Like a phoenix from the fire

It's strangely inspiring to know that you are never too old to have an identity crisis.

Some time ago I posted a short story here that resulted in threatening emails from a male reader. Then abruptly I decided to change the focus of the blog from a sort of personal column reminiscent of the one I had written in local newspapers when my children were small to a political commentary on feminism. I didn't see a connection at the time. (Hahaha!) I completely redesigned the look to a garish yellow background with ugly knife slashes through the canvas that offends me this morning, published two posts, and then abandoned the blog entirely. For two years...

And so, without conscious effort, I made a more cogent comment on the challenges of womanhood than I ever could have imagined.

Because when faced with difficulty, women often submit, or run away, or self harm, or give up, or react in some other passive manner, as I did with this blog. I'm not saying these aren't sometimes good choices, or that only women make them, but just noticing what I see when I look around me, and wishing it were a little different, a little more balanced.

So now I'm back. I'm going off to the back end now, to see if I can get rid of the garish wallpaper, tidy up a bit, and get all my links working again. Wish me luck! And wish me luck in being selected for a writer's residency on Amtrack this summer. I have two novels in progress that I want to finish--both involving kick-ass women. :)

I can totally see myself writing them here:

In Search of the Feminist Blogosphere

I keep reading references to the "Feminist Blogosphere" and I so want to go to that place. I imagine a small waterfall roiling in a deep, green pool beside big, flat rocks under a baking sun. The fragrance of flowers wafts over my face on a delicate breeze. The sound of women's laughter beckons me from around a bend in the river. Skinny dipping is encouraged.

South Yuba River waterfall from wikipedia.org

The only problem is, there's no map, and I don't know where to find this place. I've been looking in various nooks and crannies, following a link here, a clue there, but I haven't yet stumbled upon the precise location.

I have a vague uneasiness that maybe the Feminist Blogosphere is hiding from me. Maybe it doesn't want me to visit because I'm too old, or not wearing the right clothes, or reading the right books, or using the right jargon.

One feminist blogger shut down her blog shortly after I discovered it. Was she running away from me? It seemed she beckoned me with one hand and held up the "halt" signal with another. Was I the victim of a practical joke? Of course not, but when you're searching for Paradise, you sometimes get delusional.

Then there was another blogger whose words really spoke to me, moved me. I commented on the first blog post I read. Then I commented on the second. I wanted to comment on the third--I wanted to take her in my arms and cradle her like a daughter, to try to soothe her pain--but I felt embarrassed. Was I intruding?  Overreaching? I didn't want to bring chocolate cake to the party when all that was wanted was a few dry chips.

Following blogs is new to me. It feels a little like following soap operas--viewing and caring about unfolding lives that I'm not really a part of: Sue got engaged! Tiffany went to a party! Roxanne broke up with her abusive boyfriend! I'm interested in their stories but not entirely sure that I should be. Is "getting to know" these young women a good use of my time? I think it is, but I'm not sure.

Meanwhile, I've just finished reading The Screwtape Letters for the third time straight. It is really nourishing me. Here's an old-fashioned book, written in the 1940s by a white man, and I know that my loyalty to my own Heart is so weak that I wouldn't even allow myself to love it except that David Foster Wallace said it was his favorite book, so it must be cool. And thank God. Because I love it. I really do love it.

Three more things: First I read that the New Feminists didn't mind talking about make-up and crafts and putting little pink ponies on their sites and being generally girly. That was news to me. Then I saw this post on Tumblr and it made me laugh:

"m: i was trying to tell alex what the feminist waves are. first wave is we want to vote. second wave is we want to make as much money as you. third wave is we knit..."

Later I saw this other post on Tumblr and it made me laugh, too. It's Zoey Deschanel talking to Glamour Magazine:

“I’m just being myself. There is not an ounce of me that believes any of that crap that they say. We can’t be feminine and be feminists and be successful? I want to be a f–king feminist and wear a f–king Peter Pan collar. So f–king what?” - Zoey Deschanel 

I could tell you who posted it, but it wouldn't mean anything. The thing about Tumblr is everyone is quoting and re-blogging everyone else, so it's hard to know who the originator was. I guess that's post-modern: the art of appropriation. It's all around us on the web and in music and movies and our lives. What was that John Lennon lyric? "I am you and you are me and we are all together." 

I'm going to be 58 next month. All I can say is thank God for medical science. People used to die at that age! But I'm a slow learner. And I want to read The Screwtape Letters again. And I want to find out what happens next to Roxanne. And I want to write a really good novel, or short story, or poem. And I still want to find the Feminist Blogosphere. I still have so much to learn...

Let A Demon Show You the Light

C.S. Lewis image from stkarnick.com

I've just read C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters. Twice. He's a British Christian scholar from the WWII era who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia and is probably sexist, homophobic, racist, etc.-- but maybe not; at least none of that is obvious in this book, and there is much that is speaking to me.

I was led here by my imaginary dead lover David Foster Wallace, my current favorite writer because he wrote one of the most amazing books I've ever read: Infinite Jest. I fell a little in love with him while reading that volume, and a little more while watching a humble and charming DFW being interviewed by a German woman whose accented voice sounds so lovely and alluring in this video. (Beware: it's part one of nine, and addicting.)

In another interview somewhere else, my imaginary dead lover said Screwtape was his favorite book, so I determined to read it.

Lewis writes of a world I heard about in my youth, in which Heaven and Hell exist, and God and Satan battle over each human's soul. The twist is Lewis writes the book from Satan's point of view, or rather Screwtape's, who is a high-level bureaucrat in the "Lowerarchy" and is instructing his nephew, Wormwood, a novice "tempter," on how to subtly and surreptitiously corrupt the soul of an innocent man.

Wormwood being instructed by Screwtape
in a theatrical production; image from dcist.com

No extravagant evil is required for Hell to gain possession. Peevishness is just as good as murder for the job. In fact, Screwtape advises Wormwood to focus on encouraging the smaller sins--selfishness, dishonesty, pride--in his "patient," since they are so much easier to achieve.

Reading this book, I realize how confusing our modern world is, and how complicated to make personal decisions without these larger-than-life archetypes to light the way.

I like to see myself as sophisticated, able to discern the difference between gradations of gray, unlikely to be fooled by simplistic black-and-white representations of the world.

But Lewis, a very intelligent and accomplished man--Oxford and Cambridge scholar, author of more than 30 books--proposes we do just that: separate all things into one camp or the other. Every step you take is either a step towards God or away from Her. (And by "God" I have no idea what I mean, except perhaps the whole point of everything.) (And the gender change is mine, of course.)

Lewis goes on to posit that God created all the pleasures, which She sincerely wants us to enjoy. Smoking and drinking, as I read it, are not "sins" if undertaken with a joyful attitude. But Screwtape and his league of tempters work to pervert all God's pleasures by twisting them inside out, or turning them into habits, which Lewis describes as things that are harder and harder to forego even as they provide less and less real pleasure.

Screwtape composes a letter;
image from apilgriminnarnia.com

The lesson is simple: Habits are bad; Pleasure is good. Pleasure is so good, in fact, that any real pleasure we are able to create for ourselves leads us farther from Hell and closer to Heaven.

Mid-book, when the human's soul seems to be slipping through Wormwood's fingers, Screwtape admonishes his nephew: "you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends. In the second place, you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there--a walk through country he really likes, and taken alone. In other words, you allowed him two real positive Pleasures. Were you so ignorant as not to see the danger of this?"

This viewpoint is a revelation to me--the opposite of my early Catholic inculcation that God wants us to suffer, that suffering brings us closer to Heaven. Not so, this book suggests. Or at least, not only that. It's also bliss. It's exaltation.

Sitting in the sun while waiting for my son to finish a phone call the other day, I got a vision of myself standing by a broad river. Then I saw my body levitating slightly, maybe three feet, off the ground. It seemed the simple pleasure of enjoying the sun on my face was bringing me closer to God.

In my horoscope for 2013, Rob Brezsny advises me to "ramp up [my] capacity for pure enjoyment" in the coming year. That sounds like it fits the plan. The trick will be discerning "pure enjoyment" from the sexy come-ons of disease-addled facsimiles, all dressed up in their finest and disguised as fun.

I am an old woman, but there is still so much that I want to do, so much I want to understand.

I have stale habits of thought and body that I want to shed in the coming year (and the new Mayan era), but not via "the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy [by which Screwtape means God] calls the Heart."

I am praying that I will be able to hear my own Heart above the cacophony of Screwtape's clever confusions this year.

Come, pray with me.

Come, listen for your Heart.