Sunday blues

It's raining again and it's cold. I got up early and put on my yoga clothes, full of good intentions. But then I made the mistake of eating breakfast. And while sitting in my cold dining room, reading the paper, I got so down that I could hardly hold my head up. Obviously, a good, hard workout would have gotten my blood moving, but I had just eaten three bowls of cereal, and this after swearing to my self that I wouldn't. What is wrong with me? Where is my self-control? Yoga requires an empty stomach. I felt sick just thinking about the heavy, mushy mess in my gut getting in the way of twists and coming back my up esophagus in downward dog. So did I go? Did I head out into the freezing rain, open up the (non-electrified) garage doors, try to avoid the waterfall that comes through the broken gutter on the right side of the garage, and pull the car out? No I did not. I went back to bed.

I'm grieving again, damn it. I just broke up with...god, I have no idea how many boyfriends I have had since I got divorced, and no desire to count them. Another one down the tubes. It seemed like the right thing to do. He was devoted to me, intelligent, attractive, fit, politically savvy, succesful, and reasonably well-off. Good with money. But he was also domineering, egotistical, insensitive, and often boring. Perhaps that was the worst of it. Talking to him was almost never a pleasure. Indeed, it was usually an exercise in stifled frustration and repressed rage, because he has the habit of saying whatever comes into his head. He's a digressive talker--the sort of person who begins a story and then inserts all kinds of somewhat related but utterly uninteresting information, asides, statistics, on the way. It's not unlike hearing a scholarly book with lots of footnotes reading itself out loud, with all the footnotes interrupting the main flow of the narrative. I like footnotes. I use them. I understand this kind of thinking; I can follow the progression, but I don't enjoy it during conversations. In fact, conversation--that word of manifold meanings--was the principle issue over which we finally broke. We couldn't HAVE a conversation because generally he did all of the talking. Or, rather, I would say something, and then he would lecture on it for a few mintues, while I listened. And I would impatiently wait for him to finish, because usually he had gotten onto a rant based on an assumption that he had snapped to without actually asking me any questions, and he was usually way off base. But contradicting and correcting him was difficult, because he, like a bulldog, would tenaciously hold on to whatever his original idea was, and would defend it to the death, seemingly. Only later, after he had come out of the bull-dog lock, could he reassess. But then he would still pugnanciously hold to the basic outlines of the stance.

The weird thing is, I often find myself listening instead of talking because I get so depressed, so sunk into lassitude and dejection that I literally lose the energy to speak. But men tell me that I'm actually rather intimidatingly articulate and strong. The don't perceive the shattered inside self that I feel, the part of me that crawls into bed, that curls into a ball in the corner and falls, headlong, into the void. They think I can "take it" because I guess when I'm "up," as opposed to "down," I put up a pretty good fight. And I fight as tenanciously as they do because I'm threatened, as they are. It's hard for me to back down and say I was wrong. If I admit that I messed up, then, I'm afraid, my entire self-structure will crumble.


It was like this with M., my ex-husband, still the great love of my life. Indeed, all the men in my life, the men I have loved, have all had the gift of gab. And they have all talked over me, beaten me into the ground with discourse--I seem not to be able to fall for someone who I don't suspect can beat me at my game, a man whose rhetorical skills are greater than my own--men who dominate me verbally, in fact. I'm attracted like the moth to the flame that singes me. In this case, the case of B., I appear to have been impressed by sheer volubility, the rhetorical energy that powered his talking, but not so much by what he had to say. In the case of all three---no, if we count I., there are four men whom I have loved a lot in the last 30 years-- I ended up having to leave each one of them, I thought, because they beat me up with banter. Not one of them was particularly good at asking questions, or especially introspective.

And so here I am on a rainy, dark Sunday afternoon, back in bed, where I'm looking for solace in sleep, because sleep heals the hurt in the mind that is conscious of what I have lost, and sad for what I still haven't found. I am still alone. My mother and father are dead. My sister and brother live thousands of miles away. Not that they're any comfort. They're far more abusive, verbally, than any of my boyfriends. There's a reason I picked these guys.

But there's got to be a way to break the trend, to free myself. And the first step is facing the world without the crutch of someone who thinks I'm a pain in the ass but who puts up with me anyways, who loves me the way my family did--for no reason they could articulate, but rather out of some incomprehensible force of nature. I think my sister and brother, taught by my parents, believe that love is almost instinctual--like an urge or primitive bond between people related by the blood. We don't like you but we love you, they say quite often. We think you suck but we love you because you're our sister. Don't they know that "love refines/The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat/ In Reason, and is judicious" (P.L. 6.689-91)? As Adam says to Eve, conversation is

Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
Of looks and smiles, for smiles from Reason flow,
To brute deni'd, and are of Love the food,
Love not the lowest end of human life.
For not to irksom toile, but to delight
He made us, and delight to Reason joyn'd. (P.L. 9.238-243)

Love is reasonable, after all, it is not a brutish, low response of the body alone, but rather an activity of the heart and mind. Even animals choose whom they love, and love best where best treated. But we are not dogs, not children who cling to the hand that beats them if it also feeds and shelters them.

Adult love, genuine love, grows out of an autonomous spirit that is capable of evaluating and the other in all his or her otherness, as an independent life upon which one does not depend for existence, but rather as a "meet help" an equal (okay, so we've transcended Milton, now, alright?) whose delightful conversation refreshes the spirit, the body, and the mind, someone with whom one finally no longer feels so terribly alone in this world, this universe.

I know this and writing about it, dwelling rationally with these thoughts, is helpful to me. It makes it possible for me to get up, at last, and get on with what there is left of the day. But I will move through time with a sense of loss, and regret. The illusion of companionship, after all, is often very persuasive, and one so badly needs company. I liked pretending that I had found my mate, that at last I would no longer feel alone.

We are bombarded with cultural messages that urge us to think that true and lasting fulfillment in life, that blissful feeling of harmonious togetherness that we all yearn for, comes principally and perhaps only through heterosexual love. But there are, there must be, many other ways to experience life as meaningful and fulfilling. There is, after all, my still unfinished and neglected self to unfold, to spin out in its own form, unrestricted by the needs or determinations of an other...there is the inner voice I hear, that whipsers "you have paintings and books inside of you...and you need to give yourself time to bring them forth." Every day I read about suffering people whose lives I want to improve.