My mental circus, inside and out.

Restless

Emma will turn 50 this year.  All of this talk about birthdays was a reminder to everyone that this supposedly big event is coming up, although Emma herself had forgotten how old she was and vaguely thought she might be turning 49.   But no, it is 50, which essentially means that she'll have to put up with a lot of birthday cards with bad jokes.  This is the first year she had planned not to take a big summer holiday, thinking that instead she'd putter around the new house and garden, as old ladies should.  On the other hand, she still has this big dream of hiking a ten-day circuit in Patagonia and then visiting Easter Island, and now she thinks, hey, I should do that during my fiftieth year.   Unfortunately, while she has plenty of friends, they are not the outdoors types, and if she could just find a person who thinks it would be great to spend ten days backpacking in the Andes, that would be very fine.  Of course, this is a restless time of year, going into March, when dreams of flight take over.  And Emma has always been more restless than most.  Gotta see and know everything.  And wow, there's not so much time left anymore.

Posted by: EmmaPele at February 21, 2007 21:03 | link | comments (3)

circuses

Was it the last ski of the season on Sunday, out on the fields, with the red berries, the gold leaves of the oak, the purple branches of some low bush against the expanse of snow on the farmers' fields.  The dark grey clouds, the snow, the sudden break in the clouds to reveal clear skies, the last push along the snowy path. Maybe.  But sometimes the snow comes heavy in March.  It still feels good to walk out the door and not feel the stinging cold of below zero wind chills. 

The house was full of young people and birthday sheet cakes (plural) this weekend.  The kind of birthday for the adult-child who still needs a birthday crown (made by herself with glued rhinestones) and a Harry Potter cake.  And Peg, visiting for the day, who told Emma a sad-funny story about her re-entry into the dating pool after the death of their mutual former husband, now dead. So Peg says she has been going out with this guy for dinner, but the other night, she asked him if he'd go with her to a Billy Joel concert, and he says, "You are my dinner girl.  I have another girl for concerts."  To which she replied, "I guess I'm your circus girl now, because I'm never going out with you again until the circus comes to town." 

Posted by: EmmaPele at February 21, 2007 01:55 | link | comments (2)

Something further on that last post.  I don't think that Buddhism necessarily has to be associated with sadness, as it appears to be in Japan, maybe because Zen is quite a rarefied, very aestheticized form.    I have a Japanese grad student who is descended from samurai, and he has told me that he can never really be happy about any achievement, because of the wheel of samsara, but this seems an interlocking of a certain social evolution in Japan with the tradition of Zen, which seems more about acceptance than progress along the path.In Burma, when anyone talks about Buddhism, as far as I know, it's always associated with happiness, the way out of sadness, associated with success, even business success. Almost cornily, until you actually understand this mantrra, the Goenke Vipassana movement's slogan is "Be Happy," or "May All Beings Be Happy," and Goenke is from Burma. Of course, happiness has to be understood as something other than fleeting pleasures and desires, and it has to be understood that ultimately even joy is transcended when one achieves enlightenment.  "Be Happy" only sounds corny until it's understood as a practice as well as the reward of practice, mindfulness, knowing the mind.  This is why I like the Southeast Asian traditions a bit better, even though they are appallingly patriarchal.  But then, Buddhism is unfolidng in its own way in the West.  The German Buddhists, who were in the forefront of introducing Buddhism to the West, really stripped the philosophy of feeling and happiness and even affection in their versions,  from what I can see.  It's a very grim version. In the United States, Buddhism  is taking its own shape in assocation with psychanalytical practice and, very unfortunately, New Age, which robs it of any depth and flies off into cornball fantasies. 

But better, it intersects with science, and that's a lovely thing, and offers a way out of the sadness of science's blows against individuality, volition, etc.  One example: neuroscience is finding that one's sense of "will" comes after the act, but this has been known by Buddhists for many generations.  The notion of "will" has already been pretty well dissected, especially the idea that there is a permanent will that resides in a Self, rather than a contingent sense of volition which arises in its moment in the aggregate which we think we know as a Self.  But it is this very fluidity that we recognize as liberation.

In that article, I like the statement that "depression" tries to encompass too much, and that there are many human states, like sensitivity, that are not really depressive, but aware.

Posted by: EmmaPele at February 18, 2007 19:56 | link | comments (2)
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Depression in Japan

Emma thinks Buddhism must have different social shapes in different places, but found this interesting.

From:

Did Antidepressants Depress Japan?

by Kathryn Schulz, Spring 2004 IRP Fellow

For 1,500 years of Japanese history, Buddhism has encouraged the acceptance of sadness and discouraged the pursuit of happiness -- a fundamental distinction between Western and Eastern attitudes. The first of Buddhism's four central precepts is: suffering exists. Because sickness and death are inevitable, resisting them brings more misery, not less. "Nature shows us that life is sadness, that everything dies or ends," Hayao Kawai, a clinical psychologist who is now Japan's commissioner of cultural affairs, said. "Our mythology repeats that; we do not have stories where anyone lives happily ever after." Happiness is nearly always fleeting in Japanese art and literature. That bittersweet aesthetic, known as aware, prizes melancholy as a sign of sensitivity.

This traditional way of thinking about suffering helps to explain why mild depression was never considered a disease. "Melancholia, sensitivity, fragility -- these are not negative things in a Japanese context," Tooru Takahashi, a psychiatrist who worked for Japan's National Institute of Mental Health for 30 years, explained. "It never occurred to us that we should try to remove them, because it never occurred to us that they were bad."

Posted by: EmmaPele at February 18, 2007 09:45 | link | comments (3)

A Birthday

Emma's daughter's birthday is today, and as with many mother-daughter relationships, theirs is one fraught with love and difficulty.    Emma watches all the painful mistakes of her own life unfolding in her daughter, and yet she also watches her daughter's immense creativity and demand that her life be fully her own as coming from the same source.   And from Emma's mother, and from Emma's grandmother who, living in the poorest house in a poor farming community in Ohio, insisted that there was a life of the mind beyond her destitute circumstances.   The women were always the most powerful members of Emma's family history--the angriest, the most energetic, the most unrelenting, the most uncompromising about family togetherness, and the most giving.   The men tended to be gentle, soft-spoken loners, out of touch with reality. Maks, Emma's grandson, has many of these qualities.  These threads of matriarchal family history have  woven their way into Emma's daughter, who is still seeking out the path of her own life, always traveling upstream instead of taking the easy drift down.   She is the one who loves every holiday, who has larger-than-life visions of the way things should be, who will paint an expanding walll-size mural rather than confine herself to a tiny canvas. 

Posted by: EmmaPele at February 17, 2007 21:40 | link | comments (2)