There’s enough French in my blood for me to agree with the European attitude that the very young can be charming and delightful and pretty but only a mature woman can be beautiful; and only a mature man can be strong enough to be truly tender.
Jung disagreed with Freud that the decisive period in our lives is the first years. Instead, Jung felt that the decisive period is that in which my husband and I are now, the period of our middle years, when we have passed through childhood with its dependency on our parents; when we’ve weathered the storms of adolescence and the first probings into the ultimate questions; when we’ve gone through early adulthood with its problems of career and marriage and bringing up our babies; and for the first time in our lives find ourselves alone before the crucial problem of who, after all these years, we are. All the protective covering of the first three stages is gone, and we are suddenly alone with ourselves and have to look directly at the great and unique problem of the meaning of our own particular existence in this particular universe.
The breakup of many marriages at precisely this point is another symptom of our refusal to accept this vitally important period of our lives. We have—particularly in the United States, particularly in the suburbs—allowed ourselves to live in a child-centered world; the children have become more important to the parents than the parents are to each other; and suddenly the children grow up and leave the nest and the parents find themselves alone with each other, and discover with horror that there is nobody there. Their youth is gone, and they haven’t become anybody, least of all themselves, and in their terror they have to escape from themselves even further.
So we extol the virtue of chronological, rather than actual, youth. Our younger daughter amused us highly several years ago at the dinner table by looking at us and saying, “Well, really, Mother and Daddy, you’re finished. I mean, it’s all ahead of us, but you’ve had it.” She could not understand what we found so hilarious.
One of our children came to us as a legacy from her parents, close friends of ours who died within a year of each other, leaving a seven-year-old daughter. These two deaths, sudden, unexpected, must have seemed to the little girl like total betrayal. “Not her Mommy!” one of her friends cried. To the small child Mommy is still god, and therefore immortal, and must not betray the child and the universe by dying.
For various legal reasons, Maria was not allowed to come to us for several months after her mother’s death, and this period of being homeless, without family, was wholly destructive, adding to the loss and upheaval. Her quite natural response was to test the cosmos: if there is any structure or reason to life, prove it. She broke rules, because only thus could she have it shown to her that there are rules. It was my husband who came up with the one punishment which had any effect when she got completely out of hand: we took away all rules. You don’t want to go to bed at bedtime? Stay up as late as you like. It’s your turn to set the table? Forget it. You don’t want to wear the dress Mother’s put out for you? Wear whatever you like. You enjoy living in a pigpen? Fine, don’t tidy your room.
This was the one thing she could not stand, to have us remove the security of loving discipline. It wasn’t more than a short while before we would find her stealing into the dining room to set the table.
Possibly one of the reasons so many of us have relinquished our proper roles as parents is a reaction to the warning of Zeke’s psychiatrist from Omaha: we are so afraid of manipulating, of taking away essential freedom and replacing it with imprisoning structures, that we withdraw. Added to this, the widespread misunderstanding of psychiatrists’ warnings about the prevalent abuses of parenthood intimidates us. We read about the mother forcing her son to be dependent on her, so that, psychologically, she emasculates him; he becomes incapable of love and blunders into the grey world of narcissism. The father, we are told, forces his superego on his son, thereby diminishing his free will and his capacity to become a man in his own right. And of course there’s the old bugaboo of the Oedipus complex, the boy “wanting” his mother and ending up looking for a “girl just like the girl who married dear old Dad.” And the girl “falling in love” with her father at puberty and looking for a father, rather than a lover, in her husband.
We swallow half truths without understanding the very real and important truths behind these mythical analogies, and in our terror of becoming destructive mothers and fathers, we refuse to be parents at all. We abdicate parenthood and turn over our responsibilities to strangers; the Sunday School teacher will teach morality (while we brag at the dinner table of “getting around” the government on our income tax); the biology teacher will give sex guidance (it’s too embarrassing); the comics and the villains on TV will take care of leisure time and keep, the children out of our hair and, what is worse, teach them passivity. If the kids are opting out, we have opted out first.
Sometimes Hugh and I feel that if we have done anything right with our children it has been an accident and a miracle; often we realize, in retrospect, that the things we thought were best weren’t really very good at all. Perhaps our children have taught themselves more on our mistakes than on our good will. But we still have to have the courage to make decisions, to say yes, here; no, there.
And there are compensations, lovely unexpected surprises. For instance, one night at dinner after the children’s school report cards had arrived in the morning, Maria said, “Mother and Daddy, we really appreciate the way you talked about all the good things on our report cards and didn’t yell at us about the bad.” (She had had a D in math: so did I, during my school days, far too often.) She went on, “You’ve no idea how awful most of the kids’ parents are; they hit them and yell at them and never even notice if they get a good grade in something.” And to our amazement she repeated, “We really do appreciate you.”
So, by a happy accident, we had done something right!
10
Something very wrong that our generation, as a whole, has done is to set one example for our children that may be more telling than we realize: we respect old age even less than they do. Our parents, as they grow old, are frequently shuffled off into homes or institutions. We persuade ourselves that they’ll be happier there, they’ll be better off with their “own kind” (chronological segregation seems to me one of the worst sins of all), but actually the real problem is that we have neither the time nor the space for them in this urban, technological world. I don’t speak out of any righteous isolation and I know of no easy solution. My grandfather lived to be one hundred and one. For ninety-five years he was a vital, brilliant human being. At ninety-five he retired—up until his ninety-fifth birthday he went to work every day. When he stopped work, the rest of him began stopping, too. In the end he was little more than a child, and things were—to say the least—not easy. He was not put in an old people’s home—our modern equivalent of Bedlam—because my mother took care of him. But, for many people, Bedlam is the only solution. My own mother is now ninety, and not well. I know how I hope to meet the problems which will inevitably arise, but I am not sure that I will be able to.
As for me, when my time comes, I’d like to be put out on an ice floe.
I heard a doctor say that the living tend to withdraw emotionally from the dying, thereby driving them deeper into isolation. Not to withdraw takes tremendous strength. To pull back is a temptation; it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as remaining open. But I saw a horrendous example of a family withdrawing from a long death and this, if anything, will keep me from it.
A friend of mine, a writer, only a few years older than I, got cancer of the lungs which almost immediately spread to the brain, giving the effect of a stroke that paralyzed one side. She was put in hospital where she was given powerful radiation treatment which gave her radiation sickness; she looked like a victim of Hiroshima; her hair came out until there were only a few wisps left. She lost weight massively. She lay there in her hospital bed, able to move one hand, to mumble a few words, looking like an ancient mummy. Within this
terrifying travesty of a human body she was trapped; she was. I went fairly often, with two of her friends, to see her. At first when we talked to her she could mumble that she was glad to see us. Later on she could no longer speak, but she was still there; she still was. Somewhere the essential being of the bush still lived beneath the burning. If I held her hand she could respond with a pressure. For quite a long while she had strength enough to take my hand, to put it to her lips, her fearful, dried, dying lips, and cover it with little loving kisses. After a while all she could do was to let me know with her fingers against mine that she was still there, that the touch of a hand could still reach her.
Her husband and her two children, both college age, had stopped going to see her. It was too painful for them. It is dangerous to judge; but I judged. I was only a friend; she needed her family and they were abandoning her; they had completely withdrawn emotionally. She was, as far as they were concerned, already dead.
But she wasn’t dead. She was there, and she needed to be touched. The essential part of her which could not be consumed needed to be recognized. It wasn’t that difficult for me and the other two friends to go to her. She was not our mother, child, wife. Our lives would be basically unchanged by her death, except in the sense that our lives are changed by every death. And I think that we all, except perhaps nurses and doctors who see it all the time, have a primitive instinct to withdraw from death, even if we manage to conceal our pulling away. There is always the memento mori, the realization that death is contagious; it is contracted the moment we are conceived.
I always took a bath when I got home from the hospital.
It takes a tremendous maturity, a maturity I don’t possess, to strike the balance of involvement/detachment which makes us creatively useful, able to be compassionate, to be involved in the other person’s suffering rather than in our own response to it. False compassion, or sentimentality, always leads us to escape by withdrawing, by becoming cold and impassive and wounding.
As modern medicine keeps people alive far beyond the old threescore years and ten, the problem increases. Evading a realistic acceptance of death and old age hurts not only our parents but our children, and even when it is accepted responsibly, it is criticized. Friends of ours in New York are being censured because the wife’s father is dying in their apartment: he should be put in a hospital, they are told; how can you let your children see death?
But this old man does not require specialized nursing; he does require love and acceptance, and he can have this in his own family in a way in which it can never be given even in the best of hospitals. Which children are being shown the true example of mature love? Those who are asked to share life and death? Or those who are “spared” all unpleasantness? Which children are being helped to become redeemed adults?
And here I come to a dichotomy in my thinking as far as my own children are concerned. I cannot bear the thought of being a burden to them, of becoming senile and silly and an exacerbation. I would be willing—I hope—to accept such a burden myself, but I never want to be one. There is something more than pride involved here. We’ve taken a wrong turning somewhere, so long ago, that we no longer know what is the right way.
I was deeply involved in the deaths of both my grandmothers. I was affected and perhaps scarred, but I think the scarring came more from misguided attempts on the part of varied adults to push me aside, keep things secret, protect me from what I already knew, than from my parents allowing me to share in both life and death.
After my maternal grandmother’s death I was taken to the funeral, but not to the cemetery. I remember being in the house with my grandmother’s dog, who showed his loss by retreating under the bed in which she had died, and refusing to move. I sat alone in my small bedroom and the sea wind blew and the waves rolled slowly, unremittingly, in to shore, and my own grief and incomprehension of death became too much for me to bear. So I picked up a book, a book I had already read and loved, and moved out of my own world of numb pain and into the world of the book. I do not think that this was escape or evasion. The heroine of the book had her own problems with loneliness and anxiety and death. Sharing these, being totally in this different world for an hour or so, helped me understand my own feelings.
11
After a day spent in the emergency room of a city hospital, a day in which I was surrounded by accidents, dying children, irritable patients, many of whom spoke no English and could not follow directions, incredible patience on the part of understaffed doctors and nurses, I felt somewhat the same sense of irrationality in the world around me (all these people were there by accident) as did the man who was almost killed by the falling beam. Whenever this occurs I turn to the piano, to my typewriter, to a book. We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn. Paul Klee said, “Art does not reproduce the visible. Rather, it makes visible.” It is not then, at its best, a mirror but an icon. It takes the chaos in which we live and shows us structure and pattern, not the structure of conformity which imprisons but the structure which liberates, sets us free to become growing, mature human beings. We are a generation which is crying loudly to tear down all structure in order to find freedom, and discovering, when order is demolished, that instead of freedom we have death.
A year ago I taught a seminar in writing practices at the General Theological Seminary in Chelsea. One evening I walked in and announced, “Tonight we are going to talk about structure,” well aware that I was stirring up a hornet’s nest. One cannot talk about structure in literature without talking about it in all of life, and structure, that year, was out. But I wanted to show structure not as restrictive, pharisaic law but as the means of freedom.
We started out discussing the structure of some of the great novels and plays, and went on to structure in poetry, moving from the rhythmic structure of “free” verse to the incredible obedience to structure demanded in the sonnet. The sonnet, as I discovered during the writing of Wrinkle, is for me the perfect analogy of the structure which liberates. Meg is to return to the evil planet, Camazotz, in a final attempt to free her little brother from the grip of the rigid structure which imprisons. Mrs Whatsit, one of the extraterrestrial beings who befriend her, says,
“I cannot pretend that we are doing anything but sending you into the gravest kind of danger. I have to acknowledge quite openly that it may be a fatal danger. I know this. But I do not believe it. And the Happy Medium doesn’t believe it, either.”
“Can’t she see what’s going to happen?” Calvin asked.
“Oh, not in this kind of thing.” Mrs Whatsit sounded surprised at his question. “If we knew ahead of time what was going to happen, we’d be—we’d be like the people in Camazotz, with no lives of our own, with everything all planned and done for us. How can I explain it to you? Oh, I know. In your language you have a form of poetry called the sonnet.”
“Yes, yes,” Calvin said impatiently. “What’s that got to do with the Happy Medium?”
“Kindly pay me the courtesy of listening to me.” Mrs Whatsit’s voice was stern, and for a moment Calvin stopped pawing the ground like a nervous colt. “It is a very strict form of poetry, is it not?”
“Yes.”
“There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That’s a very strict rhythm or meter, yes?”
“Yes.” Calvin nodded.
“And each line has to end with a precise rhyme pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet, is it?”
“No.”
“But within this strict form the poet has complete freedom to say whatever he wants, doesn’t he?”
“Yes.” Calvin nodded again.
“So,” Mrs Whatsit said.
“So what?”
“Oh, do not be stupid, boy!” Mrs Whatsit scolded. “You know perfectly well what I am driving at!”
“You mean you’re comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it?”
“Yes,” Mrs Whatsit said. “You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”
Well, there it is: an analogy.
To speak analogously is to admit that you can’t say it directly; you really can’t say it at all; it’s outside the realm of provable fact. But it is not a coincidence that some of the greatest poetry in the English language is in the form of the sonnet. The haiku is one of the most popular forms of poetry today: what could be more structured?
But the students talked loudly about wanting to be free to dance, to make love, to be themselves. So do I. So we left literature and talked about the body, and I kept asking questions: what is it in you which gives you this freedom? Finally one of the young men, with great reluctance, pulled out the word: skeleton. It is our bones, our structure, which frees us to dance, to make love. Without our structure we would be an imprisoned, amorphous blob of flesh, incapable of response. The amoeba has a minimum of structure, but I doubt if it has much fun.
12
This time in Crosswicks is a respite, perhaps an irresponsible one. For this brief time I am more aware of a baby learning a new word, of the splashing of the brook after a rain, of the isness of lying in our big four-poster bed on a night when I retire with the babies and watch the green fade from the trees which surround our windows. But I am very much aware that what we are all, in our country and around the world, going to do in the next weeks and months and years is of inestimable importance. In the past few years we have seen more violence and horror than we would have thought possible, and there aren’t any signs that it is going to stop without a great deal of pain and anguish.
Thomas Mann wrote that if the German writers had, through their fiction, made richer promises than Hitler, it would have been Hitler, rather than the writers, who would have had to flee the country. The idea of this kind of responsibility hit me a lot harder than the idea of being an orally regressed psychic masochist.
A Circle of Quiet Page 11