Scribbling

I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love. –Marilyn Monroe

As I was watching My Week With Marilyn, two thoughts immediately popped into mind: Michelle Williams’ splendid performance in the role of Marilyn Monroe; the Madonna Whore Complex noted in the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud as well as other sources that the film evoked. The thrust of the film was not an examination and application of Freudian theory; although, there is some intimation that at least one or two of Marilyn’s spouses might have been aptly described by Freud’s theory. The Madonna Whore Complex supplied the lens or perspective through which the film was shot; sexual dysfunction as well as drug and alcohol abuse are undeniably present; however, those elements are not what draws the viewer in or provides the pinpoint clarity that our modern day camera obscura demands.

Throughout the film Michelle Williams surfaces by turns as Norma Jeane (Mortenson) Baker–Madonna–and as Marilyn Monroe–Whore, or perhaps a bit moderately put, the object of sexual desire. Certainly at the point in her life that is being depicted, Norma Jean/Marilyn is not simply one character pretending to be another; the twin aspects of her personality have become so intertwined that neither aspect has the strength or desire to become subservient to the other. Norma Jeane wants to be loved as Norma Jeane, the woman hidden from the limelight who is vulnerable and flawed in the same way all of us ordinary people are; yet, it is Marilyn who commands the field of suitors, overwhelms them with the raw sensuality she exudes and disarms them with understated but evocative repartee.

While based on the account of Colin Clarke who spent the week with Marilyn during the filming of the movie The Prince and The Showgirl in 1956, one feels short-changed by the shallow exploration of the relationship that emerged between Marilyn and her infatuated young escort. Nevertheless, one becomes convinced that Colin merges the polar twins, Norma Jeane/Marilyn into a more refined composite figure which does not preclude the presence of one from the other; he is smitten with both love and desire so that the goddess can appear in mortal clothes while retaining her Aphroditic Aura. The lure of both beauty and vulnerability is intoxicating; Colin would marry and therefore rescue Norma Jeane/Marilyn from her vacillating opposites falling into the trap that entangled DiMaggio and Miller. If Norma Jeane is the Inscape–Gerard Manly Hopkins’ philosophical concept of unique individual design–then Marilyn is most certainly its counterpart, Outscape, the outer world of reflection and illusion.

But Norma Jeane/Marilyn is unable to guarantee the exclusivity for which Norma Jeane hungers; Marilyn’s attraction obscures Norma Jeane’s vulnerability and her need for love that satisfies more than the recurring desires of the body; she doesn’t reject physical love; however, her mechanism for attraction serves to lure the opposite of that which she intended. In the end the presence of one almost always demands an appearance of the other.

Perhaps, the complex is less a description of dysfunction than it is an outline of the stages of love, particularly as it transitions from youth to maturity. Beauty and passion can lie in the eyes of the beholder; there is something striking and comely when we first notice the other, when we are indescribably and inexplicably smitten, when our blood surges and our heart pounds. Over time this phenomenon fades–but does not become extinct–the mechanics of our bodies are subject to the laws of chemistry and physics after all and we have yet to perfect a viable perpetual motion machine. Aphrodite becomes Athena; eros becomes agape.

Of course our theories often tend to be abstractions, extrapolated from personal incidents and observations. In reality the Madonna and whore do not live separate lives; they are not separate entities. What we see or seek in others often arises from an unfulfilled need in ourselves; and, if we cannot find that which we seek, we are able creators who excel at artifice. Norma Jean wanted to be loved and Marilyn provided an opportunity to achieve that; unfortunately, in an effort to find love, the division between the means and end became increasingly blurred over time; perhaps such an distinction was never possible except in theory, a sentiment captured in Elton John’s popular homage:

Goodbye Norma Jean
Though I never knew you at all
You had the grace to hold yourself
While those around you crawled

They crawled out of the woodwork
And they whispered into your brain
They set you on the treadmill
And they made you change your name

And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in

And I would have liked to have known you
But I was just a kid
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did

Loneliness was tough
The toughest role you ever played
Hollywood created a superstar
And pain was the price you paid

Even when you died
Oh, the press still hounded you
All the papers had to say
Was that Marilyn was found in the nude

Goodbye Norma Jean
From the young man in the 22nd row
Who sees you as something as more than sexual
More than just our Marilyn Monroe

As I waited anxiously for the time when I could upgrade my cell phone, I watched with interest as stories began to surface regarding the poor battery life of the iPhone 4S. Since I had made my decision to upgrade from a first generation Blackberry Touch to an iPhone, I was beginning to question my choice, perhaps some flavor of Android phone would be a better way to go. My move to Macs 7 or 8 years ago from PC’s had been both successful and enjoyable; the Apple environment, OS X in particular, had become ingrained in my approach to computing technology so my consideration of Android OS was done with reluctance. Review after review convinced me that any switch to a phone using an Android operating system would have to come with the latest release, Ice Cream Sandwich; fragmentation was an issue which seemed to plague Android phones and I had had enough of RIM’s missteps over the two years I had a Blackberry to take a chance. Apple controls the updates to the iPhone’s operating system rather than the telecoms which made fragmentation a non issue with iOS as far as I was concerned.

While my past experience with Apple products and services had been basically very positive, an iPhone was totally different beast from my iMac or MacBook Pro, or the mini and the iBook with which I first entered the world of Apple. Several trips to the local Apple Store involving stints of playing with the iPhone and asking questions added to the information that I had gleaned from online reviews and testimonials. All in all, it seemed to me that the iPhone 4S was the best choice for me despite those who had expressed disappointment at Apple’s not releasing the “iPhone 5” with 4G speed and a 4 inch screen, etc. By my reckoning the 4S was indeed a significant release, especially when I compared it with the Blackberry Touch I had. The 4S had 4 times the memory for starters and a browser that was actually fast while the browser on my BB was barely functional. Still there was the nagging issue of battery life that had reared its head shortly after 4S had been released. I checked with a friend who had a 4S who said he had not experienced the battery issue that many had reported.

I haven’t scratched the surface of the iPhone 4S’s capabilities, including the mysteries of iCloud, but I have laid to rest my concern over the battery issue. During the week that I have had my 4S, I have gone 3 days on a single charge. My usage is probably atypical. I do not stream movies on my iPhone, nor do I intend to even though I have a grandfathered, unlimited data plan with Verizon. I use WIFI whenever I am at home and turn off cellular data services. When I am away from home I turn off WIFI. I also do not use push notifications with email and prefer using fetch. At present I do not have a plethora of apps loaded on the phone however the availability and range of apps is intoxicating. Although I am a novitiate with the iPhone 4S my expectation is that my satisfaction will increase as my experience deepens. If I were to channel Siskel and Ebert of old, I’d give the 4S two thumbs up.

During the couple of years since I joined Facebook I have noticed a rather curious behavior developing among several of my short list of friends.  Aside from the posts involving political events, articles, and commentary of one type or another there has been an increasing tendency for appeals which are very personal in nature: asking the circle of FB friends to pray for someone for example, either a family member or a person of interest.   There are also a number of the usual kinds of requests or solicitations, such as copying and pasting a post of another into one’s own post.  I doubt there has been any data compiled on the efficacy of these actions other than continuing to increase the money stream to Facebook and its advertisers.

I can understand the zealous appeal for various social and political causes.  I must admit I have engaged in my own rants regarding some, in my view, untenable or irrational positions espoused by a politician or public figure.  In a democratic republic such as ours citizens are accorded the right, if not the responsibility, to speak out to maintain the public weal; however, part of the compact we are obligated to as members of our republic has been the concept of the separation of church and state.  While we have not always been as fastidious to maintain this separation as we ought, we have always held such a belief as one of the distinguishing characteristics that contributes to the uniqueness and success of our nation.

Facebook has rapidly become the pre-eminent social network and consequently one of the most dominant vehicles for communication and media exchange for millions of people all offer the world.  The social and political conflict in the Middle East that blossomed into the so-called Arab Spring was often documented on FB pages as it unfolded.  In fact oppressive regimes seem to target the availability of social networking as their first act of repression as a means of maintaining their unchallenged control.

Regime change may involve religion in some way although it seems unlikely that this involvement includes adopting a particular belief system or an appeal to a fundamental tenant of a particular religion other than to point out inconsistencies regarding belief and actual practice encoded in public policies.  The phenomenon I’ve noticed on FB is for someone to post an appeal for his FB friends to pray for a relative or another person regardless of their connection to each other.  The supplication for prayer is often followed by responses which range from the highly personal to a rather mechanical and impersonal standard reply of prayers coming your way or already sent.  Just as often the recipient of the prayers is the person who made the request while the person for whom the prayer was requested is relegated to a parenthetical consideration or none at all.  Upon reflection, perhaps, such expressions cannot be other than boiler plate sentiments since words can easily be formed into sentences but whole belief systems and the intimacy they require is something achieved over time and with personal contact.

What do we really mean when we go on FB and ask our group of friends to pray for someone?  Our FB friends may be our friends in the strictest sense of what we mean by establishing a bond of friendship with someone; however, it often means that we have accumulated names and profiles with less circumspection than we would in our everyday lives which involve personal—face-to-face—contact.  I have FB friends who are relatives whom I have never met and yet, in one very accurate sense they are not only “friends” but family as well; we share blood, although in some instances, little else.  Included in this far-flung cadre of FB friendship are people of varying religious beliefs and affiliations.  What is the basis then for the appeals which fail to encompass what such an appeal means to those of varying religious backgrounds?  What is the common ground upon which we all can respond that is both meaningful and efficacious?  Is any response, as long as it is uttered with civility, adequate?  Does it matter what our own religious beliefs are and will they effect the intended outcome?  Are our beliefs immaterial, except for our willingness to engage in a vague process of electronic ecclesia?

My father died this summer, a week after celebrating his 85th birthday; his life ended when what initially appeared to be a more minor condition deteriorated over the course of several months into one which became increasingly life-threatening.  As my father fought to regain his health—he was valiant in his effort and even showed signs of recovery on several occasions—some in our family and extended family submitted posts to FB asking for prayers for my father.  While it is obvious that the loosely constituted Church of Facebook and its liturgy of cyber prayer were impotent with regard to my father’s recovery, it may have helped those involved to be relieved of some form of misery or guilt or who knows what deep-seated or surface emotion; after all, other organized religious groups and entities fail or succeed at roughly equivalent rates as the CFB.  And, then there is the lament, the long-suffering electronic depression and anguish of loved ones lost that demands sharing with faces whose tears we cannot see or whose embrace we cannot feel.  I am reminded of the nascent television ministry of Oral Roberts, even he asked the  faithful to touch the television set to receive God’s blessing as he prayed.  Perhaps a more universal spirit was revealed to Mark Zuckerberg; one  that salves our injuries, secures our kinship, and whose essence is encoded in a language devoid of any human connection other than the cubicled coteries of its authors and revisionists.  There is no threat of eternal perdition or the temptations of Eve.  There are no theological gymnastics required to become one of the chosen and the only scarlet letter to bear is a U—Unfriended.

Whatever our beliefs are they are inescapably tied to who we are which means that the God we worship or do not worship can only be known as a referent of our own being.  In our world of joy and misery, life and death, well-being and suffering, we are the prerequisite for God’s existence or absence; without us, without human beings, a deity of any kind is simply irrelevant.  Without us God is simply alone regardless of whether it inserted itself into time and history or if we were the sole creators of such a grand myth.  In any case, the reliance  on FB to provide context, meaning, or authenticity to fundamental aspects of our inner life seems shallow and disingenuous.

Thou great star! What would be thy happiness if thou hadst not those for whom thou shinest!

Friedrich Nietzsche,  Thus Spake Zarathustra

This summer has felt unusually long and unfortunately abbreviated for nearly all of the same reasons. My father suffered through an extended illness which ultimately claimed his life; he also left us sooner than either he or his offspring had expected. When anyone is ill, the degree of the malady notwithstanding, we tend to hope for the best but secretly, silently, so as not to attract the darker side of fate, steel ourselves for the worst. It is always an intellectual exercise as the reality of death, the loss of a loved one can never be sanitized so that one’s emotional state is unaffected or even altered to the degree that it accomplishes little more than public self-restraint; privately the shadows commingle with memories and resurrect feelings as powerful as when we “lived” them for the first time.

Having surrendered both mother and father to the intangible realm of memory in the span of two years, leaves one with the kind of independence that is unhinged and unsatisfactory; one’s point of reference must be redefined, recalculated, relocated within a geometry that is devoid of a living vertical connection to the past. Memories are scattered like captured plunder among the living and left to the interests of individuals who may find more solace in a self-imposed amnesia than in recollection. And, as is often the case, one may be plagued by the countless what-if scenarios which invariably arise: what if questions had been asked when they could have been answered instead of being relegated to a ruse of speculative meandering based on cumulative versions of the same or similar anecdotes?

With the passing of my father there are few living members of my family remaining who were witnesses to a life before my own; I have aged from son to gatekeeper, a chronicler of memories, facts, and even fictions, all contributions to the people we were and have become. My father quietly tended a trove of memories. As my genealogy research hit snags, particularly involving family in my father’s generation, I would often get him to tell me what he knew concerning an incident I’d heard about or to corroborate my own speculations regarding family; whenever facts were available for comparison his recollection always proved to be accurate and informative.

Despite our many conversations, especially the ones following the death of my mother, my father and I never ventured into the maze of memories which involved the earliest and most volatile versions of ourselves, the ones with which we created memories best forgotten, if not correctly interpreted with the help of both perspective and stoic dispassion. I have often wanted to compare the memories we shared, the hard ones, the ones that invariably pit extreme against extreme, will against will, anger against anger, father against son, man against boy. To venture into that terrain was probably a folly neither of us had mustered the courage or the foolhardiness to attempt. While relating an anecdote about one of my uncles–my mother’s favorite brother–my dad said that I was spoiled by my grandfather and that particular uncle. My father was referring to the time he was in the army in WWII and serving in Okinawa; I was born after he was shipped to the Pacific Theater so I was over a year old before my father ever saw me. By my mother’s telling, he and I did not hit it off well; I was a baby and hardly culpable but someone had to shoulder the blame; apparently, it was me.

To suggest that life for me consisted of one traumatic moment after another would be disingenuous despite the incidence of many trying episodes such as being bitten by a rat one night while asleep in one of the rent houses in which we lived, one with no inside toilet; quarantined for a year when my father was stricken with polio; witnessing my father shot by his brother just after all of our belongings were lost in a fire when the house that we had just moved into was destroyed by fire. There are more incidents but such an inventory serves no purpose beyond the fatigue its weight produces.

My father’s emotions were rarely conveyed with tender sensitivity; however, I fondly recall one time when I was very ill that he allowed that hard veneer of his to fall away. As I lay in bed on night, I sensed his presence near me. Not a word passed between us as he hovered over me protectively, and finally offered me the gift he held in his hand: a porcelain, Boston Terrier. It was black and white; a color combination that often characterized the starkness of our relationship, especially during my adolescence. Our relationship became so intolerable when I was in high school that I moved out one summer and demanded an apology from my father. There appeared to be no solution to the stalemate, summer was almost over and school would soon be in session, which compounded the problems I faced. We were both so willful that neither would consider conceding, that is, until a face-saving détente was announced by my father. As I was walking by my aunt’s house one day, my father happened to drive by recognized me, stopped his car, rolled down the passenger’s side window, and gruffly spoke, “Your mom wants you to come home”. I was stubborn but not stupid and knew that was as close to an apology that I would ever get so I returned home. Neither my father nor I ever talked about that incident; and, honestly, I do not have the faintest idea what event or offense precipitated our ill-considered reactions. If I were to speculate, it probably had something to do with corporal punishment and verbal abuse both of which my father could mete out suddenly, vigorously, and paradoxically–predictably and randomly.

I have never been able to recreate the sensation of physical pain in my recollections; it seems that even the most acute feelings when stored as memories are laundered in the process; the images may remain vivid but the pangs of injury and hurt are removed. Reconsidering the past therefore is not a matter of reliving each incident in its entirety, physical datum is extracted and replaced with an intellectual counterpart, a placeholder, in effect; for example, one becomes a witness to the re-enactment of a significant moment of one’s past and may examine what transpires as a means to resolving elements of conflict or simply as a means of accumulating and recording anecdotes for posterity. Our motives tend to cover a wide spectrum ranging from charitable to self-self-aggrandizing, and even liberating. We may never be able to escape our past, and, perhaps that is not what we truly desire. My father’s death was many things: a loss; in some respects, a blessing; and, an integral aspect of life itself. No doubt there will be moments when a word or a gesture or some otherwise insignificant phenomenon will trigger a memory of, or related to, my father; life is not static, it is not an object to be hidden away or possessed, or something from which one flees. Life offers us only one course of action: it must be lived even if we are bent under its weight and lament our loss. The past may evoke emotions in us similar to those felt by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth in his poem, The World Is Too Much With Us. His world was in the thrall of the Industrial Revolution; our world has its own array of conflagrations and private miseries. Each one of us bound to our past and fleeing it will never lead us to freedom.

The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune,
It moves us not.–Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

A few months ago my father began a journey that even he had not anticipated in his declining years. What started out as a small wound on his ankle developed into an infection that introduced or perhaps revealed other complications in my father’s general overall health. My father had waged a tenacious battle for recovery despite being admitted to three different hospitals and two different nursing homes with therapy units specializing in respiratory issues; early this morning he passed away.

Dad celebrated his 85th birthday a few days ago while clinging valiantly to life as it teetered precariously with the staccato breaths that afforded him precious little oxygen to match his resolute will to live. It’s a mixed blessing to be strong willed and resilient as we are often prone to endure more pain and needless suffering than we ought.

In the two years since my mother died my father had found certain aspects of living very difficult, as one can imagine. Our weekly telephone conversations underscored not only the usual issues one faces with the loss of a spouse but also brought into focus the general aspects that such a loss can trigger: companionship, expectations, physical limitations, and meaning of life itself. One theme that recurred in our talks centered on expectations; my father often would addend the phrase “This isn’t what I expected in life” or “This is not how I though my life would be”. The caveats he offered were mostly in reference to his life without my mother but also about the changes in his body, the growing and/or persistent infirmities that limited his mobility and usurped his independence–entropy in its most personal and insidious articulation.

Dad has driven to the cemetery where my mother is buried twice a day since she died to visit, to talk as lost loved ones do, to attempt to heal the ache, the void in his heart; he made these treks alone and in all kinds of weather conditions. My father kept these tete a tete’s with my mother faithfully until earlier this spring when he fell while at the cemetery. His arthritic knees failed him, his stubborn nature did not and he dragged himself, crawling mostly, over the rough walkway toward his car when a family member who just happened to be at the cemetery found him. Apparently, this scenario had played out at least one or two times previously with my father managing to get back to his car successfully on his own with no one the wiser for these mishaps. Dad had told me jokingly but probably accurately that he had to think about moving for five minutes before his mind could get his body to obey. His mind was willing and practically as sharp as it ever was; it was his body that had begun a slow and insidious betrayal.

I still recall the trauma of my father being carried out of our house on a stretcher and placed in an ambulance when I was just 4 or 5. We were quarantined for nearly a year and could not leave the house or venture father than our back yard. I am not certain how long dad was hospitalized with polio; I know my mother was summoned twice that I can recall to come to the hospital because the physicians thought he was dying. Dad was fortunate to survive; however, bulbar polio left physical damage in its wake: eating was particularly unsettling and fraught with the constant danger of choking due to the nature of bulbar polio which affects the medulla oblongata and can lead to paralysis, circulatory and respiratory failure. The first few years after dad’s release from the hospital our meals together were never without the possibility that we might lose him when he would gag and struggle as he swallowed a bite of food. Over time we became used to the throat-clearing sound that was dad’s best approximation of a cough. We also grew to recognize the variations in dad’s “coughing” as indicators of the seriousness of his daily coughing events. While polio nearly snatched our father from us, over time he recovered, in my childhood to the strong man he was before his hospitalization.

Polio was not my father’s only adversary; ironically, his older brother was principally responsible for another incident that shattered sibling and familial love and dealt my father another painful blow. My uncle had been in a local bar drinking more than he should with the consequence of his actions ending in an argument with another patron. Drunk and angry, my uncle returned to my grandmother’s house to retrieve a gun and subsequently settle the score with the other inebriate. My family was staying with my grandmother temporarily while my father was searching for new lodging as the house into which we were in the process of moving was destroyed in a fire with all of our belongings in it. When my uncle staggered to exit the house my father intercepted him and was in the process of disarming him. Up to the point of my father’s intercession the episode was mostly comedic, albeit disturbingly so; however, it rapidly escalated to tragedy when my grandmother and mother, for their separate reasons, grabbed onto my father as he was subduing my uncle. Taking the gun away from his older brother would have been a trifle for my father but the interference of two hysterical women created a chaos of emotion, action and reaction. The gun discharged wounding my father in one of his legs; the bullet remained lodged in his leg until he died. My uncle was incarcerated in the state prison in Trenton for the criminally insane where he was given the prevailing therapy at the time: shock treatments. He was later transferred to another facility, Ancora, in central New Jersey. Throughout this time my father dutifully chauffeured his mother nearly every weekend to visit the brother who shot him. Love can be blissful but it can also be rife with ironic agony.

As we age, we become more aware of the impact decisions made earlier in our lives have on us in the present. Wisdom is rarely a young man’s companion, often only befriending us when we have wasted resources which are not renewable. Even if we have been good stewards and have carefully metered our assets–physical, mental, and spiritual–we will be abraded by the mere passage of time, in all of its scientific incarnations. As surely as I write this I know at least part of the fate that awaits me is to join the confederation of memories of all who have lived and moved on before me; and, yet I am haunted by the imprecision of that certainty. For some of us westerners Francis Thompson’s image of the hound of heaven in relentless pursuit of our soul may offer some comfort. Others may weigh metaphor with the growing cache of novel scientific discovery. Wherever we may fit on the spectrum of personal belief our experience validates some of the fundamental theories of physics. None of us has witnessed anyone aging in reverse, traversing old age to infancy, except in the imagination of Hollywood. Anecdotal evidence of the decline we all experience abounds. None of us have been able to reverse the process and we are left staring into an abyss–as Andrew Marvell said in his poem, To His Coy Mistress,

But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.