“Know who you are at every age”
Midway through Moonstruck, Olympia Dukakis’ character is propositioned by a sex-addicted NYU professor played by the late, great John Mahoney, while her husband is attending the Metropolitan Opera with his mistress.
And what she says to him when he asks her if her house is available for a tryst is indelible:
“No, I think the house is empty. I can't invite you in because I'm married. Because I know who I am.”
And while we will never fully know or understand ourselves, or our world at large, the effort, and what that effort can sometimes surprisingly yield, has its own worth.
I never understood what Maya Angelou meant by naming one of her series of memoirs, “Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now” when I was younger, knowing how much trouble and heartbreak she had bravely faced, but the point is the facing of it and the grace and unexpected knowledge and understanding that can come from that choice.
I happened to receive Courtney Martin’s latest essay in my inbox while starting this one:
The growing edge of agency in midlife - by Courtney Martin
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A lot of what she wrote in this essay resonates, but the concept of “inscendence,” while a new one to me, really grabbed my attention. Robert McFarlane describes it thus: “Where transcendence is the impulse to rise above the world and its cares—the weight of the body, say or the burden of mortality—inscendence is the impulse to climb into it, to fathom its depths and delve into its core.”
This is the opposite impulse of the furnishing of whatever holes we find ourselves in, cautioned against by Anne Lamott, because this impulse wants to get to the bottom of things: to self-reflect honestly, to recognize the limits of our individual embodiments, and then continue to try and be as open and kind as humanly possible.
2.
I walked by this BMW, with its one letter “M” license plate flex, on the street about a week ago, and it felt kind of like a dispatch from a parallel unlived life.
Given the degree to which I know myself now, I looked at it and thought of when Dolly Parton got her mother a fur coat when she first started making serious money, and her mother asked her where she thought she was going to wear it: “a cockfight?”
I’ve had one great car in my life, a glorious blue, boxy Volvo 240 on long-term loan from a College friend, and my friend’s grandmother, to whose address the car was registered, used to pay my parking tickets!
There are car people, and non-car people. I am a person who can drive a car if genuinely necessary, but I have no desire to be yolked to an ever-rusting moving money pit that needs to be constantly parked.
Additionally, I spun out across four lanes of traffic on Route 93 and survived unscathed in 1999, when I swerved to avoid a huge piece of roof snow and ice coming towards my windshield, so the bloom was really off the rose where driving was concerned after that.
I had a free parking space in a Harvard Square garage as a job perk for a year or so in my early twenties, where I could park my loaner Volvo. That was as good as “car life” was going to get for me, and while I certainly enjoyed that pinnacle of human experience, it was also sufficient unto itself.
3.
In a country descended from evangelists and proselytizers of many stripes, the proscriptive urge is strong in us, and there is a degree to which what we personally choose can seem like a judgement of others.
I’ve never wanted to be in a position to need a car, I’ve never wanted children, and I’m fairly happy renting. A greater amount of financial security at almost fifty would be nice, but we’ve survived this far, and being able to take solace in small victories, small pleasures and not be too attached in general has been mostly good for me, because, after all, I experienced quite a cushy existence as a child, without ever needing to consider how all those comforts were paid for, and that was sufficient to itself too.
My mother used to have a quote on the fridge about simple living and the desire to “have a bed, a table and four chairs…” that resonated strongly with me. She got to enjoy, and also manage the pitfalls, of two large houses at one point, and I like to think S. and I are living her fantasy of escaping all that fraught space, in our one-bedroom, one table and four Dining Chair apartment.
4.
This is a terrible time to be a person of conscience. That beautiful tender openness towards the world S. and I have always shared (in spite of how life can go sideways) is an outstanding thing where encountering Rottweiler puppies, beautiful sunrises and great music is concerned, but becomes a major sanity liability when the worst people imaginable are driving the bus.
Nonetheless, even difficult times are not all one note. I’ve protested, but we’ve also seen a ton of live music, attended every festival imaginable, and we’re both getting good creative work done.
When I was really in a hole after the election, I saw a social media post from a random woman who posted simply “I’m still making bread,” with a beautiful homemade loaf pictured below.
We can’t afford to let one mediocre man color our whole existence, and we have to keep on our journey.