all the boys and girls, women and men out there. I want you to consider that perhaps existence has been presented to you in one particular way, and because of this, your subconscious and conscious life's goal has been to meet a manufactured set of criteria. But you already knew that. You just forgot. I forgot too.

I can't say for sure, but I can guess that I started to forget after I reached the age of being capable of baring a child. I was fifteen and playing the coveted role of Zaneeta Shinn in my school's production of the classic The Music Man. My dance partner and I, the featured "cute couple" in the show, spent night after night learning the most menial of steps, flirting but not flirting. 

He was popular, handsome, and ended up with his face on the hall wall for eternity after being named our equivalent to "Prom King," but since Prom was sin, we had to make it seem more prestigious. I knew where I stood and how he felt about me as soon as we took hands at our first dance rehearsal, and he told me my hands felt like grandma hands. 

We are animals after all. 

If I'd realized what was happening (had I been like five years younger) I'd have laughed it off as a "this guy," moment, but I was fifteen. I didn't want to have grandma hands because no one would love me. No one would love me if I had grandma hands! 

I felt that way too when my friends treated me like a freak for things like...eating tuna salad for lunch. Who will love me if I don't exclusively eat chicken fingers!?!?! When they laughed at me in fourth grade because I started getting boobs. WHO WILL LOVE ME IF I HAVE BOOBS?!?!?!?!

Shame. It's a shame. How terrified I was of not being loved, lovable. For what else was I supposed to live? But for love?

This is the message we get every day. That love is this thing to which we should aspire, that it is shiny, and plastic, and precious, and pretty. Just like America.

Except America isn't pretty. America is violence and horror, greed and rape. Her beauty is in her age, the monuments to her natural history. We the people package beauty and sell it like the ancient forests we decimate for parking lots without a second thought. 

So too is life. It isn't romance and happily ever after. It isn't good and bad. It's mostly ugly.

There can never be joy without pain. There can never be love without loss. There can never be life without death.

It isn't a game. And it isn't for sale. And you are unique out of every single person in the world. Shiny and pretty and perfect doesn't exist.

But you do. And imagine, just for a moment, that the love you seek is inside of you. All of it. The love you ache for at night. It's inside of you. And it is a well.

Live for that love.

"and you will have the suffrage of the world." Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

Thank You SO Much For Reading This part II

Welcome back. Thanks for stopping by.

Ahem.

This is from a good article in the Times. 

Margaret Fuller was not the best writer in the brat-pack of transcendentalists that came out of New England in the mid nineteenth century, but she knew the truth that history and literature books have yet to admit: that transcendentalism was, at its core, a movement for women, and she chose to use it as the guiding light in her life, which, of course, was not easy.

Despite the fact that she spent a great deal of time with prominent male authors of the period (who all loved and hated her in equal measure), she remained a single woman. She was like them: brilliant, quick-witted, philosophical and probing. (I omitted my first oxford comma. I’m trying it out.) Emerson longed for her company. Nathaniel Hawthorne was obsessed with her and kept killing her in his stories. What else can one do who has found a woman with an intellect as strong, if not stronger, than his own? He couldn’t marry her. That would be ridiculous.

She had been raised by her father as if she had been a son. He taught her classical history, languages, sciences, art, law….friggin law. By the time she was old enough to go to school, she had already received quite an education. Thus, her parents decided to send her to finishing school instead….how to be a girl school, which she naturally hated. Imagine being a kid with so much knowledge and drive, passion and gumption, and being told that you would be better off never using it and trying to be some other person entirely. If I were to be physically ripped in half, I think that pain would probably come close to representing what it feels like.  By the time she was old enough, she started experiencing what she described in her writing as “headaches,” but what was more than likely depression.

I read on a poster at my psychiatrist’s office that women are more likely to suffer from depression than men. Some of it is attributed to hormonal changes, and that is certainly a harsh reality of being a woman. Hormones make a monster of me, when I let them. There was a time in history when women did not understand their bodies (menstrual cycle) because it was illegal to teach them. It wasn’t too long ago in the early TWENTIETH CENTURY. Sometimes the only thing that keeps me going is being able to understand and monitor the rise and fall of my own terrifying hormonal changes. Knowledge is power, after all, if not also a curse.

Yes, much of the depression suffered by women is definitely caused by nature, but there is another aspect of it that the poster did address very briefly: social stressors are much heavier amongst women. We are hard on each other. Like I said before, patriarchy is not about men subjugating women. It’s a state of mind, a world view, to which we all fall victim.

Somehow, we all continue to hold each other to the same standards that the media, which is to say, the most marketable mirror of society, sets out for us, the life path that “civilized” human beings have deemed acceptable for women. Margaret Fuller saw it well over a century ago, and she wrote about it in her astonishingly (but also understandingly) underrated answer to Emerson’s Nature: Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

I only suggest reading this if you like rereading because you aren’t going to follow it the first or even the second time. It’s a mish-mash of ideas that Fuller wrestled with her entire life. It’s a conglomeration of possibilities that women in America still haven’t fully realized. It’s hard. Is what I’m saying.

In 1843, She published a short version of her ideas in a literary journal that she edited with Emerson and other transcendentalists: The Dial. She called it “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men: Woman versus Women.” It was just a few pages. Her second draft, filling about 100 pages in my Norton Critical Edition, she published in 1844. I could drown you in brilliant thoughts that I’ve gleaned from the (seemingly) bajillions of times I’ve read it, but I’ll try to focus on my point.

Fuller answered her dear friend Emerson’s call to all American men to return to nature with her uniquely feminine philosophy: the true nature of humanity is both masculine and feminine. She called it a radical dualism and believed that all human beings share equally in the same traits, and that these traits are constantly passing in and out of each other. The problem, she stated, was not that man was disunited with nature, but that man was disunited with his nature. (That’s basically straight from my own thesis, with a little bloggy talk spin on it, which I won’t cite unless you think you might be dropping by the library at the University of Memphis sometime soon to check it out. PM me.)

How do we solve the problem? Well, that’s the hardest part. Here’s the proposition, in sexy block quote form: 

It is for that which is the birthright of every being capable to receive it, --the freedom, the religious, the intelligent freedom of the universe, to use its means; to learn its secret as far as nature has enabled them, with God alone for their guide and their judge. Ye cannot believe it, men; but the only reason why women ever assume what is more appropriate to you (not farting out loud -me), is because you prevent them from finding out what is fit for themselves. Were they free, were they wise fully to develop the strength and beauty of woman; they would never wish to be men, or man-like...Tremble not before the free man, but before the slave who has chains to break. (36)

The quote sits on the only page I chose to dog-ear in my copy. Simply put, women behave the way they do because they are not allowed to discover any other way to behave. If women were given the freedom to explore their own passions and desires outside the confines of social structure and expectation, they might discover a spirit greater than could ever be imagined.

The same is true for men. We are, all of us, too often at the mercy of our own world-view, but there are steps we can take to stretch our minds further, to defend ourselves from stagnation and ruination. We can continue to explore, with open minds and hearts, the only thing that matters: truth. To discover what it means to be alive outside the lines, and to venture further.

I would like to hear Neil Degrasse Tyson say that out loud.

Margaret Fuller went on to become a front page columnist for The New York Tribune, to be renowned as a journalist, thinker, and critic. When she left the country at age 36 to cover the inevitable revolution in Italy, she became the first female foreign correspondent. She met her husband and had a child while in Italy all of whom tragically drowned in the wreck of the ship aboard which she was returning home, the Elizabeth.

In 2006, she cracked my brain open and left it up to me sew up my skin to protect my bigger brain by creating a skin like cover. That’s all still in the works.

Now I say, “Okay Fuller, I’m going to stop resisting living. I’m going to do the hard things. I’m going to find out what it means to be me...to be a woman.”

As I go, I want to share it with other people, partially because my narcissism demands it, but also because I want to help other people crack open their own brains. Then maybe, together, we can sew this weird skin-like cover to protect our new bigger brains.

Too far? Did I lose you with the skin-like protectant brain cover metaphor? Are you wondering why you’re still reading?

Consider the coming posts my exploration, my changing of the channels on the radio in search of something familiar. I’d like to explore the voices of women through my own voice. Margaret Fuller was the first woman’s voice that I recognized calling me to action. I may never hear it or meet her, but according to Edgar Allan Poe, “her personal character and her printed book are merely one and the same thing. We get access to her soul as directly from one as from the other,” (quoted in my thesis). Her editor at The New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, said of her process, “she never asked how this would sound, nor whether that would do...but simply ‘Is it truth? Is it such as the public should know?’ and if her judgement answered, ‘yes,’ she uttered it” (also in my thesis).

I don’t 100% trust my judgement for whether things are such as the public should know, but I also don’t 100% trust my ability to trust myself. I’m working on that.

Until then, join me in my quest to find the voices of women so that I might, in turn, hopefully, find and trust my own voice.

My thesis is entitled: The Sovereign Self: Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century. I actually don't have a copy that I can find digitally saved or online. I'm in the process of typing it out, but it's been almost ten years, and I keep finding mistakes that need correcting....so I'm rewriting it, in essence.

If you need a list of my sources, I'm happy to send it over to you...meanie.

Oh....and this: 

Thank You SO Much for Reading This part I

Now let's talk about America.

I took a class in graduate school at the University of Memphis (AF) on Ralph Waldo Emerson. The first day our professor explained that we would almost exclusively be talking about reading the works of Emerson with a little bit of Thoreau and a touch of Whitman along the way, and if that sounded like a death rattle to anyone, they had a whole week to drop the class. Then we were dismissed. I think maybe one person dropped, but the rest of us, obsessed with excavating and gluttons for punishment, arrived bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to the next meeting.

If you consider yourself to be an explorer, bitten by the bug of wanderlust, I encourage you to read Emerson’s Nature. It’s difficult and sweeping, but it will change the way you see yourself within the context of patriotism. It will make you love America again. Emerson wrote the American philosophy. He said he was going to do it, and then he did it, and he was revered for it. When he was too old to even speak, crowds would gather at universities, and he would be rolled out in a wheelchair so that the people could just look at him.

I fell in love with Emerson for the first time in tenth grade after reading only brief snippets of his essay “Self Reliance” and a few poems. I scribbled “To be great is to be misunderstood,” and “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string,” on bathroom walls at rock and roll shows. I watched Dead Poets Society a million times, and a million times I cried whenever I heard someone say “Oh captain, my captain.” Emerson encouraged me to be me, ridiculous and rude, gentle and gigantic, beautiful and terrible, because that was also the story of America.

Studying Emerson in graduate school was inspiring and illuminating. He too grew old and callous, and he too had many shortcomings. Learning everything about a hero is like learning everything about your father. He could make everything okay, pick you up and make you fly like Superman when you were a little girl, but he was also a human being, and, just as you would in your twenties...and thirties, he made a few bad decisions.

Nevertheless, Emerson inspired Americans, young and old, and continues to inspire. He inspired me to begin to dig deeper. He kept talking about all these things that men should be doing in America. He envisioned a new nation whose art and literature were not inspired by the past, rather, they were inspired by the future of a country free of British rule. He told men to go out into the woods, of which there was an abundance at the time, to reconnect with this land that we now inhabited, and to draw from it the language of a new way of living. By philosophizing the problem, “the reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken in heaps, is because [this is a terrible grammatical error, but that’s how he said it, i.e. sic] man is disunited with himself.” He said that in his ground breaking essay Nature, which was, in turn, his solutionizing.

I was in love. He was so right, and I’d always known it. I immediately imagined him alive today, and we totally made out. Then, later, as is often the case, I started to wonder if maybe I had jumped the gun by throwing myself at him right away. I mean, he was saying all this stuff about going off into the woods to regain a concept of what it means to be...a man.

It was 1830s or 40s-ish U.S.A., and men had ample opportunities to explore and engage with the new continent, but women couldn’t connect on a visceral level with Emerson’s ideas because they were not free to strike out on their own. How could half the population of a burgeoning nation transcend if they lived at the behest of the other half. They lived to serve men. Is what I’m saying. It was legal to lock your wife in your room and beat her for being disobedient (for another hundred years). If a woman never married, she lived on the good graces of family members that did marry, as she could have nothing of her own. Thanks, Emerson. Thanks for getting me all excited about stuff you did not even mean for me.

Luckily (or unluckily) my prof told me to read me some Margaret Fuller. The rest, my friends, is history.

Okay. Please come back tomorrow, and I will post part II. Until then:

THANK YOU!