Peggy Noonan and St. Paul

Well, my love affair with Peggy Noonan continues. She is that all-too-rare combination: a lady, a Conservative, a human, demonstrably non-insane, and a thinker (although I disagree, and quite vigorously so, with several positions she has held), something nearly as hard to find as 'small town values' in small towns.

Tonight Ms. Noonan was on the Daily Show to promote her new book, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now. The title will be disturbing in some quarters for its inclusion of the term 'patriotic,' syllables which, when mispronounced, rhyme rather effortlessly with volk and kokutai (国体). I, however, would advise those naysayers to notice the second word, grace, and reflect on what our country, its politicians, and its political contests, might look like were grace, alongside its parents maturity and reflection, to be employed more widely.

Nor did Ms. Noonan's performance belie her espousal of grace as a virtue. She was calm, soft-spoken, persuasive, and did not once wink, wrinkle her nose, lick her finger and stick it in the air, or escalate her pitch to shrill or girlish levels. She spoke, reasoned, and comported herself like an adult, something which one should hope might pass unremarked, yet cannot for its rarity. And despite Ms. Noonan's recent still-on-microphone gaffe in which she used mild profanity and dismissed the wisdom of the Palin nomination, her ladylike demeanor and reasonable speech helped stifle almost all of John Stewart's customary swearing.

Part of Sarah Palin's gut demagogic appeal, I suspect, is that she acts like a girl. She is unintimidating, even when she resorts to the crudest, most puerile sarcasm. But girlishness, or childishness, does not engender respect, nor does it facilitate rational conversation or debate. I entertain grave doubts that the Corinthians wore red peep-toe pumps or bobbed their heads coquettishly while pursuing the Vice-Presidency, but Paul nonetheless saw fit to caution them thus: “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I put childish ways behind me”(1 Corinthians 13:11). Would that the majority of American politicians follow Peggy Noonan and do the same thing.

'Shall I teach you what knowledge is? When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it;-this is knowledge.' -Confucius

Nanny Bloomberg

I do have more important things I could talk about; why, tomorrow I hope to sharpen about 30 knives for a meal program I volunteer at. However, this story from the 19th in the London Times (go down to the penultimate bullet point) about a memo distributed to Bloomberg's London staff made me a) cringe and throw up a tiny bit in my mouth and b) wonder whether James in the Tokyo office has likewise received such a thorough explanation of the precautions to take regarding the use and proper stewardship of plastic water bottles.

What it neglects to address is what staffers are to do if they own a permanent marker themselves.


"'These bottles are yours to look after and as stated in the original message, you will only get one,' it says. To ensure 'your bottle does not go walkies and [you] are drinking out of your own one and no one elses [sic]' it might be an idea to mark them with your name. 'There are permanent markers in the stationery cupboards you can use.'"


Anyway, James is the one I got this gossip bench from:

'Joy Is Not in Things; It Is in Us,'

said Richard Wagner and perhaps, in his staunch Teutonicity, dying in Venice sufficed and he never regretted not having built a 'sun-drenched Tuscan villa' in Bayreuth. It doesn't matter; it isn't 'Tuscany' that is the problem. The houses, and their bathrooms, and their greatrooms, their wall treatments, thematic toilet-brush holders, disguised three-car garages, incongruous media centers and 'authentic details' could all equally well be replaced by 'Hobbit' or 'Siheyuan' or 'Iroquois Longhouse' style with the principle remaining the same. Part of the problem, as I mentioned before, is the lack of hope these buildings signify, but there are other disturbing aspects.

Yes, in a perverse sense, these homes are all about hope, or American optimism, at least in its basest form. They are a testament to material success, to the fulfillment, in all caps, of The American Dream of home ownership. But what appears to me bleak in this reading is the notion that anyone's American Dream reaches its dramatic finale in a tract home rather than an alpaca farm in the mountains or a high-tech ultra-green penthouse condo or a craftsman bungalow with a beautifully, lovingly, tended garden. Your visitors will know you have money -- but will they suspect you have a soul?

A more troubling aspect for me is that the 'Tuscan' home and all its necessary 'Tuscan' appurtenances represent the recent widespread conflation of 'lifestyle' with Life, which then gave rise to the current tendency to disprivilege or ignore the latter in favor of the more comprehensible and convenient former. The problem with Life, I suspect, is that invariably it must be lived. We fall into it sodden with drool and incontinence, often leave it in much the same manner, and in between --

Well, in between we stammer at countless beginnings, stare at the creeping minute hand through lots of tedious middles and cry to ourselves over unfortunate endings; we get punched, sacked, ridiculed, betrayed, lied to, and cut off mid-sentence just before brilliant ripostes. We give our hearts away, we sing babies to sleep, we take up astronomy, then Jung, then Uilleann pipes; we take photographs lest we forget it really was just that beautiful, once. We have one too many, we don't get the promotion, we sit on the edge of the dance floor waiting; we practice kissing with a pillow and proposing with a mirror, we sometimes get the girl and we sometimes get the grippe.

None of that can be purchased. Much of it wouldn't be a very good deal, anyway, at any price, and I suppose that is the point: better to try to ignore it, and then perhaps the breathtaking crescendo of life, what all those clogged sinuses and broken heels and soothing kisses have been leading up to - death, in other words - might get distracted and not disturb us, after all. Life can be boring, painful, taxing, and too long or too short. And it always ends poorly.

Lifestyle, by contrast, is a narrative the user can control. It begins and ends as you wish, and you can leave out any of the parts that don't suit your desired image. Lifestyle, moreover, is nothing but a commodity, and an imaginary one at that. It consists in the things a consumer buys to convey to others and to himself the persona he wishes to inhabit. It is cosmetic surgery for your life, and just as there is a code of conduct regarding what should and should not be said to the obviously pulled, pleated, and plumped, so, too, will your posture as suburbia-dwelling daimyo, pasha, doge, or Indian Chief remain unquestioned by your neighbors. After all, you didn't neglect to include thematic outlet covers.

I suppose part of the problem for me is that it's just all so rickety. They are in the main not nice houses, just expensive ones. The majority tend to have a distinctly Disney feel, as though around the next cul-de-sac our little boat will sail past Olde Siam. There is an attempt at wholesale replication on the one hand, and a jarring failure in execution on the other. Neither is appealing; both together are horrifying. All art incorporates older elements, some art cross-cultural references; nothing man-made can ever be wholly new. That fact notwithstanding, history, geography, and culture along with form give a work its content, its meaning. The meaning of these tract homes is simply 'Tuscan sells.'

Why is that more troubling than an older neighborhood filled with bungalows or ranch-style homes? Are not all houses, since the dawn of modern real estate, designed to sell, to appeal to the buying public? And what's more, was not the Atomic Age as executed in the American home a perfectly articulated lifestyle, as detailed and complete as the 'Tuscan' variety, down to its Saturn-shaped lamps, spiky, Sputnik table legs, and galactic-design curtain fabrics?

Okay, yes, in theory, but in the case of the 1950s, few people kitted out their entire house in space-age furnishings, and there were plenty of other 1950s looks that mixed with the outright futuristic ones harmoniously. One could have an up-to-the-minute television lamp atop a table from 1947 with no grave sensation of aesthetic malaise nor expectation of scorn from the neighbors. Additionally, the house would not come with an actual satellite in the front yard, which is as good an equivalent as I can imagine for faux-cracked walls, faux-aged fake beams, faux-ruined paint jobs, and murals in the toilet of someplace you are not but which the entire house contrives to make you believe you are. And, yes, too, houses and minimalls and BP stations reflect the aesthetics of the time, but there is the additional problem that the aesthetics of earlier times demanded better craftsmanship and genuine materials. Moreover, people bought furniture differently decades ago, as companies realized they could sell more over time if they offered 'sets' that could be acquired slowly as finances allowed: even the counterparts of today's neo-Tuscans would not have bought a whole new household worth of thematically-congruent furniture, appliances, and accessories when they moved up in the world and bought a better house.

Lastly, 1950s style didn't seem thematic in the 1950s, because it wasn't thematic. It was simply up-to-date. Muddled, forced and fauxed tract-home half-iterations of a Tuscan fantasy lifestyle seem tragic to me because they hold out a series of promises they can never keep. The garish, kooky exuberance of Atomic Age decor cohabited in its enthusiasts' hearts with the very real fear of nuclear annihilation. Gratitude for the end of the War was balanced with the grim knowledge of how the War ended and what that could portend for future conflicts. Satellite table lamp and cars shaped like rockets were symbols not only of the power of technology, but of the hope that with proper stewardship it would lead humanity to more good than ill. It hurts my soul to contemplate the hopes these McMansions encapsulate.

"'There is no man,'

[Elstir] began, 'however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man--so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise--unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded....We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.'" (Proust, Within a Budding Grove)


I pray to God it is not that I am 'growing accustomed to,' or acquiescing in, or failing any longer to notice, the winter such that I can no longer naturally and effortlessly be as splenetic as I have every right to be. After all, it is only the beginning of February, I am nearly at the 49th parallel, and thus there are many, many more weeks of short, dark days made darker by an unremitting low-hanging grey sky. I may have plenty to be thankful for, but there is still much to lament. At least for another eight weeks or so. And while I think equanimity in the face of some hardship is a hallmark of maturity, I think the Dylan Thomas approach is perhaps the sanest when choosing one's coping mechanisms for Northern winters. It may not perceptibly change objective reality, but you'll feel more alive after screaming in the snowy woods, and the slight elevation in blood pressure may help warm you up a bit.

Mature? Perhaps not; perhaps so. I think denial is in the main unduly demonized. Yes, we need a scapegoat, clearly, for the world's ills, but I remain unconvinced that it has to be the one that lets the individual get on with life! Rage, rage, fine; play a little hockey, hit the heavy bag, burn off some angst and cabin fever snowshoeing or sitting on a foreign beach pretending it's not still dismal where you're heading back to in 6.5 days 4 hours and 36 minutes -- and then go back to work, get back to living and resume waiting for April. Nothing is solved, obviously, but scant little generally is, and still somehow we manage to put our boots on the right feet again and get out the door.

That perhaps is the true model of maturity: getting on with it. Accepting that at times it truly is every bit as wretched as it seems and still having the courage and audacity (and, I will maintain, 'denial,' as it is popularly used) to put the boots on once more and head out into it. Certainly existentialists, whether of a Christian or atheistic bent, would stand with me there. Taking the nihilo, sticking an ex- in front of it, and finding within oneself what can be made of it.

Still, as Proust reminds us, we were not always wise, and if we have attained to any measure of wisdom now we might well look back on one or two habits or inclinations of our youth and wince. I was reminded of this today in a conversation about some film now out, which I thought I remembered as having Jeremy Irons in it - Jeremy Irons, who was once something different, or so I like to believe, but who has now become to films of the Double-Aughts what Michael Caine was to films of the Eighties and early Nineties: to wit, the scrubby, middle-aged Englishman who will take any part in any American film, no matter how bad the part, no matter how meritless the film.

I wouldn't care were it not the case that Jeremy Irons, along with Charlie Rose, Sartre, and William F. Buckley, were my Deep Dark Crushes of middle high school through early college. I adored that Buckley loved and wrote passionately about words despite all his other interests and careers; I loved that Rose's interviews were longer and more in-depth than the norm but that he was always even-tempered and polite; Sartre is an obvious and not uncommon one; but in contrast to all those I suspect that my Irons crush was based solely on the fact that regardless of role he was always effete, etiolated, and wan. He could take any part he wished, and still look and act completely morbidly tubercular in it. For me that was sufficient base for an abiding passion at the time.

Now of course, the stages of my psychosexual development having passed through such 'fatuous or unwholesome incarnations' as the foregoing, I must admit I do indeed feel quite mature by comparison in my quest for the six-foot Jesuit-schooled, Indian-riding, multilingual, finish-carpenter sailboat-racing poetry lover with a thing for Stravinsky, skirts, Mastiffs and Malagasy prosimians...

Ess, Bench, Sei a Mensch!

And while we are on the subject of stupidity, I would like to expatiate a bit on one of my long-held peeves: use of the content-free, yet so perniciously, routinely, and vacuously turned-to word 'classy.'

Now, I hear you rustling in your chair, getting ready to object, 'It can't be content-free, since I know what it means!' And I see your point (somewhat): there is a meaning, to some extent. My problem is that that meaning is now predicated on air, which is a bad thing to predicate most things on, unless those things are respiration, or flying.

I say now because things have changed a great deal in the past few centuries. These days it's harder to find a daimyo, serf, lady-in-waiting, knight errant or invigorating pas d'armes than it is a suburban mother of three driving a sensible mid-size sedan. First it was that whole business with Gutenberg, then Diderot, Condorcet, Rousseau, Kant. The Church, King, and God got disentangled, and Man with his Declaration of Rights stepped into the vacuum. Then came Marx, Lincoln, child labor laws, compulsory education, corporations, self-made men, literate freedmen and chimney sweeps.

(And et cetera.)
Add in the First World War, department stores, film, dance halls, television, and ascendant America, and what remains in the 'developed world' is demotic American culture writ large. Class distinction is a monetary distinction only, no longer rightly carrying with it connotations of difference in education, refinement, or taste in amusements. Popular culture, now the prevailing cultural expression, filters 'up' from the masses or out from the advertising industry and routinely influences 'high' art. Meanwhile, in countries where there still exist aristocracies, their scions grow up listening to the same rap and rock as do most other teenagers worldwide.

In the U.S., having taken the Enlightenment seriously, or at least the parts of it we felt applied to men of European ancestry, we wanted no truck with hereditary title, and sought instead to create a sort of meritocracy and a culture of opportunity. A poor man could through industry become rich, and some did. And then they realized that they weren't acting as they imagined rich people to. They hadn't the training. They hadn't acquired any acquired tastes. They didn't know a cantata from a canticle, couldn't tell Burne-Jones from Botticelli. So rich boys were sent away to learn Latin and Greek and history and politics as their European (economic) counterparts did, while rich girls learned ladylike arts and comportment at finishing school, the better to resemble people with money who had a family history of being people with money.

But it is all quite different now. We still have a robust tradition of philanthropy amongst the very wealthy in this country, and of that we should be proud. But with regard to 'class' being a reliable predictor of erudition, conduct, diction, taste, or 'classiness,' I need only point to George W. Bush and Paris Hilton as two notable examples among many with regard to which that is patently not true. Examples pertaining to either of these two admittedly egregious cases are too numerous to mention, obviously, but I think Bush's question to Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso in 2001, 'Do you have blacks, too?' (drawn from a conversation they were having about difficult race relations in the two countries, according to Cardoso), is just as good as any I might pick, as it is nicely multilayered in its resignation to (optimistic reading), or embrace of (more realistic version), ignorance, insularity, ineptitude, and indelicacy.

And perhaps that is where the problem lies. On the one hand, there is nothing to aspire to. On the other, the major cognitive divide in society is between youth and age. Both categories are fluid and subjective, but since 'youth' is widely believed to be a 'state of mind' rather than chronological fact, it can be learned, attained, much in the manner of adulthood in days past. The youthful demotic is now normative. Being young is what the old aspire to.

Fame is what matters, and it is viewed as simply Popularity on a much larger scale. Bush is the Homecoming King because he is in the White House; Ms. Hilton the Queen because her images, flattering or otherwise, are everywhere. He enacts variously the role of the sitcom buffoon, the warrior-hero, the rodeo cowboy, and the child king eternally under the tutelage of this or that éminence grise.

He is under no obligation to behave with the 'dignity befitting his position,' as his position is Star. He is the Captain of the Football Team; what he does or says is cool, or, more alarmingly, correct, by virtue of his having done or said it. His imprimatur is sufficient. The same with Ms. Hilton or other celebrities, or by virtue of the fact that a particular item is sold at a particular store. There is no global warming because George Bush says it is a fiction; I must buy these shoes (or a cheap knockoff of the style) because Saks says they are desirable. I must listen to Phish, or go to Burning Man, because (at 40, or 50, or 60) the kids I think look 'coolest' (or is it more comprehensible, and more as I envision my youthful self?) do...

In any of these three cases, I think the root problem is the same: immaturity, a symptom of which is the inability to think for oneself. This willful ceding of all higher-level though to the monarch and to Madison Avenue, which would have scandalized the thinkers of the last few centuries had they been forced to witness it, is routine for us now. Second nature. Nearly ineluctable. This tendency is evidenced in our pandemic of not voting as well as in our voting, as noted previously, for people we fancy we would 'like' were we to encounter them in a social situation. It is also apparent in our decisions about where we live, why, and what criteria we routinely turn to when meeting others.

But more on that then. Time for bed and books and sweet dreams,

so whatever it was I was going to say about Lautréamont with regard to all this, and whatever Grand Pronouncements I was hoping to get to about stupidity, cupidity, faux anything, the unconquerable vacuity of the newly rich and poorly educated, and the few (very few) defensible occasions on which one might wear a tweed jacket (I know, I knooooow, and it hurts me far worse than it does you, but some people simply don't listen to their clothing consciences!) will simply have to wait.

Have You Seen This Inner Child?

I blame it on the Beats. That is unsurprising if you know me, as I blame most of everything on the Beats, from unpremeditated 'poems' of testosterone-ridden admiration hastily scribbled on cardboard bar coasters, to white men in dreadlocks, to women in public in sweatpants, to shorts on adults, sneakers as shoes, Dockers as dining attire, sexagenarian playboys, and restaurant place settings without knives. I blame blogs on the Beats, for heavens' sake: they are evidence of the now pandemic delusion that everyone, anyone, can write -- and therefore, what's more, should. But at least we are not getting paid for our self-indulgent drivel. And it is not being forced upon anyone, as is sadly the case with barroom panegyrics and their unwitting subject/victim, as well as the sight and sound of long-haired middle-aged men in sportscars blaring Korn or Dave Matthews or some indefensible 1980s girl band from their convertibles.

Yet I digress. While all those symptoms and disorders share a common etiology, and while I could digress far more in innumerable concentric circles about all of it until I bored even myself, what they also have in common is what I wish to lament here: a renunciation of the Civility clause in our social contract, the subsection that stresses that your rights end where mine begin. Now, only an adult can understand that concept; an infant doesn't even know that he stops at any point, and a child has great difficulty seeing beyond his immediate desires and their quick satisfaction --much like the Beats, and their latter-day progeny unswerving in their resolve to 'let it all hang out,' 'chill,' 'listen to their inner children,' and 'find themselves.'

I for one have yet to wonder where, or who, I am. (At least in the sense they intend, and for other, more practical, senses I have GPS, and the invaluable Google Maps on the Blackberry, not to mention the nice officers who pull me over and ask if I know where I am going, which is something, even with the above, that I sometimes cannot answer affirmatively.) It used to be common wisdom that if one had questions about this, the answers were predictably to be found in a youth hostel in India or Western Europe at the age of 18 or 21. Those failing to encounter an integrated self by that time, and to choose an appropriate superego congruent with this self, were quite rightly deemed insane and offered antipsychotics at government clinics.

Now, of course, it's quite different. One can realize at 70 that there is a gaping hole where instead a Whole should be, of personality, tastes, goals, desires, values, and dreams. A void where for years all those components of a self, of a Gestalt, were ignorantly presumed to have been resident. And nobody gets medicated, or lobotomized, or ridiculed. Divorced, perhaps, but then marriage or 'heavy' relationships are just one more instance of the hand of the Man keeping a free spirit down. A free spirit who could instead be occupying himself with penning boozy free-form verses with a Sharpie over several months' worth of Chimay stains on paperboard about my felid eyes and porcelain cheeks and sangria lips of oranges and sunshine and the endless day and hair black as rainwashed Dougfir in the misty gloom of the blackblack forest gloom. Or something.

No, I encounter myself every day, whether I want to or not. I'm the only reason I have ten red suit jackets. I'm the only excuse for buying aspirin by the case and for putting ice cream into the refrigerator. I can look to no one else for a rationale for the absurd bed, or the driftwood arrangement by the bathtub, or the highly idiosyncratic wine selection, or the dying houseplants. It's down to me and me only that there are bottles of unfinished perfume around, miles of sari cloth, hairstyling products in the wine cabinet, and socks in the tinned-goods-organizer in the kitchen. It's me with the tailor on speed dial and the phobia of hairdressers, and me with the books under the covers on the passenger side of the bed. Everywhere I turn, ever since I had a sense that there was in fact a me to speak of, I haven't been able to get rid of her. Even when I look in the mirror, it is chilling how deep a resemblance my reflection has always borne to me, and me alone.

So I don't get it. How does one wake up, in the midst of being an adult and decades after crashing triumphantly past Piaget's goal line, to find that that the hole one so recently discovered is a hole with a shape that can only be filled with Burning Man, or rabbit hunting, or arena rock shows, or casual sex, or over-the-road trucking? Genuinely, it strains my mind. Additionally, what makes it all the more grievous is that the vast majority of such cases do not 'realize' they have 'always wanted' to join the seminary, or start an NGO; instead, their epiphanies as regards this previously missing 'self' tend to focus on the need to tend to the needs of that neglected self, not to others. This in its turn leads to a convenient discursive loop, as the neglected self, being neglected, is always presumed to be in some child state, if not the dread Inner Child itself, thus excusing all manner of base and self-indulgent, if not overtly puerile, pursuits.

Which is where the Beats and the Social Contract come in, if only out of convenience rather than painstaking logic, since I am becoming quite cranky with thinking of all this, and have a long week ahead in which I will have to muster my usual charming self repeatedly. The painstaking logic can come later, if I feel like the taking of pain might for some reason be pleasant at that point. For now, the Beats and their popular lionization, quite simply, are handy scapegoats for the existence of the near-ubiquitous reverence for the supposed virtues and, indeed, necessity (for the 'self,' of course) of a perverted, solipsistic, jejune freedom over the adult responsibility necessarily implied in acknowledging the worth of others around one, one's fellows in society. Acknowledging that we are a part of a group, and that the group consists of other individuals with their own desires and needs, perforce constrains behavior. If one can manage to accept that it's improper to murder members of this brotherhood, I fail to see it as a great cognitive leap to acknowledge as well that respecting them in other ways is in order.

And etiquette is nothing but respect and consideration for others. It is not about proving to (or lording over) others that one knows the proper utensils to use for jellied consommé or oysters or bacon; it is instead at base an attempt to create and foster an environment of mutual respect. In other words, I respect you by not sonically resembling in any way a giddy aye-aye with an egret's egg as I eat my consommé, and by not air-guitaring 'Stairway to Heaven' as you pray with your congregation and by not ruining the coming week for you by blasting inane 'dance music' out the opened windows of my Porsche or forcing you to witness the horror of my deformed toenails and crusty heels in 'flipflops' or a topographical map of my cellulite through mangy sweats because I was, yes, rude, that is the word, and so is immature and so is tiresome and so is inexcusable after the age of three and in my rudeness wore Inside Clothes outside because my Inner Child wanted to.

Perhaps at this point we are too far gone in our stoned and Xanaxed and liposucted solipsism for one to expect that we might credit our peers with having existences, wills, and souls of their own. But if we are intent on becoming children ourselves, it is not unreasonable to suggest that we put into our service that much-vaunted 'childlike imagination' we thus have again at our disposal and, for the purposes of sustaining an at least marginally livable world, pretend that they do and accordingly put behind us the stringy grey ponytails, the shorts when not on the water or holiday, the adolescent pop music, the sweat pants and track suits outside the gym, and, in the name of all that is holy, unsolicited spontaneous 'poetry' of any stripe.

Wrack and Pillion

Right, so if we accept the fact that I have no market, that I am, in the voice of my scratchy-tee-shirt-creating friend's blown-up Times New Roman scream 'INCOMPATIBLE' in an elegantly intransitive way, what am I supposed to do? If there is, as I am increasingly persuaded is the case, exactly no demographic for the Product that is me, then how many cats should I ultimately have, and at what age is it most seemly to start acquiring them?

I mean, here's the deal. Dating is, for good or ill - and I do have my opinions on this, but they do not matter in the slightest - the process of advertising what it is one thinks to be his or her greatest selling points to those individuals s/he has deemed to be within his or her market demographic, while simultaneously assessing the claims of desirability proferred by that same population. Maybe you need to marry a fellow Jew, maybe your spouse must have attained at least a Master's degree, maybe you just really like blondes. The gravity of these necessary or desirable characteristics varies. It has, moreover, become clear to me during my brief sojourn into Internet dating that how wide the pool of potential partners individuals believe themselves to be drawing from varies significantly, as well. In other words, some people will not waste their time with anyone who is not a Libran Lutheran real-estate developer with grey hair and green eyes on a raw-foods diet who prefers Scrabble over poker and Bakhtin over Baudrillard. Others, by contrast, hope to find a non-leprotic member of the opposite sex who does not immediately try to kill them.

There are a million variables that go into deciphering - not the Ideal, because that's easy (6'2" and above, shaved and pleasingly-shaped head, cow eyes, PhD in Continental Phil or a Doctor of Divinity who nonetheless passionately appreciates the performing arts, well-toned arms the better to drape my delicate ones over, collects and rides vintage Indians, emotionally adroit and verbally fearsome, wears work clothes non-self-reflexively, tans easily and seldom burns, is possessed of a North African nose and fullish lips, owns neither 'polo shirts' nor 'flipflops,' and whether or not he has one speaks never, ever, ever, of an 'avid yoga practice') - but rather the Desirable and, failing that, the Minimum Acceptable. Moreover, when it comes to dealing with actual people, whatever variables and emphases one has placed in either of these two categories tend to be more fluid in practice than they had seemed initially in the Excel chart. You may find it possible for Jane's industriousness at lovemaking to compensate for her apathy as regards housemaking, or you might eventually stop noticing John's weak chin after listening to him drunkenly recite ten Shakespeare sonnets consecutively. It ends up not being very scientific for most people in the end.

I guess that's 'chemistry,' and I couldn't be bothered. I can't get to the Chemistry Phase because I can't stand anyone long enough to endure the phases leading up to it. The Irrelevant and Hyperbolic Flattery Phase, the Self-Aggrandizement via Recountings of Accomplishments I Could Not Even in an Alternate Universe Care About Phase, the Surely It's Time by Now Groping Phase and, my least favorite, the I Really Thought We Had Something Special There What's Wrong with You Girl Phase.

And I think we all, and I for my part certainly do, make accommodations. In deft acts of self-deluding algebra we optimistically cube portents of 'affability' or 'gentleness' or 'emotional intellect' while dividing by their square roots all behavioral auguries of 'unreflective,' 'melancholic,' or 'rash.' When we find something we like, we naturally focus on that and allow the low-level nasty things to recede in our consciousness. This is how you end up a year later being shocked when your boyfriend 'does the mature thing' and 'opens up' to 'share his emotions' -- and the only 'emotion' he sees fit to share is the one where it's not about you, you're really wonderful really, and pretty and untiringly kind, as well, but it's just that there's a feeling of loss he can't seem to shake, and he really thinks he should address this, should tuck in and knuckle down and take care of it, this bereftness he and his inner child now feel that before getting entangled with you he failed to 'play the field' sufficiently to preclude his daily longing for that idyllic field now...

But leaving aside both the past and bald Gauloises-smoking retired Jesuits turned art critic social workers with a sideline in oldschool philology and research on the Generation of '27 not to mention lofty ethics and ancient but shiny motorbikes, we end up, yet again, here. Which, presumably, since I don't have the twenty-seven cats yet, is not nearly as horrific as what's to come. Which is irrelevant, of course, since I don't even want the twenty-seven cats; the twenty-seven cats are a sop, or a consolation prize, or a hideous metonym for What I Can't Have, What Ever Eludes Me, All That I'll Never Ever Ever Get But Keep Wanting Until I Fill the Hole With Felids. And perhaps as well with a set of long-discontinued China that I spend decades laboriously accumulating piece by piece. If all goes as I fully expect it to, at some point in my dotage I'll revert indeliberately to 'Miss' and the circle will be completed, no more cards will need to be read, and the cats, bless them, will in their hunger pick my (brittle, since I couldn't afford the meds) bones clean once I'm no longer opening the Friskies for us to share, having long ago spent what few shekels remained of my oisive jeunesse à tout asservie, back when I still believed I should or could or would date, or fall in love, or engage in even a vague simulacrum of what I then considered to be 'meaningful conversation' before I descended the mountain (or in this case the creaky stairs of my tenement) one last time and admitted that Yes, par délicatesse I had indeed perdu ma vie.

'If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.'

And if Mr. Amis is right, then the following, though it violates several of my personal rules of conduct, has a point and a justification for having been written. Also, God willing, enough of this sort of thing and the monkey will find a new home. I just pray he does not take the neighbor's cat with him -- although he can have the 'pet chaise' as a sop if that will help speed the move.

Right, then: the Reckoning. As I said, once one gets past that, does the necessary math, weighs all variables accurately, and accepts due responsibility for whatever share of idiocy and misjudgment is his own, then the final stage of dealing with the loss is complete, dispassion has been achieved, and forgetting has commenced. And the harsher, or more honest and complete, the accounting, the quicker and more effortless is the business of getting on with things. Additionally, as I intimated earlier, having previously experienced and addressed genuine grief, loss, and tumult in one's life gives one invaluable perspective as to the actual magnitude of loss on future occasions.

Love, I will forever maintain, is transformative. Its positive effects racinate into all other areas of our lives. When we are in love, we see the world differently, and we walk differently in it. With regard solely to the object of this Love, however, one of its effects is a loss of objectivity, a willingness always to focus on the good, an abundance of forgiveness and an overflowing empathy. And I believe all that is necessary, salutary, and good; without it one couldn't arrive at, or maintain, genuine Love. Without it there would be no substantive difference between romantic committed relationships and pleasant casual friendships.

But when there is a fissure in the emotion, when something big enough has transpired to rend that beautiful gauzy veil, then the Lover can most definitely address the situation, and the other person, with the same logic and dispassion as he can any other individual or set of circumstances. This, too, I think, is necessary and constructive: if one's spouse has gambled away all the retirement funds, being able to acknowledge that and to take steps to address that and the relationship as it now is cannot but be preferable to blithely ignoring what is clearly a grave reality.

It is a bit nasty and embarrassing, though, even if it only transpires within the privacy of one's head. One's judgment, or even sanity, can be called into question as one reflects upon the various things glossed over in deference to the continuance of the Love-state.

And this is the part where I violate my ethics in hopes that doing so will banish the monkey.

When I got to that point, after a bit of crying and missing having someone to do special things for, I then had to endure feeling like an idiot on a number of counts. That, my dears, hurts more than anything. I do strongly believe we should all be idiots in love, or 'childlike' if that makes you feel better about things, but at the point where it seems as though the idiocy was 'for nothing,' one is necessarily inclined a bit more toward self-flagellation than is normally the case. In some sense -- if there was Love, at any rate, or at least one believed there to be -- one has to find the relationship to have been senseless and inherently flawed in order to be able enthusiastically or even calmly to accept its demise. The practical problem with this is that by devaluing or fully invalidating the relationship, one does the same to one's investment of time, ardour, kindness, openness, and boundless empathy.

And by God does that sting. The specifics of the thing stick in the mouth like ammonia from Dutch licorice (Hello, Andy!). One has to address the horror of multiple versions of 'I was in love with someone who __________!' The things that leave the most enduring bad tastes vary from person to person, clearly, but that is, for some of us, at least, the worst stage of the grieving.

In other words, I might be able get on just fine knowing that I accidentally dated a bank robber or married a serial philanderer. You might well be able to integrate seamlessly having been briefly engaged to an expert on artificial bovine insemination into your self-concept, or never regret for a moment the dalliance with the writer of how-to Morris Dancing books. But you may well experience a lasting difficulty with rectifying your posture after coming to terms with the psychic scars of having plighted your troth to a Scientologist, Nikken distributor, or collector of porcelain cat figurines.

This is where it really gets tawdry. And, again, I apologize, but it's all to a good cause.

In my case, the following. And let me preface it all by admitting that I believed myself to be 'in love.' I said those words, I felt that glowy feeling, I had caritas and agape and eros and the rest radiating ceaselessly from my ever-dilated pupils. My voice was soft, my gestures were kind, my thoughts were noble, and my emotions true. So it's me, not him, that was the problem.

So.

1) A thesaurus is not a dictionary. A synonym relationship is neither an equal sign nor a copula. I myself have never owned nor sought recourse to a thesaurus, and I freely admit my relationship to words has never been typical. Still, however, even if we postulate they might possibly have their place, sometimes and for some people, thesauruses are extremely limited in their usefulness and MUST, as any sixth-grade teacher or history professor despairingly red-lining term papers will insist, be used with extreme caution, if not outright fear.

Why? See above. But also because not only does one not get an actual denotation, as with a dictionary, one does not get context. 'Blue' or 'tawdry' can 'mean,' according to a thesaurus, 'dirty,' but the neighbor's cat, although he sometimes comes in with sticks and burrs stuck to his coat, never returns from his tours looking either of the above.

Sometimes the words in a thesaurus entry can indeed be said to be part of the same cognitive category. Fiery, hot, steamy, sultry, sweltering, feverish. Fine. But none of those words equals the other. I didn't just pull a sultry loaf of pumpernickel out of the oven. I know I didn't. And the sixth-grade teacher in me bristles at this sort of thing every time. Thesaurus abuse doesn't make anyone sound smarter; reading, and absorbing the content, and noting grammatical nuances one wishes to remember, do.

2) Nor does mispronouncing fancy words help one's case when trying to impress others with one's erudition. (And we are leaving to the side for the moment the issue of why anyone should wish to do that.) (But stick around: there's always tomorrow.) (Which I think, in terms of my dating of these posts, is actually yesterday.) Again, the dictionary can be a great resource. Good dictionaries, as well, can assist with some of the clarificatory context issues that thesauruses can't, and thus demonstrate the sorts of things that, unlike pumpernickel, can at times accurately be described as 'sultry,' for example.

On this note, I sometimes used to refer to my last apartment as 'the seraglio' jokingly in print. It had a great many pillows, a low bed, little furniture, many textures and prints, and even a narghile a friend had given me in acknowledgment of my deranged decorating 'style.' Not everything said in print is worth saying aloud and vice versa, and when speaking I called the same residence 'my apartment.' This habit was cemented into law when the exboyfriend insisted on using the former label when speaking, and pronouncing it in such a way as to make every sinew in me twitch in pain.

I don't correct people. Especially as regards language. My idiolect is my own, and my reading and study have been far broader than most people's, so I know I use words many other people don't. Sometimes they are in the active-use pile from one discipline or language, and because they are there, they might come into my head for quite different contexts than originally learned. But just as I can't be expected to discourse rationally about mathematics, I don't expect anyone to have precisely my reading, educational, or cross-cultural background.

However.

It is always ill-advised to use a word you don't understand or to say a word you don't know how to pronounce. This is trickier in English than any other language, because we have adopted words from so very many different languages, and there is no consistency as to the level to which we have Anglicized the various adoptees. To avoid buffoonery one must have knowledge, not merely confidence, on one's side. Seraglio in English cleaves to its Italianate past, as does intaglio. One doesn't sound well traveled or educated by summoning a waiter with 'garkin!' nor by describing the day's events as having been largely 'comb ill fought.' At the same time, it is past the bounds of both common sense and decency to subject a dear friend to snapshots of one's vacation in 'Paree.'

I am not perfect, but when I want to say something was ghastly, and I can't quite come to quite the right word to describe the precise way in which it was as ghastly as it was, I am more than happy to stick with what is at hand and describe the various ways in which the ghastliness manifested itself. The fact is, context often determines whether the same word will be pejorative or praising, and no thesaurus can give that insight. Even 'tepid' can be a good thing under certain circumstances, and 'righteous' can be downright slanderous.

The point is, I cared about someone who engaged in this sort of behavior. It's not as though I was deaf or illiterate while we were dating, but I chose not to focus on the less appealing aspects of his personality. Then, once graver unappealing characteristics emerged and I divested myself of the thing, all those nasty bits came to the forefront of my consciousness. At that point, I did what math I could manage, figured there must have been some rationale not immediately perceptible that would ultimately vindicate my unswerving belief in my own sanity, and went on with things. A bit less trusting of my powers of discernment, perhaps, but confident in my ability to hone them should it appear necessary that I do so.

But then the thesaurus came out again and, having already gone through the dispassionate charts-and-diagrams phase, I no longer had the willpower or motivation not to look with wide-open eyes. Or to be other than horrified by what I saw. Consequently, I had to revisit the self-flagellation stage, but with no vestigial gauzy glow at all. No, now it was 'I was in love with someone who _________ and whom I have unwittingly given license to continue to do it!' Why, in other words, would he have thought I found it charming then, and (of far more consequence and spine-chilling potential) in what way am I complicit in his assuming I will still find it charming now? And why, oh why, oh why, is he noting the timestamp?

As you know from numerous posts, I am hung up on the idea of adulthood. And I think the greater part of embracing adulthood consists in accepting responsibility. Indeed, welcoming, cherishing, that responsibility. It is a harder course, yes, but far more rewarding. (Also tremendously less annoying to others.) So at this stage it is of no consequence to me that the thing is over, or why it is over: that pugnacious primate pulling at my hair is ME, demanding of myself that I please explain to me why I did whatever it was that I did to make him feel that flirting with me, reminiscing to me, and attempting to charm me with stolen, inapposite adjectives or insult me with inaccurate barbs is polite, permissible, quirkily winsome, or anything other than base and futile.