Reading:
John Fowles, The Magus.
Moving:
walked 2.7 miles to work; 30' NT: 3.06 miles
Listening: Górecki,
Symphony #3
Watching: magpies
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6 March 2001: Explanations
In the fall of 1998 I read a book that immediately, like Into the
Forest, like Small Changes, became, if not a favorite book,
a talisman, only more so than any book had done before. Much more so.
It's Mine, as much as the painting The Princess belongs to Randy
Melendy. Cathleen Schine, The Evolution of Jane.
I first read about this in The New York Times Book Review and
I wanted to read it because of a lost friend. The protagonist loses a
friend of eight years at 15 and no one pays any attention; she divorces
after six months and everyone is awash with sympathy. I know how that
feels, the sympathy when you don't need it but none when you do. And she
grew up in Barlow, Connecticut, a town on the shore but that wasn't a
summer town. Hmm.
I told someone I had found a book passages of which I should staple to
my forehead as an explanation of lisa. He asked, "Was it written
from a padded room somewhere?"
In my biography period, I read an illustrated account of the voyage
of the H.M.S. Beagle, which marked the beginning of my fascination
with Charles Darwin. What I remember most vividly from that book was,
first, that Darwin was seasick for the entire five years of his voyage
on the Beagle, and, second, that he had to be so very tidy on
shipboard. There were pictures of the cabinets used to store specimens,
pictures of rows of little bottles and jars and wooden boxes, each labeled
in an old-fashioned hand. Life on board ship seemed miniature, like
a playhouse full of neatly organized treasures. I'm sure there were
pictures in the book of other things as well--birds and volcanoes and
ferns--but what I remember most were the boxes and drawers and their
orderly tags.
...
During this time, like all my friends, I also read The Diary of Anne
Frank and The Story of My Life by Helen Keller. But in addition
to blindfolding myself and wandering around the living room to see what
it was like to be blind the way we all did, and crouching in the attic
with a bologna sandwich, hiding from Nazis, I used to look for fossils.
I tired of being blind within a few minutes, and I tired of fossils
almost as quickly, particularly because I never found any. I did, however,
display and label a row of rocks from the driveway. I didn't know what
they were and was too lazy to find out, so I just labeled them by color.
But I still felt a proprietary bond with Darwin. Whenever I hear his
name, to this day, I experience a sudden alertness, as if my own name
has been spoken.
The New York Times reviewer said that Jane is self-absorbed and egocentric,
which I know a thing or two about myself. Also that it's an anti-allegory:
instead of Christian of Pilgrim's Progress representing mankind,
evolution represents Jane, exists to explain Jane. The one consuming event
in her life has been the loss of her friend Martha (no strange occurrence
to me) and she obsesses on it (as do I). Jane's mother send her on a week-long
trip to the Galapagos to get over the divorce. Her eco-tour guide happens
to be Martha, who is pleasant but unmoved to her throughout, not
much different than she is to the other passengers. Toward the end of
the trip, Martha tells her,
"You're so literal-minded and fanciful at the same time."
I was, wasn't I? A black hole, sucking up the world around me to metaphorize
it out of all recognizability.
Darwin was right--the habit of comparison leads to generalization....[W]e
travelers stay such a short time, able to make mere sketches of what
we've seen. And then we fill up the wide gaps of knowledge with inaccurate
and superficial hypotheses.
Was that what Martha did as well? No. Martha told stories, but she
described what she saw. Detailed observation--just what Darwin valued.
The world opened up before her, inspired by her vision and her touch.
She used what she found, like my father opening all those misfiled drawers.
Whereas all I seemed to do was put things in drawers. I was the one
who misfiled in the first place.
Here is something I read in Darwin's journal. He was amused by a theory
of a contemporary philosopher, William Whewell. "Says length of days
[is] adapted to duration of sleep of man!!! and not man to planets,"
Darwin wrote. "Instance of arrogance!!"
I pulled Gloria aside. "I got it backwards," I said. "Like Whewell."
"I'm sorry."
"The sun does not bend itself to man's needs. It's the duration of
man's sleep that is the adaptation
." I had assumed that the length
of the night was the result of my need for sleep. For years I had been
asking myself what I could have done to Martha, an action of which I
thought nothing at the time, but which cut her to the quick, something
unforgivable, unforgivable even to Martha. I had come up with so many
possible explanations....
But it had nothing to do with my story. It had to do with Martha, with
her story, with her rotations, her travels from dawn to dusk, from horizon
to horizon, whatever they were, whatever they had been, journeys beyond
my sight that had nothing to do with me, the other side of the moon.
"You see, Martha is the sun
and I'm the male nipple.
I'm
the whale's thumb. I was so arrogant and self-centered that I thought
it must be Martha, but really it's me! I'm the vestigial organ."
"For six days she labored to discover humility," Gloria said. "On the
seventh day, she rested."
And there's the name Jane. The Cowboy Junkies' "Sweet
Jane." Jane Austen, and Elizabeth Bennet's beloved sister Jane. Zora
Neal Hurston's Janie. I love the name Jane. Also Martha. In Zilpha Keatley
Snyder's The Changeling, it is Ivy who leaves Martha, but still.
---
Last week I received an actual paper letter from RRP written
with an actual pen, because she was remembering the huge long letters
I wrote (with a keyboard) to her when I first moved to Denver. On vacation
with her family, she told me, they were all making fun of the "What
are you doing" angle of the "Whazzup?" ad, and this
reminded me of another passage that Explains, or at least illustrates,
Lisa
Cynthia Voigt has three books, so far, about two bad girls
named Mikey and Margalo. In the third book, It's Not Easy Being Bad,
they're in seventh grade and recognize the importance of popularity. Margalo
doesn't want so much to be popular as for people to think she's
popular so it'll be easier to be Margalo. Mikey wants to be popular
because she believes that power comes with popularity. Margalo knows how
to get along with people--if she weren't friends with Mikey she'd get
a lot further, but she wouldn't give her up--and when someone says "Whazzup?"
to her in the hall, she responds, equally impersonally, but equally, "Whazzup?"
Mikey doesn't know that:
"Great blouse," somebody said [to Margalo]. The somebody
was Casey..., who know said, "Mikey? Love your cookies. I'm Casey,
hihowareyou?"
"Wet," Mikey answered. "Otherwise, pretty good because
I got a really good night's sleep. Also, my dad got us bagels for breakfast."
She thought about what else Casey might want to know. "I'm staying
with my mother this weekend, but I don't start getting jumpy about that
until Friday. She likes me better since the divorce, but I'm not exactly
her favorite person a lot of the time."
"Oh," Casey said. "Well. That's--Hihowareyou, Margalo?"
"Cool," Margalo said. Whatever that meant, Mikey thought.
I like how Mikey does try to think what else Casey might want to know
but misjudges so spectacularly; is so self-involved; and has no idea what
Margalo's casual response might mean or why she might have delivered it.
The "What are you doing" of RRP's vacation reminded
me of this, so I told her this whole thing, writing it with an actual
pen in response to her actual handwritten letter. About two thirds of
the way through I realized I was, in fact, being Mikey, that this was
way more information that her vacation anecdote should have elicited,
but that, unfortunately, since I was writing with a pen, I couldn't stop
myself, as I could with a keyboard. So the explanation was by virtue,
or nonvirtue, of its length, in addition to its content, proof.
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