We're All Getting Better

Last week I had coffee with two old friends, and by old friends I mean two people, each of whom used to be my friends and then weren’t because we got to the point where we couldn’t really stand each other. But each of these people happened to reach out to me last week and ask me to have coffee and I know that people are always changing, so I went both times. 

One of the coffee dates was surprisingly lovely and made me full of hope and one of them made me really upset but also ended up being really good.

I don’t like leaving friendships hanging around, I’m a gladhand, but I am an intimacy introvert, and I do not gain a bunch of energy from having many close friends, and by close friends I mean people I can talk to, one on one for more than an hour. So when I make one of those friends, and I lose them, it’s a big loss. 

But losing close friends is a part of life, I think, especially for women. You make a friend and then you guys are super close, like a crazy romance, and then something happens and she fades out and you never know why that happened exactly, unless sometimes when you’re the one who faded her out.

I think that these friendships often happen because you are both having some kind of boy trouble, and you want to talk about boy trouble basically all the time and so does she. Perhaps nature evolved us to have these friendships to diminish the number of people who have to hear us talk about that stuff. But when you’re consumed with boy stuff, nothing beats a lady friend who is also consumed with boy stuff.

Woo! Let's don't have feelings together!

In my particular case, the other reason you form these relationships is because you and the other lady are crazy. Crazy, like boy trouble, is pretty much all consuming. When you’re crazy, you want a crazy person to talk about being crazy with. This can go two ways.  Either you and your crazy lady friend sit around indulging in coping mechanisms and making really dark (but [necessarily] really good) jokes about some traumatic shit that you are going/have gone through, or you and your crazy lady friend climb out of crazy super awkwardly together.

The crazy friendship either does the first thing, in which you continually pull each other down into the lobster bucket of depression, making the bucket the coolest place to be, and also making sure that she never climbs out or it does the second thing.

That second thing is the best thing. It's pretty rare though. 

The boy stuff friendship is pretty much doomed, but it is also pretty functional, so good on that

Last night I had drinks with two rad ladies who are about ten years older than me, and they were lamenting the shift in culture where people share really personal stuff with relative strangers. Joy said that it made her feel like she wasn’t special. She remembered what it meant to have a friend who selected her personally to give good news instead of putting it on facebook for everyone to see at once. She doesn’t like this new mass sharing (some would say oversharing) culture.

Sometimes it is not great, sure, but I think the new sharing culture is coming out of a generation who just know less shame than generations before. There’s so much less that you need to hide under the bed in a

lockbox because people might cruelly judge you for it.  It can’t be bad that we live in a time where people feel comfortable talking about hardship, abuse, divorce, addiction, sexual orientation and all kinds of other things we used to keep to ourselves. I know every time I hear someone say that they are divorced I feel a little absolved. It was scary when I moved here and walked into a community which thought it was funny/shameful to have mental health issues. I’m happy being around people who step up and talk about therapy and medication and the process of getting over. I also like when people talk about these things on facebook.

I was listening to a storyteller on the Moth the other week who remarked that his son’s generation was just more perceiving than judging. Where his generation, he said, would have called something shameful or wrong his son’s called it “awkward.”  “Awkward” isn’t a negative judgment, it’s a perception of a lack of grace that doesn’t seem to demand grace. Grace is ideal, but “awkward” is just part of life.

One of my two estranged friends has been having a really bad go of it. In fact, when I heard through the tight and twisted Philly grapevine that he wasn’t doing well, even though I a little bit still wanted to punch him in the face, I sent an email saying that if he needed to talk, I was there.

I guess I wish I had had grace when I just wanted to punch him. Maybe I could have breathed through and understood why he was infuriating me, if I’d had better tools or stronger will. But I didn’t. And it was awkward. I’d run into him, and it would be ungraceful but I didn’t do anything about it. 

And my old friend-- the last person who I would ever have expected to be self reflective and thoughtful and to show grace to me—did do those things. My friend is making his way in the world, figuring things out, getting better tools, getting to know himself. The good stuff. And it fills me with hope for all of us to see it.

1660: Not a good time for
sharing feelings

So many of the people I love are doing this, these days.  We are all awkwardly stumbling along the path, but finally it is the right path, the one that leads to peace and meaningful work and lasting friendships and health for the body and mind.  I can’t think of a better thing. Not just because we’re coming out of dark places, but because our experiences seem to show that the nature of things is that it is possible to escape. It makes me so happy, and so grateful.

This is another privilege of these generations coming up. Maybe mine will be the last to feel shame about needing help, needing therapy and needing medication. Maybe a world that talks about coping strategies and tools and makes “I” statements is coming up.  Maybe a more healthful search for a more real peace will become the norm.

My other friend is not doing so well. She’s steeped in hurt, and quickly dragged me down in. I got nervous and then I got gaslit and then I felt nuts.

But then I walked out. And I went to the next thing, and wished her well and let it go. And I was OK. And this is new. It’s part of the getting better. I can’t make her do it; I can only make me do it. And my doing it means that I don’t have to get in the lobster bucket with her because I’m afraid she won’t have company in there. To paraphrase what Darin kindly said when he saw my leftover sad, 'Sometimes the best thing to do with baggage is to just put it down.'

That’s what honesty allows, in friendship, if you have the guts. One of my friends had the guts to apologize to me, and I had the guts to let the other one walk her own way by herself when I wouldn’t be a good companion. We’re all getting better. 

On The Barnes

And, wow. The Barnes Foundation museum is really overwhelming. I think maybe my favorite museum

experience ever, certainly my favorite art museum experience.

There's a whole graduate thesis
in here somewhere.

My least favorite, for the record, is the new MoMA. Well, I guess it isn’t really new anymore. That is a big dumb museum that all the objects in it are just pieces of “art.” Look at the “art.” On this wall is some “art.” Take a photo with your phone.

I mean, and it’s not just portraits of Madam Vandervlosky in her sitting room we’re talking about here. We’re talking about Duchamp, who is surely rolling his eyes in his grave every time he thinks about it. $22? Are you fucking kidding me?

Ceci n'est pas un joke. 

MoMA is so good at trading on the commodification of objects that it can take any old bullshit and throw it in there, pointing out that an ipod is as much a rarified object that we can pay $22 to take a picture of with our phone as a Gaugin. In that way, the MoMA is a kind of reverse Duchamp, in that rather than de-valuing rarified objects by putting ordinary ones in their midst, they rarify ordinary objects by placing them alongside things someone has already decided are valuable.

Let's not degrade the man who created
 this subtle exploration of human experience.

Just to clarify, I don’t think this is any insult to the Gaugin. I think the truth of the MoMA is actually very true. Painting. Mp3 Player. 17^th Century Tea Set. It’s all rich people’s stuff to me.

John once said that the thing about working at a fancy restaurant is that it’s the same as working at any restaurant, except that your job is to tell people that they are rich all the time. “May I take your coat? You’re so rich! Would you like to hear the specials? Wow! You’re very rich.”

That is what I feel like I’m doing when I go to the MoMA. Telling rich people that they are rich. “Oh, you ordained this good and meaningful? You’re so rich!”

This gets a twist weirder when many of the objects being commodified were designed with the very specific intention of criticizing the commodification of art objects. You paid five bazillion dollars for a wheel nailed to a stool? Wow! You’re very rich!”

The most grotesque manifestation of this phenomenon that I have been a part of was in the Vatican Museum.

The gaping maw of the Vatican
Museum spews the bile that is us

Have you been there? The slough of wretched humanity shuffles through that museum’s engorged, betapestried intestines in a purgatorial perpetuity, holding screens aloft to photograph object after object until each faceless human form is eventually excreted into the gift shop. The Vatican adds insult to injury in that it commodifies art and spirituality in one sprawling vomitous palace.

An art museum casts you in one of two roles. Maybe you are rich and you enjoy the affirmation that cultural treasures and sublime expression are things that can be bought, priced and cataloged, and the further comfort of knowing that the things that a person like you owns will one day become treasures in their own right. (If you’re at MoMA, maybe they already are!) Or perhaps you are not rich, and then you get to walk around and be reminded that the things that consensus says are of cultural value are things that cost lots of money, and you can feel grateful for the relatively cheap permission to rent a glimpse.

But the Barnes is not like that. This is a museum that refuses to let the things in its collection be rendered mere “art.” Instead, they get to be themselves.

Because the items in the Barnes are put together intuitively, with no regard for or mention of their history or generous donors or materials or makers, they get to live only as what they are. Now. The curation of the museum is such that things are together because the feel like they go together. They have an intuitive harmony. And intuition, like everything people scoff at, is democratic. The objects, presented as belonging to a long, universal narrative of human experience-- instead of on a pedestal of alienating rarefication-- belong equally to anyone who looks at them.

Barnes' total disregard for a work’s context, and for its country of origin, ends up allowing the pieces to come together and tell the story of breathing on Earth. “Look,” it says. “We all have hands and eyes! lots of things have curves! Many things are hit in a certain way by light, all over the world! What do you know, all the cultures have yellow!”

In the Barnes, your relationship to any piece of work is totally different than in other museums. Your job is to look. To notice. To think and feel. And you cannot do it wrong. No amount of money or education is going to make you better at it than anyone else. Whereas a museum like MoMA puts you in a position to stand in humility before an object, the Barnes invites you to stand in humility before shared human experience.

It’s an expensive building. It’s very fancy, and it costs $20 to go there. And from the audioguide, you can tell that the museum staff really wish they could elevate Albert Barnes, who curated these pieces, to a sort of rarefied artifact himself. But he hasn’t given them much to work with. “It’s possible that this is meant to highlight maternal relationships” says the audioguide hopefully “but Barnes never explained the reason for his arrangements.” Ha ha. Sorry audioguide. Your guess is as good as mine. Or more to the point, mine is as good as yours.

That may not be what every artist ever wanted, but it IS what art wants. In the end, it wants to belong to everyone. Sure, art may think it would be cool to be “art,” hanging there behind a velvet rope. But once it gets there, it will come to learn that being “art” is lonely and unfulfilling. In the end, art always realizes that it wants to be alive in multiple engaged interpretations, not cryogenically frozen in a single expert one.

The Barnes, and I guess Albert Barnes, let the art in the collection do that because although Albert Barnes was a very rich dude, he cared more about the human story than hearing anyone say “you’re so rich!”

It's a lovely museum. You should go spend some hours there. 

The Crouching Woman

I skipped out of work on time and went to the Rodin Museum, which is a little jar of light up on the Parkway that has a small collection of sculptures by Aguste Rodin. I don’t know anything about sculpture and visual art tends to make me feel lazy and guilty, because I rarely want to stand around observing each work in all its depth and instead usually catapult through the museum looking for something to empathize with and be validated by. But I wanted to see the museum.

The Crouching Woman is framed by the eastern window, and she’s not fucking around. She’s on the ground like a frog with her head on her shoulder and her hand across her sternum. 

Pretty much everything I read about this statue calls it “erotic” and “sexually charged,” but (surprise surprise) I don’t really see that. It’s true that she’s crouching down with her cunt forward, but I guess that’s only erotic if she’s with someone. If she’s alone, it’s just being where it is. Don’t you ever sit like that when it’s summertime or you have dropped something behind the sink? She could just as soon be looking as a bobby pin as for a fuck, if you ask me.

Some people say that the statue has a kind of terrifying primal (and of course, erotic) violence to it. I’m not sure what’s so scary about her, except that she’s not sitting in a very nice statue pose, and that tends to have distressed people in olden times.

She’s holding on to her own ankle, which is such a dear gesture. As a lady, you are so alien in your own body all the time, constantly aware that it is not yours and on loan to you from men so that you can do some errands such as sleeping and cleaning out your refrigerator. There are the parts of you that are around so often that you almost forget that they are connected to the terrifying (and of course, erotic) structure that houses your soul. Your hands are so practical, your elbows sit on your desk and dinner table. It is easy to forget that they are sexual instruments until you see a helpful advertisement for a product that must be grasped by them or pass a nail salon.

But your feet and ankles are all the way on the other side of the broad teeming ocean and jungle land masses of your female body. That’s probably why it’s so weird to hold them, and so pleasant. It feels stolen, this intimacy between you and you. Although I’m sure someone could shatter this illusion for me, as of now I don’t believe there’s any man who would see me grasp my own ankle and think the gesture was meant to seduce or frighten him.

In the history of the sculpture a critic posits that she is holding her ankle as a reference to a saying commonly used among French prostitutes “prendre son pied” which meant, “make sure you get to have some fun, too.” Good looking out, 19th century French Prostitutes.

But the real thing that gets me about The Crouching Woman is that she was initially created as the counterpoint to The Thinker. She was designed to sit across from him on The Gates of Hell.

You know Thinker, right?

He, like, represents human consciousness and the ingenuity of mankind? You know that one sculpture of a naked dude that no one ever finds threatening or “viscerally sexual”? Perhaps you've heard of it.

Rodin himself said of the sculpture “he thinks with every muscle of his arms, back and legs...the fertile thought slowly elaborates itself within his brain. He’s no longer dreamer. He is creator.”

His nakedness is his humanness. It’s not sexual, who has time for that? Since when do allegories wear pants? The thinker is putting all of his bodily energy into his brain, concentrating it there and harnessing it into a control that mimics that of the Creator Himself.

Meanwhile, what’s my girl doing down on the floor?

I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty sure it’s not what you think.

Unlike her counterpart, she is with herself. Her energy extends to the tips of her fingers. She is present in her mind but also in her heart, gut and cunt. Her hand touches her breast, where her heart is where the feelings that contort her emanate from. She grounds herself against the earth. She is asymmetrical but perfectly balanced. She is not comfortable but she is comfortable with herself. Her focus is inward, look at her head, down, and the way her she’s open and protected at the same time. The way she makes a comforting cradle for her head in her awkward posture. You can call her a sexual object all you want, but there’s nothing of that in the figure herself. You can be terrified by the visceral imperfect aliveness of her compared to johnny sit-and-think, but it doesn't look like she is interested in harming you. She probably doesn't even know that you are there. You’re probably not, anyway. You've never even heard of her. You're looking at The Thinker.

You are the Salt of the Earth

Working people salt the fields of
entrepreneurship! Industry lies
 fallow! Just Kidding. 

This week the reading was Matthew 5, the one that includes my favorite powerful dangerous seven words ‘You are a city on a hill,” the ones that have driven my curriculum, and in a lot of ways, me over the past few years.

Also in there, though, is 'you are a light unto the world', and 'you are the salt of the earth.'

It’s been a wounded week, for a lot of people apparently, because Andy got salt in there this Sunday.

It’s funny how when we say someone is “salt of the earth” we mean that the person is unpretentious. When Jesus says ‘you are the salt of the earth’ he is usually interpreted as meaning that the people of god are cool. But at the same time, the salting of the earth is a punishment that vanquishing armies carry out in defeated cities to prevent things from growing there and to symbolize that the city will not be reinhabited.

The Puritans did it to the natives in their city on a hill.

"Purple monkey dishwasher! I'm white for
some reason!" Sayeth the Lord. 

It is a confusing etymology.

Jesus says “But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”

Um. OK.

Good ol’ Jesus, he liked you to figure stuff out for yourself. You got to think half the time the disciples were like “oh, yeah, we get that, Isa, that makes perfect sense to us! Salt. Totally.” Then they’d look at each other like “WTF?”

I think he might have been saying “you are salt, so be salt. What’s the point of salt that isn’t salt?”

This reminds me of a poem that I loved written by a dude that I went to college with, Ali Green, which started “Be who you be, ‘cause you ain’t who you not.”

I don’t think it’s really about salt at all. It’s about your being the thing you are, and there being no point to you if you are not that.

Andy saw the purpose of the salt, to carry the metaphor, as being to make the undesirable more bearable. He saw discipleship as a willingness to do so. “You are the salt of the earth,” he said, “expect to be shaken loose on some unpalatable things.”

You are, too. You, whatever salt you are, are *the* salt for some distasteful thing somewhere. Probably somewhere nearby.

John Winthrop. Both salt and
salter of the earth. 

The most distasteful part of A Model of Christian Charity, the speech that puts the US at the top of the hill, for most Americans and me anyhow, is the part where Winthrop says that “GOD ALMIGHTY in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in submission.”

Totally counter revolutionary! Mario would not be happy. But this idea is growing on me. Winthrop (probably Calvin, what am I, some kind of theologian?) says that god made us unequal, made us imperfect on purpose specifically so that we would need each other and god. (More evidence that god is a little insecure.)

Everyone is salt for some other person’s tasteless lentil stew. The seeking, the striving to first be who you be, and then to apply that where it goes is how god intended us to spend these hours. God made us without the answers so we could seek the answers, god made us hungry so we would go get food. Need is a divine instruction. And people are uniquely instructed- different from the other animals.

Winthrop seems to be saying.

That is all well and good. I’m a little weary of being the salt this week though.

I guess that brokendowness is my marching orders. Onward, faux-Christian soldiers.

Household Tip

You can not put mulling spices in a tea strainer and put hot water over them. You can. It will not taste like tea. It will taste like boiled water.