Atom Smasher

He is slowly dying from the inside out of a degenerative cognitive disease. With no awareness this is happening, he continues to pride himself on his good memory. He doesn’t know what year it is, how many children he has, or what he did this morning.

A little over two years ago, we sold his house, picked him up, and drove the several hours back to our house, which would be his new home. Since that day, he has been pretty much attached to me by the hip, watching soccer games, going out to eat, taking the kids to various activities, having coffee, sitting and staring into space for hours while I sit across from him trying to do my work, sometimes waiting in my office while I teach. He increasingly fiddles uselessly with watches and razors, only able to do tasks that comprise precisely one step. He loves to talk about the past — the stories of which repeat hundreds and hundreds of times, increasingly intertwining, splicing one into the other, copies upon copies spinning out like a suddenly exploded nucleus bursting with unrecognizable virus. The Eiffel Tower is the first stop on a trip to China, where they saw the Pope and got on a cruise ship to see the Kremlin. The military, malaria, boats through the Golden Gate, flying, harvested sweet potatoes stored in a mound of dirt, holding up the leaning tower, chickens fighting underneath his bedroom floor, selling boiled peanuts from his family’s farm to the mill workers changing shifts, sending a postcard from a place called “Hell” in Mexico, truck stops, Morse Code, spies, torture, a girl on a bus, businesses, dead bodies in airplanes, swimming in muddy creeks, race cars careening into the fences but landing back on the track, overcoming a carjacker with a gun. Together we spot and admire the contrails of airplanes, both of us fascinated by air travel.

He is and has been a man of his era and of the rural south. Race is everywhere and almost always salient enough to mention, but he’s sure he is no racist. And indeed, the friends he makes at daycare are not white. He loves them. Men and women are fundamentally different, and he has that particular form of religiosity that places devil, demon, and warring angel in the middle of everyday life, taking active roles even in the mundane. His inner model of the world has been one both of bootstrap pulling and of powerful forces outside our control. These days, it is a fantastical, ephemeral one, one in which a strange, flying life-form I cannot see — and he pities me for this — buzzes around power lines and into bushes, occasionally, he has been told, diving to the sea to collect salt water, which is somehow related to the power lines. He asks my son if he has ever heard of a man named Christian Turner.

After about six months with us (a particularly low period for all of us, with every point of stress a resonant tone awakening vibrations among many other point of stress), we were able to get him into an adult daycare center for six hours a day. Without that help, it’s hard to see how the situation would have been tolerable absent a full-time stay-at-home family member, especially as his friends, family, and church back home rapidly dropped off the map. It reminds me of caring for a toddler, but instead of having faith that one’s hard work would be rewarded by the development and growth of a new personality, you know this particular hard work will grants little more than the intrinsic reward that always attends acting for others.

You’re constantly reminded of your own selfishness, how much more you could be doing, the fleetingness of this existence, the contingencies that bear on your conception of your own mind, your many inadequacies in everything else you’re trying to do but failing at. Watching someone else’s brain die teaches you about yourself like an atom smasher teaches you about unsmashed atoms. It has been a great but hard won gift to be forced to accept, in the most visceral and direct way, the mind as ever-changing and temporary. It is one thing to think of one’s mind as a more or less undifferentiated part of the rest of the universe. It is quite another to feel it.

Early on I wrote an impressionistic blog post after seeing a poster that depicted the inevitable decline of the mind as a series of less and less transparent jewels, ending in the opaque luster of a pearl. And then, reflecting both on my father-in-law’s increasingly distant orbit from my reality and on my grandfather’s death, I wrote about the way we seem to die now, out of our minds, of thirst, with just enough morphine not to care so much, probably perceiving our predicament through the refractions in dream of a lifetime’s memories. I’ve also started and junked a post more than once about What I Believe, my own religion, perhaps driven by a need felt because I lack the fellowship on these matters that many others have. But like everyone else, I grapple often with what’s really there. Out of the darkness, in the flickering of light perceived with closed eyes, I see the fundamental idea that happiness lies in appreciating and truly accepting that one’s objective significance is no more or less than that of so many crumbling bits of concrete from the broken edge of a curb, weeds beginning to colonize. What does it mean that these bits of soon-to-be-dust and I are similarly fleeting manifestations of the same universe? Observing a dying brain makes what is intellectually plain into something that is emotionally plain. And that’s the trick, isn’t it: accepting emotionally what is all too easy to grasp intellectually.

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At the beginning of this year, two years after the day we picked him up, we placed him in an assisted living facility. We had neared our limit in providing a good life for him, on account of his inevitably declining mobility, his complete and utter inability to entertain himself, and his chaotic swings between love and extreme dislike of the daycare and our routine. Sooner or later he would fall down our stairs, slip in the shower (which he only took when I give him realtime, step-by-step instructions and manage it), wander off, or otherwise manage to hurt himself. It soon became even more apparent. Within days of moving him in, we got a call that they needed to move him into the locked memory care center. I’ll omit the details and just say that this was hard but has gotten easier. I love him.

Many of my friends have shared their own, their family’s, or their friends’ struggles with illness, death, divorce, or mental breakdowns. And I think of all the struggle that lurks unseen beneath even the happier Facebook status updates. I certainly don’t think the burden my family has carried is or has been unusually difficult, our tragedies any worse. Surely they have been less so than those of my friends who have lost children or struggled with life-threatening diseases. I thought, though, I would share this, because maybe it will help someone else feel less alone. No matter how dark your here and now, please know that people do care. While I believe our senses of separate, subjective experience and self-importance are illusions, also illusory are our feelings of isolation.

We cannot, no matter how we might wish or pretend, drop everything and give ourselves over completely to all others in their private struggles. But we can each do our best, where we can. Over the past two years, my friends and family have given me great comfort, and for that I am forever grateful.

It's My Anniversary Again

One day, I might get around to revising, rewriting, or otherwise rethinking this. But here at the twenty-third hour of the twenty-first anniversary of my marriage, I think I’ll just repost it. With all that’s happened this year, it seems like I wrote these words a lifetime ago. I love you, Meredith Turner, and I still mean every word of this.

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My twentieth wedding anniversary was last week, and we finally went away together to celebrate. Ergo, the lack of posting. While sipping mojitos and relaxing by the beach, I kicked around this post for awhile, but kept putting it away and hating it as pablum. Even if it is, it’s an antidote to other nonsense I used to believe. So here goes. Maybe I can combat, even a little, the dangerous, malformed view under which I labored as a young person. For me, growing up meant gradually letting go of lots of comforting ideas and learning how to embrace reality. This is about one of those: true love.

You’re either groaning because you think true love is such an absurd idea that it’s essentially a straw-man or because you’re pained that anyone would lead the empty life of a romance-atheist. These antipodes, and I’ve experienced the eye rolls from each, are yet another instance of the opposing forces always at play when working out our place in the universe. Is our position privileged or not? And if it’s not, what’s the point?

True love, soul-mates, destiny, all of these are ways of describing a deeply embedded but wildly destructive cultural myth. Your partner is that one person for whom you were meant and whom you really, really love, the one who makes your heart beat faster, the one who is supposed to be so close as to be a part of you. It’s psychologically comforting. It affirms our specialness and provides an aura of security so unbelievably tempting in this life that seems otherwise perilously close to being cast adrift in rough black seas, at night, alone. Even if we don’t believe in the Myth, and most people probably don’t intellectually, we may grasp onto it in dark times. Some days we just need it to be true.

You probably already know all I’m about to say in response and are wondering why I thought it worth writing down. Well, it wasn’t obvious to me as a young person, and I know too many others sabotaged by an attachment to some part or other of the Myth. Our culture, our movies, our music, and our books are filled with it. Marriage ceremonies too often pretend simply to recognize true love’s existence. We’re overrun with the message that love is something that happens to us, that we either feel or don’t. I’m convinced that this belief, even if only subconsciously entertained, causes too much suffering to be ignored.

The answer to the Myth’s seductive promise is to be mindful of reality. There are thousands of people out there with whom you could fall in love. Thousands and thousands. If you were in a boat with forty random people and shipwrecked on an island, you’d probably fall in love with one (or more) of them eventually. The supply of people with whom we could fall in love is vast, and we’ll keep meeting members of this set throughout our lives. Obvious, yes, but dangerous to deny.

For me, love is not faith in the idea that the universe has delivered to me my one, true companion. Rather, it begins with the adherence to a wager, the most important choice I’ve ever made. I’m betting that this single, precious life will be best spent with a single, compatible person. Again, the wager is this: life will be better lived with steadfast commitment to one partner than with one’s devotion lurching from person to person, wherever the sensation of love takes it. I can’t tell you whether this is always the right choice, but it is mine.

Love starts, of course, with biologically-driven infatuation. But the body will keep doing that to you, if you let it. Every time you meet a new member of the set, if you leave open the possibility, infatuation will lay in its hooks and begin to do its work. Part of love is deciding that you will not let this happen, that you will draw boundaries so broadly that you never give infatuation with another a fighting chance to become something more and so broadly that your partner is never asked to wonder whether you’re still together in all this. It’s your obligation to reassure. Deep and whole-hearted sharing of a life, my definition of love, cannot really happen without that security.

I wish I’d understood marriage this way from the start. You grant each other the luxury of knowing that your loyalty will not depend on a day-by-day calculation of competing desires. If you’re guided by momentary calculations of happiness, you’ll sooner or later jump ship. That’s human nature. But together you’ve made the long bet. And once you’ve both committed to that, truly committed to irrevocability, infatuation with each other never really goes away for long.

After twenty years, the love I have for my wife is not at all how it began. My feeling of it is inextricably bound to our shared history. Whether either of us could have been happier with someone else is not a relevant question. That’s a life we didn’t lead. We’re betting not that we’re happier together than we would have been with any other people in the world, but that we’re happier living irrevocably together than conditionally, and thus, in a real sense, alone. Soul-mates are made, not born. And we are soul-mates, because we choose to be.

The power of the Myth of true love lies in the assurance it provides that our seemingly secure lives are destined, that our love is embedded right in the moral fabric of the universe. Life is a story we’re living out, a movie in which we’re the sympathetic hero. But what happens when what you feel isn’t the “outside this universe,” timeless, emotion as the voice of God, overwhelming conviction that you’re in love, when you don’t feel that electric jolt of infatuation for your supposed soul-mate? Well, then how could this person really be your soul-mate? If he or she were, there would simply be no way you could have the feelings you do for someone else. The people in the movies sure don’t seem this ambivalent about the love they find. So your soul-mate must still be out there somewhere, and, obviously, this relationship must end for the next one, the destined one, to begin. But that way lies sadness, because love is not a sensation, but the sharing of your one, precious life. Don’t waste it trying to chase a phantom. Love is yours to choose.

The Men and Women of ...

Why do we so often refer to members of the military as our “men and women in uniform”? It’s not the “uniform” part that has me thinking about this. We do the same with many other institutions — the “men and women of TransExpress Airlines” or the “talented men and women of Central State University.” For that matter, why do we address a kindergarten class as “boys and girls”? I’m not looking to suggest that each utterance of such phrases reveals the latent gender biases of the speaker. I only want to ask why. In doing so, I’ve been led to consider the descriptive power of terms of sexual identification, beliefs that men and women are essentially different and yet inseparable types of beings, and how attempts to be inclusive can also reinforce the distinction among groups.

But maybe you think it’s ridiculous even to question this turn of phrase. It’s just a colorful way of saying “people,” right? To see how odd gendered phrasing is, in the abstract, try it out on other social groups: “our blacks and whites in uniform,” “the Latinos and non-Latinos of Widget World Industries.” No one talks that way. The phrasing is offensive for what we would think it reveals about the speaker — that he or she found the classification into social groups somehow relevant, so relevant as to be the fundamental way to sort the employees of an entire organization. And yet the audience understands that the distinction drawn is not at all relevant in the context used. The speaker, therefore, must be resorting to faulty stereotypes. Shame on him … or her.

But even where a classification is not offensive, it just seems bizarre when it’s not directly related to a functional categorization within the organization. “The black-haired, blondes, and brown-haired of Central High School” is a patently stupid way to refer to a student body, whereas “the pilots, flight attendants, maintenance, and other professionals of Pacific Airways” is intuitively sensible.

So why is a top-level gender classification of an organization seen as rhetorically acceptable and perhaps even the preferred way to refer to the organization’s members? There are a number of possibilities. First, perhaps this usage reflects the pervasive belief that men and women are essentially different in ways relevant to just about every aspect of life, including jobs both genders share. This is a first step toward arguing that the common rhetorical phrase, “men and women of,” is an invidious one. And there is certainly lots of evidence in our society that many, many people believe the distinction between men and women is almost always relevant. That’s not to say that relevance is thought automatically to imply the acceptability of unequal treatment. It’s a weaker thing to assert that a classification among, say, workers is relevant to appreciating the social dynamics and character of a workforce than to claim that a classification should be the basis of different treatment. But, often enough, people also believe that gender justifies different, but perhaps not what they would recognize as unequal, treatment.

As the father of a young girl and a young boy, I’ve lived under the social pressures to give boys and girls different childhood experiences. From colors (pink and blue), to varieties of play, to dress, children grow up with profoundly different kinds of reinforcement and opportunities depending on their genders. There’s a debate over how much of this is innate and how much kids’ tastes are shaped by marketing, expectation, and peer-group pressure. Other social animals exhibit sexual segregation or at least inhabit different roles within groups. I know almost nothing about research into the social expression of innate human sexual differences. But I would very surprised if evolution has not resulted in at least some different social proclivities among the sexes. After all, the struggle over the eons has been to attract one another.

Whatever payload natural selection has left in my own children, I see no reason to reinforce gendered distinctions that have no obvious relevance to modern society and which are hindrances to affording others opportunity and respect. So my spouse and I never forbade, but did not selectively encourage, princess play or truck play or superhero play or pink markers or blue markers. My son fell in love with Star Wars, true. And my daughter developed a particular kind of interest in animals that is more often associated with girls. She also has been more attracted to sparkly things and, more recently but to some extent for a long while, clothing, hair styles, and nail polish. (She also loves the Lord of the Rings, great white sharks, and videogames more associated with boys.) I have no way of saying how all their tastes have come about. This is a massive topic that to discuss would take a book-length treatment and knowledge I don’t have. You quickly learn as a parent, though, that while you can do your best to impart values and taste, your children will substantially be a product of the culture in which they live, just as you have been. That felt understanding leads to a critical appraisal of what that culture is telling them.

That’s why I’ve balked when a politician acknowledges a debt to our “brave men and women of the armed forces.” Why should my kids believe that one’s gender has anything to do with one’s place in the armed forces? The obvious rejoinder is that the phrase does not mean to imply any difference in status. Kind of like the judicial rationale for upholding the appearance of “in God we trust” on our money and “under God” in our pledge: The Supreme Court has told us that these are only secular acknowledgments of the role of (non-sectarian) civic religion in our history but have no religious expressive value. In other words, they’re ok for the government to say because they do not mean at all what they purport to say (and, ironically, what the zealous advocates of theocracy believe them to say). So too, the justification for “men and women of” might be that it means nothing, only another way of saying “people.”

Perhaps we can take a cue from the religious example, though, and give an even more charitable reading to the phrase. At one time, one could accurately say, without imparting to the word “man” a universal quality, “the men of the armed forces” or “the men of Central College.” Adding “and women,” far from having any discriminatory intent or effect, signaled the importance of the recent inclusion of women in formerly male-only institutions. When I was growing up, people started saying “our forefathers, and foremothers” in speeches, orally set off in commas, inducing a knowing chuckle at the then-common tendency to undervalue the contributions of women in the early days of the Republic. It was a reminder of the undesirable exclusivity of the word “forefathers.”

A CEO who praises the “men and women” of the company does not, under this view, communicate a different appraisal of their roles but respect for their equal contributions. There’s a problem with that, however. Why would the same CEO not open a speech by praising the “blacks and whites” of the company? Surely, African Americans have struggled to overcome systematic exclusion just as women have. And as surely, it’s still important to signal their equal status, the rejection of discrimination, and to welcome the arrival of policies of inclusion. But we don’t do that in this way. Why not?

Highlighting the social groups that compose a company is a double-edged sword. It can signal the presence and importance of those groups within the organization even as it reinforces the relevance of the distinction. Some conservatives have taken the irrelevance of racial and gender distinctions to mean that no policies should ever turn on them, even those policies meant to achieve greater inclusion in areas of life where women or minorities are underrepresented and have been excluded in the past. This is a mistake, in my view. But it’s a bit curious that the zeal accompanying the insistence on the irrelevance of the distinction, to the point of abject hostility to “identity politics” and the Colbert-like insistence that we just not see race at all, does not cause a moment’s hesitation at “the men and women of.” In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to find empirically that the phrase is more often be used by CEOs who are otherwise allergic to group-based politics.

Just to be clear, I don’t mean this to be personally critical. I don’t think that saying “the men and women of” means the speaker holds essentialist and incorrect views about the capabilities of the sexes. It’s embedded in modern rhetoric, and I’m rambling along thinking about why that might be. So let’s consider another possibility that is yet more charitable to the phrase, one you might consider when trying hard to be fair to such speakers’ intentions. I’d call this aspect of the phrase “vivification.”

Why, after all, did we ever use the phrase “the men of”? When I hear the word “man,” I summon a picture more specific than that when I hear the word “person.” When you hear “men and women,” if you’re like me, you sometimes summon an image of a somewhat generic group but made more flesh and blood by the admittedly weak visual cue the gendered words carry. If I want you to think of the laboring and helpful human beings staffing my organization, perhaps saying “men and women” instead of “people” makes it more likely you will imagine a group of actual human beings than a faceless bureaucracy. Specifying gender is a gentle, subtle cue to physical features — secondary sexual characteristics, to be sure — that distinguish us from the cogs of a machine. We could as well say “the hard-working, tall and short people of Skyways Airlines,” but it would be such a novel way of injecting human characteristics that it would quite obviously not have the desired effect. And so, maybe “men and women of,” born of a purpose to be inclusive in a world of very recent exclusion, is now an available means in rhetoric of humanizing an institution. If this is its purpose, we should recognize that we’re piggybacking on cultural understandings of the stereotypical physical differences of the sexes.

Well, I don’t have any answers. I admit that I don’t particularly like the phrase “the men and women of.” My perception is that it tends to be delivered to achieve a solemnifying effect by politicians and corporate officers. At this point, I think its effect, if not its purpose, has shifted away from laudably signaling inclusion and toward reinforcing distinctions that should not exist. By now, inclusion should be a given. Just as obviously, its binary phrasing is problematic as transgender individuals achieve greater social acceptance.

I’ve found it funny how, in all the wars over gendered products and the sexual politics of the workplace, some uses of sexual differences go unremarked. It just seems like a pretty big deal to me when a leader of a large organization introduces it by asserting, right from the beginning, that it’s a union of sexes. Weird, huh?

Kids Today

You’ve all seen it. A father attempts to murder modernity itself:

Humanity is always becoming something else, and yet each generation wants to be the last ever to change. There’s a complicated sort of fear — for their children’s security and for their own irrelevance — in this attitude. Not helped by the fact that the agent of all change, whether good or bad, is disrespect.

Anniversary Post: Against True Love

My twentieth wedding anniversary was last week, and we finally went away together to celebrate. Ergo, the lack of posting. While sipping mojitos and relaxing by the beach, I kicked around this post for awhile, but kept putting it away and hating it as pablum. Even if it is, it’s an antidote to other nonsense I used to believe. So here goes. Maybe I can combat, even a little, the dangerous, malformed view under which I labored as a young person. For me, growing up meant gradually letting go of lots of comforting ideas and learning how to embrace reality. This is about one of those: true love.

You’re either groaning because you think true love is such an absurd idea that it’s essentially a straw-man or because you’re pained that anyone would lead the empty life of a romance-atheist. These antipodes, and I’ve experienced the eye rolls from each, are yet another instance of the opposing forces always at play when working out our place in the universe. Is our position privileged or not? And if it’s not, what’s the point?

True love, soul-mates, destiny, all of these are ways of describing a deeply embedded but wildly destructive cultural myth. Your partner is that one person for whom you were meant and whom you really, really love, the one who makes your heart beat faster, the one who is supposed to be so close as to be a part of you. It’s psychologically comforting. It affirms our specialness and provides an aura of security so unbelievably tempting in this life that seems otherwise perilously close to being cast adrift in rough black seas, at night, alone. Even if we don’t believe in the Myth, and most people probably don’t intellectually, we may grasp onto it in dark times. Some days we just need it to be true.

You probably already know all I’m about to say in response and are wondering why I thought it worth writing down. Well, it wasn’t obvious to me as a young person, and I know too many others sabotaged by an attachment to some part or other of the Myth. Our culture, our movies, our music, and our books are filled with it. Marriage ceremonies too often pretend simply to recognize true love’s existence. We’re overrun with the message that love is something that happens to us, that we either feel or don’t. I’m convinced that this belief, even if only subconsciously entertained, causes too much suffering to be ignored.

The answer to the Myth’s seductive promise is to be mindful of reality. There are thousands of people out there with whom you could fall in love. Thousands and thousands. If you were in a boat with forty random people and shipwrecked on an island, you’d probably fall in love with one (or more) of them eventually. The supply of people with whom we could fall in love is vast, and we’ll keep meeting members of this set throughout our lives. Obvious, yes, but dangerous to deny.

For me, love is not faith in the idea that the universe has delivered to me my one, true companion. Rather, it begins with the adherence to a wager, the most important choice I’ve ever made. I’m betting that this single, precious life will be best spent with a single, compatible person. Again, the wager is this: life will be better lived with steadfast commitment to one partner than with one’s devotion lurching from person to person, wherever the sensation of love takes it. I can’t tell you whether this is always the right choice, but it is mine.

Love starts, of course, with biologically-driven infatuation. But the body will keep doing that to you, if you let it. Every time you meet a new member of the set, if you leave open the possibility, infatuation will lay in its hooks and begin to do its work. Part of love is deciding that you will not let this happen, that you will draw boundaries so broadly that you never give infatuation with another a fighting chance to become something more and so broadly that your partner is never asked to wonder whether you’re still together in all this. It’s your obligation to reassure. Deep and whole-hearted sharing of a life, my definition of love, cannot really happen without that security.

I wish I’d understood marriage this way from the start. You grant each other the luxury of knowing that your loyalty will not depend on a day-by-day calculation of competing desires. If you’re guided by momentary calculations of happiness, you’ll sooner or later jump ship. That’s human nature. But together you’ve made the long bet. And once you’ve both committed to that, truly committed to irrevocability, infatuation with each other never really goes away for long.

After twenty years, the love I have for my wife is not at all how it began. My feeling of it is inextricably bound to our shared history. Whether either of us could have been happier with someone else is not a relevant question. That’s a life we didn’t lead. We’re betting not that we’re happier together than we would have been with any other people in the world, but that we’re happier living irrevocably together than conditionally, and thus, in a real sense, alone. Soul-mates are made, not born. And we are soul-mates, because we choose to be.

The power of the Myth of true love lies in the assurance it provides that our seemingly secure lives are destined, that our love is embedded right in the moral fabric of the universe. Life is a story we’re living out, a movie in which we’re the sympathetic hero. But what happens when what you feel isn’t the “outside this universe,” timeless, emotion as the voice of God, overwhelming conviction that you’re in love, when you don’t feel that electric jolt of infatuation for your supposed soul-mate? Well, then how could this person really be your soul-mate? If he or she were, there would simply be no way you could have the feelings you do for someone else. The people in the movies sure don’t seem this ambivalent about the love they find. So your soul-mate must still be out there somewhere, and, obviously, this relationship must end for the next one, the destined one, to begin. But that way lies sadness, because love is not a sensation, but the sharing of your one, precious life. Don’t waste it trying to chase a phantom. Love is yours to choose.