Kuala Lumpur is hot. The humid air smells of spice and perfume and swirling fans carry the music of voices in a language unknown  to me.

KL is suprisingly green and chilled, pockets of tropical parks in the centre of the city and quiet. Not at all the chaotic Bangkokian metropolis that I was expecting.

But it still possesses the Asian style chaos that I find so deeply appealing: the hand of history peeling back the paint, the touch and wear of time, of lives, and unfinished futures hanging in the air.


The large shopping centre next door to my hostel was ground floor America : Borders, Esprit, Western Union, 7 Eleven...



but as the floor numbers grew things changed. By floor five I was being accosted by people wanting to unleash feet eating fish upon me.



and by floor seven.... a full size indoor rollercoaster.. whoah.


But I was headed straight for a massage : my first  in six months. I have been so consumed and overtaken by loss and unexpected, unwanted change in my life, that I've built up  twisted bundles of suffering in my muscles.  The pain the Malaysian woman's hands untwisted from my back and (unexpectedly) the back of my legs was quite simply insane.



and there's much more untwisting to come on this holiday road....

"Sati had the feeling that this was the first time her body had really existed.  It wasn't as if SIva was penetrating her, but as if he opened himself up to her like a huge cavity, welcoming her into himself. The contact with the surface of his body absorbed her into it.. She pressed on toward the center of him, as though toward the glow of a fire in the depths of a cave.  She was lost, but felt she was about to find herself. Or rather: She felt that what was happening was a return" (p79)

Ka, Roberto Calasso

"... peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while.  The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the foresaken land, and hope returned to him.  For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for every beyond its reach"

The bohemian french writer Anais Nin reads as an astounding creature : intelligent,  adventurous, sensual. I feel affinity with her relationship to the aesthetic, to creativity, to having an artistic practice, to her self work (she was in psychoanalysis for a long time),  and with the spirited way she wrestled with her yearning for a grand, 'ideal' love.



Once of the things that really stayed with me from reading her diaries years ago, was the passage where she speaks of preparing her house: both of physically creating a beautiful space that was an extension of her interior, and metaphorically of preparing, of readying her self for this great love:

"Most of my life has been spent in enriching as well as I could the long, long waiting for the great events which fill me now so deeply that I am overwhelmed. Now I understand the terrific restlessness, the tragic sense of failure, the deep discontent.  I was waiting. This is the hour of expansion fo true living. All the rest was a preparation. Thirty years of anguished watchfulness. And how these are the days I lived for. And to be aware of this, so fully aware, that is what is almost humanly unbearable.   Himan beings cannot bear the knowledge of the future.  To me, the knowledge of the present is just as dazzling.  To be so actuely rich and to know it."

And this too passed.

While I am not yet forty, with those gates of passage looming in my years, I also  feel much affinity with this, written some years later :

"At forty I enter a new maturity, stripped of my mirages, dreams and miracles, of my delusions and illusions and my heavy romantic sorrows. What awaits me is the expression of this strength, in action. I am about to lay down my magician’s wand, my healer’s paraphernalia…and to confront the act, in writing as well as in living."

I don't know about laying down the magician's wand... but I too feel that need to confront my movement into a new stage; or at least, to be standing wakefully at the precipice, observing the shifting of paths. To confront where I have come from. To confront where I have gone adrift, where my plans, best laid and otherwise, have come undone. And once again to return, and more deeply and thoroughly this time, confront where and who I am; perhaps who I will be.

from When the Candle is Blown Out: On The Death of Katagiri Roshi, by Natalie Goldberg
........


“Roshi, now that I am divorced, it is very lonely.”

“Tell me. What do you do when you are alone in the house?”

I’d never thought of that. I became interested. “Well, I water the plants,” I faltered, then continued, “I wash a few dishes, call a friend.” The momentum built. “I sit on the couch for hours and stare at the bare branches out the window. I play over and over Paul Simon’s new album about New Mexico—I miss it there.”

His attention encouraged me. “Lately, I’ve been sitting at my dining-room table and painting little pictures.” I looked at him. Suddenly my solitary life had a texture.

“Is there anything wrong with loneliness?” he asked in a low voice.

I shook my head. All at once I saw it was a natural condition of life, like sadness, grief, even joy. When I was sitting with him, it didn’t feel ominous or unbearable.

“Anyone who wants to go to the source is lonely. There are many people at Zen Center. Those who are practicing deeply are only with themselves.”

“Are you lonely?” I entreated.

“Yes,” he nodded. “But I don’t let it toss me away. It’s just loneliness.”

“Do you ever get over it?”

“I take an ice-cold shower every morning. I never get used to it. It shocks me each time, but I’ve learned to stand up in it.” He pointed at me. “Can you stand up in loneliness?”

He continued, “Being alone is the terminal abode. You can’t go any deeper in your practice if you run from it.”

He spoke to me evenly, honestly. My hunger was satiated—the ignored little girl still inside me and the adult seeker—both were nourished.

Listening to the radio last night I chanced upon the discovery of one of those not-so-well-known legends, a haunting folk singer called Kath Bloom, whose exquisite poetic folk melancholy reminds me of Joni Mitchell (who is so close to my heart).

Synchronicstically, as I was looking her up it turned out that one of her songs was featured in Before Sunrise. A really beautiful little movie by director Richard LInklater with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy.  In it, two young travellers meet by chance on a train and spend twelve hours together exploring a city and each other, and in so doing end up connecting with brief intensity in love.

Interestingly for me, Hawke and Delphy are of my generation so the follow up movie, Before Sunset which picks up their story again some eight years later, temporally followed my own growing beyond young adulthood and so it has in some way, seemed to follow the contours of some of my own questions about love and life. 

The two movies question their chance meetings : what of our missed opportunities? the paths we don't follow?, what of randomness? ...synchroncity?, the magic of heart connections, do we have a soul mate?, what of the way love's presence and loss cuts into us?, what of our regrets and dissatisfactions with compromise?

... and Kath Bloom's music fits these questions most exactly...

"there's a wind that comes in from the north and it says that loving takes its course.... come here.... "

"He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover
something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.

His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could
once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he
could find out what that thing was"

I saw Gatz recently: a spectacular seven hour theatre experience by NY's Elevator Repair Service, a word by word reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. It was truly wonderful. For seven hours I was fully under the spell of wonderful storytelling and wanted for nothing. 



Listening to The Great Gatsby thus in one session it stuck me as "something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned": as Fitzgerald wrote of his aim before embarking on the novel. Profound by virtue of its poetic yet deeply simple observation of the relations of flawed characters.

Fitzgerald captures; the dazzle of materialism, and the inherent dishonesty, and  curious emptiness, this engenders in relationships, the deep intense currents of yearning -  for happiness, for intimacy, for human connection - that effect us, and romance, both sublime and full of self deception:

"One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down
the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where
there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight.
They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees--he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy's white face came up to his
own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his
unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp
again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer
to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed
her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the
incarnation was complete."

It seems to me that Fitzgerald is beset by ambivalence; he is unable to fully forgive his characters their failings and yet unable not to love them.  In this, I set Fitzgerald in contrast with Steinbeck.

"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream."

John Steinbeck

I found the clear sighted wisdom which Steinbeck displays in his extraordinary Cannery Row no less than stunning. His authorial voice invokes an unfailing, deep, and truly loving compassion through which he holds, observes and exposes the multifaceted truth of  his characters humanity.
It is, I think, through this compassion, this spiritual certitude,  that Steinbeck transcends (yet includes) an amibivalent observation of humanity's brilliance and weakness. Reading Cannery Row  my heart broke open  at Steinbeck's depiction of deep beauty in the ordinary, the shattering acceptance of love in wrongdoing, and the joy and pain, mystery and wonder, at moments of union in love with the heart of another in this ever passing world.

This difference in the two writers is  shown in their summation. For Fitzgerald it seems we push forward with hope towards the fading lustre of our dreams, against the unrelentling tide of struggle that is human life-

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
the past."

"Even now
I know that I have savoured the hot taste of life
Lifting green cups and gold at the great feast.
Just for a small and a forgotten time
I have had full in my eyes from off my girl
The whitest pouring of eternal light.
The heavy knife. As to a gala day."
(from the sanscrit poem Black Marigolds),

I followed a link from the previous article to "The How of Happiness" from the research of social psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky. This is what she reccomends:

Counting Your Blessings
One way to practice this strategy is with a “gratitude journal” in which you write down the 3 to 5 things for which you are currently thankful – from the mundane (your flowers are finally in bloom) to the magnificent (your child’s first steps). Do this once a week, say, on Sunday night. Keep the strategy fresh by varying your entries and how you express them as much as possible. And if there’s a particular person who has been kind or influential in your life, don’t wait to express your appreciation. Write them a letter now, or, if possible, visit and thank them in person.

Practicing Acts of Kindness
These should be both random (let the dad with the crying baby go ahead of you at the check-out counter) and systematic (read a newspaper to an elderly neighbor). Being kind to others, whether friends or strangers, triggers a cascade of positive effects – it makes you feel compassionate and capable, gives you a greater sense of connection with others and earns you smiles, approval and reciprocated kindness. These are all happiness boosters.

Nurturing Optimism
This strategy involves such practices as looking at the bright side, finding the silver lining in a negative event, noticing what’s right (rather than what’s wrong), feeling good about one’s future and the future of the world, or simply feeling that you can get through the day. One way to practice this strategy is to sit in a quiet place and take 20 to 30 minutes to think about and write down what you expect your life to be 10 years from now. Imagine that everything has gone as well as it possibly could. You have worked hard and succeeded at accomplishing all of your life goals. Think of this as the realization of all of your life dreams. Then, write about what you imagined.

Learning to Forgive
Let go of anger, resentment, and feelings of vengeance by writing – but, not sending – a letter of forgiveness to a person who has hurt or wronged you. The inability to forgive is associated with persistent rumination or dwelling on revenge, while forgiving allows you to move on.

Increasing “Flow” Experiences
When you’re so absorbed in what you’re doing that you don’t notice the passage of time, you are in a state called “flow,” a term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. So, become fully engaged at work, at home, and at play. Try to increase the number of flow experiences in your life, whether it’s completing a project at the office, playing with your children, or enjoying a hobby. Seek work and leisure activities that engage your skills and expertise.

Investing in Relationships
One of the biggest factors in happiness appears to be strong personal relationships. Indeed, having the support of someone who deeply cares about you is one of the best remedies for unhappiness. Thus, this strategy involves putting effort into healing, cultivating, and enjoying your relationships with family and friends. Act with love, be as kind to the people close to you as you are to strangers, affirm them, share with them, and play together.

Avoiding Overthinking
Remember the book, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff? There’s a time to think about the bad stuff in your life, but dwelling on your problems excessively is unhealthy. Very happy people have the capacity – even during trying times like a parent’s chronic illness – to absorb themselves in an engaging activity, stay busy, and have fun. To practice this strategy, pick a distracting, attention-grabbing activity that has compelled you in the past and do it when you notice yourself dwelling.

Savoring Life’s Joys
Pay close attention and take delight in momentary pleasures, wonders, and magical moments. Focus on the sweetness of a ripe mango, the aroma of a bakery, or the warmth of the sun when you step out from the shade. Some psychologists suggest taking “mental photographs” of pleasurable moments to review in less happy times.

Taking Care of Your Soul
Studies show that religious and spiritual people are happier and healthier than others, though researchers don’t yet know why. Perhaps the social support of belonging to a close-knit religious group is valuable, as is the sense of meaning and purpose that comes from believing in something greater than yourself. If you are so inclined, join a church, temple, or mosque; read a spiritually-themed book; or volunteer for a faith-based charity.

Committing to Your Goals
People who strive for something significant, whether it’s learning a new craft or raising moral children, are far happier than those who don’t have strong dreams or aspirations. Find a happy person and you will find a project. However, being dedicated to any pursuit won’t make you happy if you’re just doing it for superficial reasons such as making money, boosting your ego, or succumbing to peer pressure.

Using Your Body: Exercise, Meditation, Smiling, and Rest
Getting plenty of sleep, exercising, stretching, meditating, smiling and laughing can all enhance your mood in the short term and promote energy and strong mental health. Practiced regularly, they can help make your daily life more satisfying and increase long-term happiness.

I've been reading an article in The Atlantic What Makes Us Happy?  on a very interesting longitudinal study conducted at Harvard U on Adult Development.

The study in itself is very interesting, but the findings, as reported in this article, raised questions for me that are very congruent with some of my own struggles of adaptation at the moment.....

The author writes that the central question of the study
is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble. His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of “adaptations,” or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father’s work, adaptations (also called “defense mechanisms”) are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality.
.....
“immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy.... aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.”
....
The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).

Which, despite being a purely Freudian list, seems fairly reasonable....

But I wondered about the contrast between two of the cases listed, the first Case 128, as an exemplar of happy adult development:

 “Probably I am fooling myself,” you wrote in 1987, at age 63, “but I don’t think I would want to change anything.” How can we know if you’re fooling yourself? How can even you know? According to Dr. Vaillant’s model of adaptations, the very way we deal with reality is by distorting it—and we do this unconsciously. When we start pulling at this thread, an awfully big spool of thoughts and questions begins to unravel onto the floor.

You never seemed to pull the thread. When the study asked you to indicate “some of the fundamental beliefs, concepts, philosophy of life or articles of faith which help carry you along or tide you over rough spots,” you wrote: “Hard to answer since I am really not too introspective. However, I have an overriding sense (or philosophy) that it’s all a big nothing—or ‘chasing after wind’ as it says in Ecclesiastes & therefore, at least up to the present, nothing has caused me too much grief.”

I am interested by their exemplar of happiness who by his own admission was "not too introspective", but self reported high levels of happiness. Was he just not looking very deeply?

What does this say for those of us who are prone to questioning and inquiry? That we shouldn't 'pull the thread' on our distortion of reality? Or that it's ok to do so, but only with mature adaptations in place?

By this model does this very "neurotic intellectualization" lead to unhappiness?

I feel much more kinship with case No 47, the spirited (yet dysfunctional?) 'philosopher' who earnestly sought to “squeeze" the  "lemon” of life. A la Freud (who dismissed the very idea of “normality” as “an ideal fiction”) he asked:

"By what standards of reason are you calling people ‘adjusted’ these days? Happy? Contented? Hopeful?”

I think it's a good unanswered question.

GENDER STRATIFICATION: COERCION AND VOLUNTARISM

Wilber draws on Janet Chafetz's sociological theory in Sex and Advantage (1984) as evidence for his theory of the co-creative nature of male and female roles in prehistory. Peggy Wright responds to Wilber particularly on this point. She writes that while “Wilber asserts that men and women have co-created their social structures at every stage of human development … Chafetz … states that there comes a point when women as a group are no longer equal co-creators of their conditions” (Wright 1998, 229).

Chafetz’ later work on “the maintenance and reproduction of gender systems”, in Gender Equity: An Integrated Theory of Stability and Change, ventures beyond the limits of Wilber’s co-creative gender theory (Chafetz 1990, 14). She distinguishes two separate, yet deeply interrelated, forces of gender inequity which she terms ‘coercive’ and ‘voluntaristic’ and in doing so discusses the manner in which worldviews set limits for socio-cultural participation.

Chafetz presents coercive theories as focused on “men’s ability to maintain their advantages over women by dint of superior power resources: economic, political, ideological” and voluntaristic theories as the examination of “how women come to make choices that inadvertently contribute to their own disadvantage and devaluation” (Chafetz 1990, 19). She notes that coercive forces tend to operate on a macro-level, through social structures and economic systems, where voluntaristic forces are micro-level “and stress the processes by which males and females internalise gender-normative ways of being and behaving” (Chafetz 1990, 19).

From her research she asserts the following propositions: in gender-stratified societies male advantage in macro-level division of labor sees a higher distribution of men in “the composition of social elites”, thus social definitions follow that value more highly “attributes associated with maleness” (Chafetz 1990, 60). These values legitimate “a gender-based system of unequal opportunities and rewards” in which resources, power and opportunities to work (outside the home) accrue to men, and the work done by women (in the home) is devalued (Chafetz 1990, 60).

Voluntaristic processes are set in motion as a result of these macro-structural forces of disadvantage. Chafetz observes that according to Exchange Theory “the partner who has less access to valued resources balances the exchange by offering deference to, or compliance with, the requests of the provider of resources” (Chafetz 1990, 23). In terms of “agrarian, pastoral and industrial societies” in which women are marginalised from the ownership of essential resources, Chafetz writes that women are required to provide services “to their husbands … other family members … the physical household and the objects it contains” (Chafetz 1990, 47) in exchange for access to the primary resources men control, but, unlike economic debts, the time of discharge of this social debt is never clear (Chafetz 1990, 23). Chafetz presents this micro-structural process as an example of the manner in which women inadvertently “come to want to do that which they would be constrained to do anyway” (Chafetz 1990, 24) and thus contribute to the process of their own “disadvantage and devaluation” (Chafetz 1990, 19).

Habermas marked woman as the bearer of symbolic reproduction, highlighting the key mode through which woman has enacted the voluntaristic process of gender stratification. In a conventional society such as Chafetz refers to above, typical of the western Mental-Rational epoch, woman has overseen the micro-level construction of male and female gendered subjects through their role as the primary care giver to children (Fraser 1993, 117). In this role women have had significant influence over the generational transmission of gendered behaviour to the children in her care, as particularly explored in Chodorow’s work on the ‘reproduction of mothering’. Wilber’s co-creative argument has validity when examined in this context but, as noted, his theory fails to address the broader context in which voluntaristic processes are framed by coercive ones.

A REBUTTAL TO CO-CREATIVE THEORY
To recapitulate, Wilber’s key claims amount to the following: women have not been oppressed as much as captive to the limits of human development, biology and the ‘expediency’ through which her nurturance of infants was extended to the general domus. Overall, he concludes that woman has been an equal party to co-creating the intersubjective patterns that determined her constrained life conditions.

As noted, Wilber’s argument is in part reflective of his evolutionary theory of developmental capacity. According to the developmental model, there are limits to the behaviours and interpersonal capacities available at each stage. Wilber insists that these limits require acknowledgement. He writes that “forms of oppression and subjugation … have to be judged, not against today’s structures of consciousness, but against what could have been otherwise at a given previous structure” (Wilber 1995, 163). While there is certainly merit to this argument, it needs to be contextualised within a broader picture. In Wilber’s analysis of co-creativity, he stresses the voluntaristic nature of women’s participation in the construction of a gender system while minimising the coercive. Chafetz’ analysis clearly demonstrates that the coercive nature of macro-structural forces placed significant constraints on women that left them with few options other than to participate in the voluntaristic processes that reinforced their disadvantage.

In response to Wilber’s assertion that the movement of women into the public sphere could not have occurred earlier “under any given circumstances” (Wilber 1995, 163), let us ponder the circumstances of the period under discussion. Historically the social reification of cultural views on gender had serious ramifications for women, by determining who is a social subject and in what manner. Chafetz highlights the fact that “when gender norms gain the status of law, they take on a far more powerful role in reinforcing the gender system status quo than when they remain informal. They become part of the coercive forces that maintain the gender system” (Chafetz 1990, 69).

Laws introduced in the Mythic-Agrarian stage distinguished a male public sphere from a female private sphere in terms of citizenship and cultural participation. These conditions were maintained until the early twentieth century. Thus for extensive periods of the Mythic-Agrarian and Mental-Rational stages women were without access to citizenship or public office, were excluded from social and religious authority, marginalised from full participation in public culture, and access to education, the work place and the arts. Rendered through law an occupant of the private domain only, women were actively incapacitated from determining their own conditions of being in the world. In this period where woman was marginalised, actively discouraged and often outlawed from exploring and culturally expressing essential aspects of her being, when she was not a public subject, how could she at this point equally ‘co-create’ her conditions of being in the world?