My hair has metamorphosed into some kind of ravening beast atop my head (altitude? Soft water? Galtonesque sub-optimal genetics?) I examine it with mild fascination each morning, but largely leave it to its own primal devices. Perhaps it is on-message – this is, after all, my wild and free adventure. As I roam, so does my hair.
And the adventure into which I roamed this week was transcendental meditation. I bartered a day’s work for charity in exchange for tuition. I’m destitute, so genuinely could not have paid a cent towards it, but also harbour healthy suspicions when asked for large sums of money by such organizations. Whilst I’m wary of being suckered into any kind of weird belief system, I am here, one could argue, to expand my horizons and to change my life for the better – so I will not yet sniff at a constructive way to reduce stress and anxiety.
I cherry-pick the practical technique and retain a rounded scepticism about secret words, rituals, and all the stuff that smacks of insidious religion: hubble-bubble cauldrons that bypass the conscious mind, prize us open and defenceless, and reduce us to credulous sponges. (Much like advertising, in fact.) Religion is religion is religion, whatever your flavour: and they all prey on the vulnerable.
Dr. PJ (yup!) doesn’t actually have a beard and sandals, but I do strongly suspect him of lentil-eating (J’accuse!). I am charmed by his constant and surreal use of broccoli in his analogies to describe meditative techniques. And even a jaded old bastard like me can’t find a less-than-glowing adjective for the man: he’s a one-man charity crusade. Arguably he’s a zealot, but in the nicest possible way (besides, there’s something pretty unthreatening about a meditation zealot). I do believe the world is a much better place for his existence: he has my appreciation as well as my genuine admiration.
I become keenly aware of my abrasive cynicism when surrounded by such sincerity (a Brit in America – say no more). As to the question that any sentient Brit would ask: does all this earnestness preclude a sense of humour? I will continue to report back from the spiritual coal-face…
My charity work will be for the local adaptive ski programme that takes out disabled kids and adults to ski – I’ve seen them on the mountain a lot. I must admit, I tend to give them a wide berth – am not sure if that’s politically incorrect or just pragmatism. I’m really excited about it, but as yet I’m not sure they’re so thrilled to have me. (I know, hard to believe…)
My meditation training meant I missed my usual Monday night date with the Summit County Choral Society – cheerful murderers of the classics, from Faure to Mozart. As Alison was there with the car, I got the bus home.
“Is this the Boreas Pass bus” – I knew it was but, you know, belt and braces...
“Where you go?”
“Wildflower...?”
“I stop there just for you” In fact, I was fairly certain this bus always stopped there.
“I stop Wildflower just for you. You sit here”.
John, it transpired, was an Uzbekistani dental surgeon. (I am actually inclined to believe this after some gentle quizzing on implant techniques – conveniently I have an ex who is a dental surgeon.) His wife (ex) had won some sort of immigration lottery and lo, he now had the privilege of being a Colorado bus driver. I was relieved when the bus pulled off and he stopped pinning me to the spot with his over-familiar gaze. Despite blushing and not knowing quite where to look, I did manage to convince him that Scotland Yard was not in Scotland, and Braveheart was not entirely historically accurate. He was crestfallen. “Was he not a real person? Did he not fight and die for his country?”
“And Scotland – it is still under England, yes?” Ummmm.
Instead of waiting for the bus to wheeze around its circuitous loop, I hopped off early and opted to walk 10 mins in the arctic conditions. Which is not to say the wisdoms with which John favoured me did not impact.
“In Uzbekistan, people are not poor – not like Africa – but not rich like here. Are the dentists in England rich? (Yes.) But people – they are happy – not like here. I work for government – economy does not affect me – people always have sore teeth. I help them. I make them feel better. It made me happy. People come here – they discard their culture. There is no culture here.”
Clearly John had his criticisms of the American way of life, and whilst I could not agree with all he said perhaps we were in accord on certain points: Money does not bring happiness; consumerism feeds, but does not fill, an inner emptiness; and hardline libertarian economics will not cure the world’s ills.
As for culture – how can so many peoples of such vastly disparate identities and backgrounds be convinced they have something in common – something that is ‘Americaness’ – unless they are forced into somesuch mould. Some of their identity crushed out, like a scrap car, reduced to a nice bland stackable cube of Americana.
I am put in mind of one of the cultural habits that still leaves me confused. Everywhere I go, “How are you today?” is the greeting. It is expected that one will not answer the question, but merely give back the required response “good” or some contentless equivalent. Whilst on the one hand I love people’s cheerfulness and politeness here, I also find it difficult to cope with this constant wall of insincerity. It’s like a courtly dance – an intricate etiquette I have not quite mastered. Of course I do not have such trouble in just the U.S. (I have little or no small talk at the best of times – my failing!); it’s just more pronounced here and hence more flagrantly insincere. But it is, after all, just exaggerated politeness – a social ritual of which all cultures have their version, to make life more pleasant for us all. Ah what a lost and distrustful Annabee I am.
We all conceal our feral animalism beneath artfully tailored cloth, within beautifully structured walls – and behind a gloss of socialisation: in other words, a wall of insincerity.
I adore the people I have met – I love their warmth and kindness, their can-do attitude, and sheer optimism. But the flip side of that optimism can be a certain blinkered lack of self-doubt. This is surely a key to success, but a tariff I am unable to cough-up. Once you realize that you are being pragmatic in casting aside your self-doubt – it is not about the truth-status of those doubts, it is about realising the lack of them is a tool to success - it feels like a world of contrivance. Your belief-system is merely an empty functionally-effective life-strategy. (Rather like religion, in fact – the constant looming presence of which both depresses and disappoints me.)
I realize my way is not the way to a happy life, and perhaps there is no nobility in sacrificing a bliss to cling madly to truth – no, not even a truth, but the idea that truth is important. I reflect upon what a strange little girl I was, even as tiny ‘un, sitting apart from the world, contemplating such existential agonies before I had the vocabulary to frame them. How little we change in substance – I am still but a lonely separate little girl seeking and clinging to invisible truths of my own, wishing to share my little island with someone who will willingly cling there too. (Can you imagine the personal ad…?)
My current conclusion is that there is a fakeness about uniting so many disparate peoples and cultures and attitudes under one banner. A fabulously winning strategy, but with what collateral damage? The building up of America itself as a religion. The brainwashing that to admit doubts about capitalism is sacriligous. That to be un-patriotic is the most heinous and socially unacceptable crime. Like God, the concept of America and its values are protected above criticism by this sly contrivance – if one questions or rejects, one forfeits the right to be a member of society at all. It means that the risk of having such doubts is too great, and should you succumb to them your dangerous voice will be rendered impotent lest it affect others.
Dissent and questioning, and a right to verify truth for oneself, rather than to place one’s faith in authority unquestioningly: is that worth sacrificing to be happy - with God, with bland politeness? To be the world’s greatest superpower? Probably. Yet I will huddle nobly on my little island with my brittle moral superiority and my ignoble truths. Lonely.
Wasn’t America build upon a foundation of free-thinking? Humanity may go around (all the way across the Atlantic, even.) But in the end it comes around.
I watched a PBS documentary the other night about Lincoln, which served as a timely reminder to me that he was but a politician. He had no great humanitarian conviction that the races were equal. He just thought that slavery narrowed the opportunities for working white men, and that it was inherently corrupting to those white men (who were, lets be clear, his actual concern) to own slaves. The thing that interests me about this is the disparity between the public myth and the reality. What is the difference between truths that become common knowledge, and those that refuse to circulate? There is a real unwillingness to re-evaluate the popular narrative that is Lincoln. I felt a completely different sort of pathos watching old reel of Marian Anderson singing under the great square be-throned Lincoln – clinging to the hero that never was a hero.
Surely there are no heroes – they are just people conjoined with time and place and circumstance and we make of them what we will in our folklore. Like history – they are constructs. We adapt the telling of our past to the version that suits us. We project what we need in a hero onto whatever hapless inadequate is in the right place at the right time. Lincoln, Jesus, George Clooney…
Entirely by coincidence, a fellow volunteer was telling me about ‘President’s Day’. It’s now ‘President’s Week’ (Heck, lets celebrate all of ‘em), but there used to be two days – one for Washington and one for Lincoln. According to the version of my (New Jersey-hailing) friend, the South didn’t recognise Lincoln’s day because they were still mad about the abolition of slavery. I can’t believe this version is true for a moment, even as a non-American with very little knowledge of American history. But I’m both flummoxed and fascinated by this mish-mash of event and perspective, and completely unable to tease one from the other. It is not always so?
Ah well – Lincoln is still the beardy dude in the big square chair that he always was to me! (Actually – they showed him pre-beard in the documentary and his features did look like chiselled rock even before they immortalized him…)
I have come in for criticism in more than one quarter for the personal nature of some of the content I write. I am beset with concern that people read my little travelogue (both outer and inner) as a self-indulgent personal catharsis – indecorous, crass, boundary-less, adolescent dirty-linen-airing. It’s difficult to hear an external voicing of one’s own self-doubts (self-belief being precarious at the best of times), and for a moment I lost faith and swore to take down every piece of poetry and never publish again. Perhaps I should not write, lest people think me innapropriate for being so intimate. Should I censor, and sacrifice the honesty that allows me to be creative? Perhaps I should produce a jolly but sterile account of my adventures – all frothy wit and anecdotes. Lift music. I find myself engaged in this constant battle between the lingering desire to be socially acceptable, and a growing need to just exist as who and what I am (whatever that is…). There’s a real tension between trying to live my real life, alongside the more public life that is necessary if I am to continue to work and publish. The conflict between the rather brutal creative and the pink-and-fluffy self is exhausting. That I’m so reticent about sharing my work at all is precisely because of worries about how I will be perceived: thus I am a coward who sells the creative down the river to accommodate the needs of a shy girl who needs people to think well of her. The artist provokes comment or offense: but the girl suffers the fall-out. I am striving to build an inner resilience that will allow me to further the creative without, in turn, sacrificing that fragile girl.
Far be it from me to elevate myself with inappropriate comparisons, but I do wonder if all people who work in a medium that involves revealing something of the inner have to weather accusations from their ‘real life’ that they’re inappropriate. Do Tracy Emin’s friends express disapproval of her exhibiting pictures of her cunt?
I’ll leave you with that edifying thought. This blog was brought to you today by the letters A and B, and by a number of fractured modernist identites, and post-structuralist epistemological doubts.
Do tune in again. I promise to make the jokes thicker on the ground…
Foties link: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=179608&id=533893668&l=e970d7c1a8
