Thursday, February 25, 2010

Break It Down (Again)

Early on in my short and uninspired career in math, I remember an exercise my math class did to break down numbers into the lowest primes whose product would be the original number. For example, 24 can be broken down to 8 and 3, and from there to 4, 2, and 3, and from there to 2, 2, 2, and 3. I liked this way of thinking because in a way it made everything potentially understandable. It was satisfying to me that many big, scary numbers could be reduced to a less intimidating combination of 2s, 3s, and other, more manageable primes.

Though I mostly left math behind many years ago (does balancing my checkbook count?), I held onto that idea. After all, the biggest, grisliest problems I encounter in my life are often combinations of things. Insecurities from one area of my life meet up with previous mistakes, concerns for the future, and even maybe a recent bad hair day, and suddenly I’m staring up at one very large, ugly, and complex knot of issues. While it is often tempting to simply turn tail and run from these monster problems, it is also sometimes satisfying to pick up your metaphorical baseball bat and beat the damn thing until your primes start falling out: the real, basic problems. (A therapist, I should note, might take issue with the image of beating one’s problems until their parts fall out, but I believe in reality a therapist does pretty much the same thing—though admittedly with a little more finesse.)

Daniel Jones, editor of the Modern Love section of the New York Times, recently broke love down into its primes. As if I weren't already thoroughly enamored of this man, he also referenced Star Trek in his introductory explanation: “If I were Spock from ‘Star Trek,’ I would explain that human love is a combination of three emotions or impulses: desire, vulnerability and bravery. Desire makes one feel vulnerable, which then requires one to be brave.” (See below for a link to this article.) So there they are: the 2s and 3s of love, albeit with a Vulcan twist. After some thought, I came to the conclusion that even those primes are still a little bulky—and maybe I in my hubris could break them down a little more, or at least define them a little more thoroughly for myself. After all, science didn't stop with Einstein.

Desire I understand. To return to my linguistic roots for a moment, Lord have mercy do I understand desire. It may be a little redundant to break desire down into its primes—I think it’s already pretty primal as is. To make a brief attempt, though, I think desire is pretty much the distance between your lack of an attractive something and the attractive something itself. Raise that distance to the power of pheromones, and God help you.

Vulnerability required a little more thinking from me—I got the sense that there were more moving parts to this one (after all, for me the only moving parts in desire tend to be my falling all over myself and what results when my falling all over myself is just fine with the other person). I believe that everybody has a certain amount of personal armor, in a greater or lesser state of repair, and that there are, by necessity of design, gaps in that armor that we have come to call our weaknesses, or, as a whole, our vulnerability. So exactly what is it that we’re guarding ourselves against? Pain doesn’t seem like an adequate answer; rather than being a prime, that to me looks like an infinity symbol. It’s just too big of a thing to understand. And so, true to form, I gave it a bit of a thwack to see what fell out, and I came up with three things: disappointment, humiliation, and loss.

In a lot of ways, I think that these are the things that go bump in the night when you’re a grownup; they are the things that scare us the most. To frame it conceptually, disappointment is what happens when the distance between your lack and the thing that would fill that lack (desire, see above) becomes too great. The desire snaps and the void across that now unconquerable distance is called disappointment. Humiliation is a subtractive process: you are made smaller by the exact amount that measures how much you care about other people’s opinions. And then, of course, there is loss.

Loss is more than simply an absence. It is a hole in yourself, shaped in the image of the thing that was once there and is now gone—an emptiness that still has the ability to shape you. Loss has mass, it has character. I’ve seen pictures before of trees that grew up around bicycles, bushes that have absorbed chain-link fences. I think loss is like that: we can absorb it into ourselves, but we can’t change it, and it’ll always be there within, foreign and painful.

And so, in the face of vulnerability, the noun that is the state in which we find ourselves because of disappointment, humiliation, and loss, why the hell would you then move to bravery? Is love really worth the physics of vulnerability?

For whatever reason, my immediate answer is yes, though I couldn’t give you a logical reason to save my life. Maybe we’re trained by family, culture, even our own instincts that love, and everything that goes with it, is worth the risk; that the stakes are so high because the prize is so great. And now I come to define bravery: bravery is the mass of your faith that love will be worth it combined with the acknowledgment of your own vulnerability, multiplied by your velocity moving through life. And hell, square it for good measure.

I’ve whipped myself into a linguistic and physics frenzy trying to describe all of this, but maybe it just goes back to primes:

Lay out your 2s and 3s, all of the basic components of exactly who you are: flaws, virtues, sapphires and gum-wrappers. And maybe there’s a person who will look at all the primes and see the product. Suddenly you’ll know in your bones why relativity makes sense, and all at once you’ll be mass and distance and energy and in love.


(For Daniel Jones' brilliant ruminations on the subject, please see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/fashion/14modlove.html?pagewanted=2&sq=modern%20love&st=cse&scp=3)

Friday, February 5, 2010

The Idea of Order and Peter Jennings

I took a course in college on the poetry of Wallace Stevens with a brilliant and eccentric professor (the best kind there is). Occasionally during class, for no apparent reason, he would launch into a completely unprompted tirade against Christmas. The seven or eight members of the class, myself included, would sit and listen, vaguely confused and a little horrified, as our professor would rail on about how the holiday was never as good as it was when you were a child, and after such complete and whole satisfaction in childhood, the dissatisfaction in adulthood was all the more awful. We, being only lately out of our teen years, generally didn’t believe him and would wait for him to get back to Stevens. In the last couple of years, though, I think I’ve begun to see what he meant.

When I was a child, for whatever reason, I developed a very black and white sense of rightness and order in the world. Certain things were supposed to happen in a certain way, and if they did, all was right and good in the universe. (Isn’t it amazing how you can track control issues to an early age?) So then, for Christmas, it was almost as simple as a checklist: tree, presents, family, Eggs Benedict. All present and accounted for? Success!

It was much the same for everyday items as well. I grew up in a remarkably nuclear family: my dad would be home at 6:30 every night for dinner, which was always a meat, a starch, and a vegetable, and all six of us (two parents, three daughters, and the dog) would be at the same table to eat. Dry cleaning on Saturday, church on Sunday, and the Nightly News during the week. A+B+C= stable childhood.

It’s difficult for me to track exactly when these things started to change. Some things were obvious, like when my sisters went away to college and we moved away from my childhood home. Others were more subtle. It’s hard to tell when adult worries started to get in the way of simple, childish satisfaction. This last Christmas I found myself with my head in my hands at the airport about to fly home. Anxieties about sibling tensions, traveling relatives, in-laws, a sister’s wedding plans, and the revival of old hurts and battles nearly made me turn around and head back to my apartment. I couldn’t help but think back to my crazy Stevens professor and started to wonder if he had been right.

Childhood seems to escape slowly, almost like air from a bike tire. It’s easy to qualify that loss in terms of siblings marrying, houses sold, friends made and lost, but I believe the attrition actually comes from many more sources, uncountable small losses that invariably carry you forward into adulthood. I only came to that conclusion the day Peter Jennings died.

On the morning of September 11, I sat on my parents’ bed and watched, sickened, as the towers fell. My father was at work, or rather making his way home from work by then, along with almost every other commuter in San Francisco. My mother had gone to the bank to withdraw cash, not knowing what the wake of the attacks would bring—in retrospect, it seems a little odd, but then, our normal now is having rainbow popsicle flavors determine our likelihood of being killed in an act of terrorism. (Still orange? Damn, I was really hoping for a purple one of these days…) I was alone in the house, trying to wrap my head around it, like trying to fold an origami cocktail napkin around a bowling ball, and looking back at me from the TV, I saw Peter Jennings trying to do the same.

We were an NBC family as I was growing up, and Peter Jennings had announced the news every night in my kitchen before dinner for years. I guess it isn’t all that surprising that I sought comfort in that newscast: if anybody could explain this to me, it would be him. I was almost sixteen at the time, but I hung onto that four-poster bed and his voice like a little kid. I had come to trust him like I trusted Christmas morning or weekday dinner: it would be there, it would make sense, and everything would be okay. Even though that particular morning would never be okay, in a small way for me, Peter Jennings made it a little better because he was on screen and kept talking. And desperate for solace, I kept listening.

Four year later, he died of lung cancer.

Historically and particularly in the last year, celebrity death has become a very strange, publicized phenomenon. Generally, I find sensationalized death unrepentantly tacky. Nevertheless, when Peter Jennings died, I felt that I personally had suffered a kind of loss. He had not only been part of my childhood, but also in a weird way, he had been with me that horrible morning. With his death, my childhood idea of order suffered another inevitable blow.

So what is it that we do on the far side of childhood, having passed through the angsty border territory of adolescence? I for one have slowly let myself trust Brian Williams for my nightly news. I have to laugh at myself when I suffer brief, ridiculous moments of anxiety when he has the night off—such things will happen. It was a valuable revelation that perhaps we don’t find order as adults; we have to make it for ourselves. My childhood stability was so comforting because I was fortunate enough to come into a world where it was already in place. There is good news, though, for adulthood: there can still be dinner, news, dry cleaning, and Christmas trees—I just have to arrange them myself.