Taking the long view from up close

Frost on the fields

I find that the views I take here tend both to the distance and to the very close-up. It's the garden and the view. If they teach things other than how to kill and maybe manage not to kill a plant (they are hard, usually, to kill, especially when you don't want them, but even when you actually do) and how to get lost in thought, they teach you to look and to notice both the large picture of the world that surrounds you and the tiny details of that world.

This is very useful in times of difficulty, when you usually hear Keep your eyes on the big picture every time something goes wrong and your stamina threatens to quit. This is when it is time to notice the very small things and forget all about the big picture for 5 minutes. It's often the smallest things that will get you through and maybe even see your way to whatever goal you are presently cursing yourself for fixing yourself.

Goals are not what they are cracked up to be. You have to be very careful with them or you can get yourself in a lot of trouble, like when someone close to you says, "You take in dogs and cats, why not a child? Don't over rationalize it."

No, do. Do over rationalize it. I implore you.

But, you think You know, you're right. How noble. It's the right thing, really. Just do it. Swelling with all the nobility your breast can contain, suddenly you hear your very own voice saying to that child's other parent, the noncustodial one, "Let's take her."

Rather like that same parent did when our first Labrador Retriever breeder asked back in 2006 if we would take Baccarat's mother, Rapide, too. That time it was he who said, "We'll take her," and he regretted it ever since he pronounced the words into the low September noon sun.

Fateful words, those. Everything changes. You say them, and there is no going back, at least not until you have gone.

I prepared a contract while she prepared her things and he went to get her after work the next day. It was a statement of our parenting intention and how our household works, and a promise to fulfill our obligations to her in return for her promise to uphold our minimum expectations of her.

Her room having been a cross between a war zone and public dump since I have known her, a period nearing one decade, I decided to begin with a spotless room, emptied of all but essentials: books, school supplies, bed, beside lamp, desk, chair, desk lamp, laundry hamper, closet and drawers prepared and waiting. Everything dusted and vacuumed. It was to stay that way. No clothes strewn all over the floor, no tiny scraps of paper adorning every dusty surface, no bowls of Nestle Quick with a spoon burrowed into the back of the desk drawer, barrettes, beads, pen caps, markers, cards, bits of games, pouches, and worn orphan socks and inside-out underpants clogging the underside of the bed, the edge of the woven straw floor covering, collecting dust bunnies larger than her dwarf hamster. In exchange, she would do no heavy cleaning, no unfair share of household chores.

That's my job. That's why I got my degree in architecture.

She would also spend time in the living room and participate in family life, read with us in the evening, do her homework with her father and myself and accept our direction and help, learning to use her brain for reflection and deduction, refrain from using such winning phrases as "Je m'en fiche" (I don't care), "J'en ai marre" (I'm sick of ________), "J'ai pas" (I don't know in slang), "Ba --" (uh or well, as in "well" at the beginning of a feeble explanation), all pronounced in a tone of voice more suited to someone raised in a crack house and not the households of a midwife and a doctor and a cleaning lady with an architect's resume.

In return, she would have more free time in her room for her Nintendo DS and text messaging all her multitude of correspondents, more time at the stables, and the possibility of inviting friends over, as long as the grades are on an upward curve, right along with the attitude.

The first evening went beautifully. We sailed over obstacles that seemed on a level with the sand. By a few days later, as we embarked on a new week, the obstacles looked more like the high jump from our seat on the wide back of a Shetland pony without stirrups. We ran into more than a few, but here's the thing: with children, you are not allowed to give up. You must go on, and they are not anywhere near as cooperative, desirous of pleasing and devoted as your dogs, nor as capable as your cats. There is nothing whatsoever in common between opening your heart to animals and to children.

Nothing.

Dogs may fart and not excuse themselves for making the air temporarily unbreathable (where does the stink go when it goes away?), but they rarely poison the environment with supreme "je m'en foutisme".

Cats may let you know that you are superfluous to them until they decide you are not, but they will rarely let you know you would be welcome to die and go to hell until they need you to prepare another meal.

And yet, their parents love them, and their responsible non-parent steps actually care about them, at least because of their great caring for their spouse, if nothing else, which is not always the case. Sometimes it is because you notice something in the child, something that once you catch a glimpse of it, no matter that it might be fleeting, you cannot forget when they deride your hopes for them, and even those they have for themselves, with their most majestic and taunting insolence.

I dare you to believe in me. I will not. I will show you that you are wrong, and nothing will give me greater pleasure or satisfaction.

Even there, when you look very closely into their eyes, you can see the fear. A question. Panic.

These they wish they could hide, and if you tell them you can see them, if you let them know that you will not give them the conflict they are demanding, that you will not permit them not to back out of the hole they are digging for themselves and correct their behavior, they will tell you Tu n'es pas dans ma tête, and perhaps laugh with deep discomfort because you have visited inside their head and seen the broken furnishings, the scribblings on the wall, the disorder. It does not comfort them to know that you can see and that you will not run. If it does, you will not know this. They will not let you.

It would be best if you simply know and act accordingly.

It takes every ounce of self-mastery to remain calm, repeating the same messages, expressing the same confidence, guiding and commanding without appearing to order, avoiding -- at all cost to oneself -- that drug of dearly beloved conflict, for if anger is but sadness and fear in its most primitive expression, conflict is sadness and fear become active, and finally habit. It's all you can offer and all you can ask.

I suspected when I said "Alright, let's take her" that the peace I had known with her would be replaced with a struggle to the death to create conflict where there had been little to recreate the relationship she had with her mother. It made me soften a bit towards her mother, but not that much. That's another story. It's a novel, or a piece for the theater, for if things had gotten to this, it was not because of a faulty wire in the daughter's head that can be fixed by a psychologist or even better parenting. It is a whole system of poor wiring, created by genes on the one hand and chemicals from responses to the stimuli of a difficult family environment on the other, and it is going to take a team to awaken the unused sensory and intellectual paths to success.

So much easier to stay the paths of non-responsibility, conflict and pain learned by the committed je m'en foutiste, with that maddening angry glare and hysterical grin. But, you have seen something. The moments when it slips because genuine excitement and pleasure have momentarily left no place for anger and self-defense.

This is what you cling to. This is how the details get you to the big picture.

"Regards," I pointed to the kitchen table. My husband's eyes followed my arm and my extended finger to where the SIM card lay on the Nintendo DS. He nodded.

"Elle tient le contrat alors," he said to me, with a slight suggestion that I had accused her of breaking the contract merely by yelling at me that none of her other friends had to have one to live with their fathers.

"Si je te la monte c'est parce que je le sais," I replied.

If I brought his attention to her SIM card lying there in that spot after she had gone up to bed, I told him, it was because I know she is honoring the contract at heart, as best as she can, while fuming about it at the same time. I knew it was a gesture of cooperation, the most important thing we had asked of her other than trust and respect.

I took a bright pink Post-it note from the drawer and a black marker, and I traced the shape of the SIM card on it, placing an arrow pointing to the image of the card below and a smiley face inside. Then, I stuck it to its place on the DS where she had left it and lay the SIM card back down in its little home.

When she came down to find it on the way to school in the morning, she would find recognition and thanks, too. I hoped I would find more strength for another day, clinging to the smallest details.

The struggle itself is enough to make a woman happy.

She hopes and prays.
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A wandering mind is an unhappy mind

The Apollo fountain as the morning fog lifts

When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired. ~Pablo Picasso

I vacuumed and -- I -- did something else. What was it? I have forgotten already. That's normal, though. It was yesterday, and it wasn't very important. It was useful, however, and it made me feel rather important (but mostly righteous) for about 5 minutes. I had done something.

Some force had come upon and pressed itself over my weak psyche of late, or for awhile if you ask some, such as my husband about things like the progress on the house and other ambitious projects I claim to be competent to undertake. It might be depression.

O! Do not worry, Sisyphe is not in need of electroshock therapy or pharmaceuticals. Non. She is in need of reigning her mind in and keeping a close watch on it. But, this does not surprise Madame Sisyphe; she has noticed this in the past.

She also suspects that her namesake was given his unending task as a way of showing humankind that even the most unbearable of repetitive and unsatisfying labor is more likely to make it happy than sitting around thinking -- about anything at all. In fact, if this journal is eponymous, it is obviously (at least Sisyphe hopes you have understood this by now) intentional, right down to Camu's quote at the very bottom of the page, The struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Let this be my epitaph, should my son decide to bury me. When I am dead, of course.

The moment I became Sisyphe was during the time I sat on the top terrace and sifted the parched and sandy, worm-free soil, preparing it for seeding after the workers had completed the trenching for the sewer connection, and filled those wounds with the chunks of chalk and what passed for dirt that they had dug up and piled into a mountain and a ridge along the fountain. When I first arrived, I saw brambles, suckers and a patch of dandelions in the place of what had been intended as a lawn. I asked my husband to show me the store where one acquires gardening tools, and I discovered that the French do not know what a dandelion digger is.

This left me perplexed. I was faced with the option of which most people would think instantly: chemical lawn treatments for dandelions and other unsightly weeds. I don't even know why I thought a dandelion fork would be most appropriate. Only habit of thought could make that possible.

An image of my smallest childhood was of my father in his camouflage-green trousers, his dandelion fork sticking out of his rear pocket, at the ready for the appearance of the offending dandelion. It hadn't occurred to me that my father had not attacked every dandelion with this specially designed fork. No, bien sur he had not. Rather, he sprayed early in the season, and then he removed any dandelion our more negligent neighbors' lawns' dandelions sent seed wafting into our property.

I sat on that dirt and sifted it because I believed (rightly, it turned out) that such poor, stone and chalk filled soil was the reason that dandelions and other weeds, and, later, moss thrived. I became a person obsessed. The piles of stone and chalk I removed grew around me. I moved them to the second terrace, and my husband pitched in, carrying pails of them to the trailer to take to a place where we could, then, dump them, down by the closed branch off the Seine. I came to dread his glance as he came to dread my continuously refilling piles and his pails.

It was about then that someone reminded me of what Mao had said about manual labor, which, it happens, is not exactly what I had been reminded he had said. In fact, I am not sure that Mao ever said that people require manual labor for their happiness and sense of balance.

No. It wasn't that of which I was reminded. It was merely that Mao said it was generally good for people, and to break down the classic channels of power and control and get the intellectuals in line, while he was at it:

Chairman Mao also launched "The Socialist Education Movement" in the early sixties, whose primary purpose was to restore ideological purity. This movement was designed to stir up excitement and ardent support for the revolution, while at the same time intensifying the class struggles which were already prevalent. The drafting of intellectuals for manual labor was part of the party's plan to inspire professionals and intellectuals to develop a higher regard for the party's objectives. Anti-Maoists were especially annoyed with Mao's relentless efforts to promote his propaganda, which not only served to reinforce the party's ideologies, but to slander the priority system and beliefs of the intellectuals.

Here was I, a highly educated former member of the professional class, sitting in the dirt, tirelessly sifting it for rocks and chalk in my mason's sieve until my gloves wore out at their tips, making piles of stone for my highly educated actual member of the professional class to cart to the dumping grounds for stone, dirt and pruned branches, down by the Seine.

He was especially annoyed with this accidental Maoist's relentless efforts to create the perfect lawn and stave off, unbeknownst to herself, thoughts of her change in status and possible dissatisfaction with certain choices she had made and how they had, actually, turned out. If she had no power any longer over many areas of her life, having moved far from her previous life to this one, she had power over the dirt and the stone, she could cause her husband to submit and to haul it away.

And here she was an even truer Maoist student than ever she had suspected, never having fallen to the temptations offered by the student socialist groups on campus at Columbia. She was acting out her Barnard feminism in a truly perverse and Maoist way. Take chapter 31, entitled "Women", from Mao's Little Red Book:

A man in China is usually subjected to the domination of three systems of authority (political authority, clan authority and religious authority). As for women, in addition to being dominated by these three systems of authority, they are also dominated by the men (the authority of the husband). These four authorities -- political, clan, religious and masculine -- are the embodiment of the whole feudal-patriarchal ideology and system, and are the four thick ropes binding the Chinese people, particularly the peasants. The political authority of the landlords is the backbone of all other systems of authority. With that overturned, the clan authority, the religious authority and the authority of the husband all begin to totter. As to the authority of the husband, this has always been weaker among the poor peasants because, out of necessity, their womenfolk have to do more manual labor than the women of the richer classes and therefore have more say and greater power of decision in family matters. With the increasing bankruptcy of the rural economy in recent years the basis of men's domination over women has been undermined. With the rise of the peasant movement, the women in may parts have now begun to organize rural women's associations; the opportunity has come for them to lift their heads, and the authority of the husband is getting shakier every day. In a word, the whole feudal-patriarchal ideology and system is tottering with the growth of the peasant power.
http://www.paulnoll.com/China/Mao/Mao-31-Women.html

I think Mao did not have enough respect for the OpEd columnist's sense of paragraphing to make his ideas stand out. Let us do it for him and bring attention specifically to my central point:

As to the authority of the husband, this has always been weaker among the poor peasants because, out of necessity, their womenfolk have to do more manual labor than the women of the richer classes and therefore have more say and greater power of decision in family matters. With the increasing bankruptcy of the rural economy in recent years the basis of men's domination over women has been undermined. With the rise of the peasant movement, the women in may parts have now begun to organize rural women's associations; the opportunity has come for them to lift their heads, and the authority of the husband is getting shakier every day.

Mon Dieu! I thought, is this not exactly what I needed, married for the first time in my life to a man who had never realized that he had been asked to question male hegemony? Or, actually, who had never been.

Is this not also exactly what Nicolas Kristoff -- who grew up on a sheep and cherry farm in rural Yamhill, Oregon -- and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn -- who is of Chinese ancestry -- and who together won a Pulitzer for their coverage of Tiananman Square protests (wait, this counters my developing line of argument) --, reported in their Half the Sky, just has Greg Mortensen these past 20 years, building schools for the education of girls in the remotest villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan, that women through their very great necessity in rural communities and the work they do make themselves powerful to get the men in their communities to join in educating and advancing themselves to the betterment of their society?

Mao's wife, by the way, was very beautiful. He would not have appreciated the Benedictine's motto, however, unless you could equate meditating on the ideals of socialism with prayer:

To labor is to pray. ~Motto of the Benedictines

And, Marie-Antoinette, restless and depressed in the relentlessly, oppressively impressive chambers and halls of the palace, grandest proof of the absolute patriarchic power her life was to serve and to promote, did she not create a miniature country hamlet on a far corner of the park, a place where she could at least play at milking cows and making cheese, gardening, and could escape and enjoy her own freedom of will to raise her children in an image of normal life?

She did.

Did not Thomas Jefferson make an appeal for an agrarian America, and would this not have been a fairer one to American women, who as true partners at the sides of their husbands would have raised a society of men and women who worked toward a common purpose, together, rather than seeing Man return from work, clad in suit and trench coat, briefcase in hand, to kiss Woman and ask, "Did you have a nice day, dear?"

"Yes, darling. Why don't you have a drink. The children are in bed, waiting for you to come and kiss them goodnight."

"That's nice, dear. Where did you put my paper? And, who finished the scotch?"

And what if she says, "Well, I cleared the ivy off that bottom wall and split a meter square of that firewood you found so difficult, and the lawn is coming in nicely, and I made a transfer to the joint account to pay for a new outfit. Oh, and pour yourself a scotch, too, while you're at it, why don't you, and join the children and me by the fire."

The salary she accords herself and the appreciation received for labor provided.

It is when she sits and broods, worries over her situation and her future, whether her promise has been wasted by her own choice, that she is oppressed with her thoughts, most depressed.

A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying that it needs work. ~Geoffrey Norman

Well, the conservatives can't be wrong about everything, and a team of Harvard psychologists must concur after their latest study of 2,200 people and a quarter of a million responses to their questions about their activity, mental wandering and happiness throughout the day during the period of the study, according to an article in today's New York Times of a study published in this month's Science magazine, When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays, which D.H. Lawrence knew more than a century before.

I got the blues thinking of the future, so I left off and made some marmalade. It's amazing how it cheers one up to shred oranges and scrub the floor. ~D.H. Lawrence

I think I'll go read. It might not be as good as having sex or exercising (see the article, sheesh), but I need to work my way up to the big leagues.
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