Women: Weak Neither in Mind Nor Body

Earlier yesterday evening, a friend and I were discussing the unique challenges our daughters faced as they carved out careers for themselves in what, despite great progress, continues to be a man’s world.  We concluded that they were nevertheless lucky to have so many opportunities for achievement and accomplishment as well as the freedom to exercise agency over their fate, something denied to women in the 19^th century. The discussion was reinforced by my examination of yet another work of literary fiction. This time it was an analysis of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by 19^th century writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, leading to another wakeful early morning, (partially fueled by an overload of caffeine).

The narrator in Gilman’s story is Jane, a young woman suffering from postpartum depression. She and her husband John, a physician, are staying in a mansion for the summer as she recovers. John is a practical man who is unconcerned with  his wife’s emotional sensibilities and does not believe that she has an actual illness. Jane battles against the prevailing medical opinion which theorizes that she suffers from a tendency towards hysteria.  Her husband says that the best treatment for Jane’s anxiety is confinement in the nursery of the house, which is decorated with yellow wallpaper. Jane disagrees, believing that she needs activity, both mental and physical, to get better but her husband prevents her from any kind of work or socializing, believing the excitement will be too much for her delicate state of mind. She thinks the prescribed treatment is making her sicker, but her husband ignores her, supposedly out of love and the patronizing view that he knows what’s best for her.

The narrator keeps a journal of her thoughts, which she hides from her husband. The suppression of her needs and her will, leads Jane to slowly lose her mind. The yellow wallpaper serves as a trigger for her delusions but her husband refuses to remove it, saying that she should have the willpower to get over her apprehension.  Jane begins to see women “creeping around” behind the wallpaper and searches for a way to free them. Her exclamation at the end of the story that she has “got out at last” would have a very different connotation to modern audiences, but it symbolizes the narrator’s feeling of liberation from her repressive confinement. Although she is believed to be weak and unstable, it is Jane’s husband who faints in shock at the effects of his faulty diagnosis of Jane’s condition at the end of the story which begs the question of who the weaker sex really is.

Gilman’s story is a commentary both on the state of marriage and the perception of mental illness at the time. Psychiatry was acknowledged as a legitimate medical specialty in the early 1800s, but treatment options for the mentally ill were few, harsh and futile. There were no medications for the management of mental illness and no understanding that some illnesses might be linked to biological causes. The focus was largely on patients like Jane, who were considered to be suffering from a nervous temperament. Gilman herself suffered from postpartum depression after her daughter was born. She was subjected to a rest cure, involving long periods of bed rest and enforced inactivity under the care of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, so the fictional narrative draws from the author’s personal experience.  In 2005, Brooke Shields and Tom Cruise engaged in a widely publicized feud when he criticized her for taking antidepressants after the birth of her daughter, calling it irresponsible. Cruise was dismissive of Shields’s struggle with postpartum depression, claiming that “there was no such thing as chemical imbalances that need to be corrected with drugs, and that depression could be treated with exercise and vitamins.”  As a dedicated Scientologist, Cruise subscribed to its belief that psychiatry, which uses medication to treat mental illness, was not a legitimate field of medicine but merely pseudoscience.

The stigma associated with mental illness has largely disappeared as our understanding of its causes and effects have expanded. Psychiatry has made great strides towards successful diagnosis of various types of mental illness, and while treatment options have improved, there is still a lot that is unknown about side effects and the consequences of drug interactions in individual patients. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) report that even today 11 to 20% of new mothers like Jane suffer from postpartum depression, which continues to be challenging to treat. 

Gilman’s story is also representative of the generally patronizing and patriarchal attitude of 19^th century society towards women. At the beginning of the story, when Jane expresses her reservations about the home they are staying in for the summer, she says “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.”  He treats her not as a grown woman, but a child, calling her “little girl” and his “blessed little goose.”  Men and women were not equal partners and women were expected to subject their individual desires and ambitions to the spheres of marriage and motherhood.

Parenthetically, the characterization of women as irrational and ruled by their unstable emotions, also emerges in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle", another 19^th century tale. Dame Van Winkle and her daughter have no role in the story except through Irving’s narrative filter. They are on opposite poles of the spectrum, representing what society considered both accepted and aberrant behavior for women.  Dame Van Winkle is characterized as a shrew who is constantly finding fault with her husband. He is a mild mannered feckless man who is always out chatting with the neighbors and helping everyone else with their work while his own home and family are neglected. When he returns from his 20 year long “nap” his daughter takes him in and cares for him, while shouldering the responsibilities of her home and family. “Rip Van Winkle” highlighted the prevailing belief of the time that women who actively defied men or questioned their actions or judgment were abnormal and a danger to the stability of the community.

Gilman advocated economic independence as a way to equalize the disparity in power between the sexes. Ironically, her solution, radical for its time, creates a different problem for the modern woman.  As increasing numbers of women enter the workforce, they are preoccupied not with the lack of mental stimulation, but with balancing the competing demands of work and family. Except in rare cases, even when they have supportive spouses, the bulk of the responsibility for running the household and caring for the children still falls on the women. 

The feeling that if they concentrate on succeeding in their careers they are somehow failing their families, causes many women to feel guilty and anxious, creating a new form of mental disturbance. In addition to their inner conflict, they are also often criticized, mostly by other women, either for choosing a full time career or for being stay at home wives and mothers. In stories like “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman’s ideas were radical for their time in advocating a more egalitarian role for women. However, despite more resources and greater knowledge, we have yet to find a workable solution to the problem of gender inequality.

Faith and Surrender

In an earlier post, I wrote about the song Hallelujah and analyzed it in the context of a love story. As I write this, it’s 3 in the morning and most of the rest of the world is dark, cold and asleep. It’s the perfect setting to contemplate another song that has influenced me.  It is only now, as I have begun to undertake the demanding and painful journey to connect to the Soul within me that the significance of the words has begun to “dawn” on me, figuratively speaking. The song is “Only Hope” from the 2002 movie “A Walk to Remember” based on the book by Nicholas Sparks.  It is sung by Mandy Moore, whom audiences will recognize as the mother in the NBC series “This is Us.” In the movie, Moore plays a teenage girl battling leukemia. She chooses to stay in the background and presents herself as drab and subdued, so she is an outsider to her peers.  She sings the song to the male lead as they are performing in the school play, causing him to see her in a different light and fall in love with her.Jon Foreman of Switchfoot wrote the lyrics, which Wikipedia claims is a Christian-themed song. For those who have not been introduced to the belief systems of any other religion, it is a valid claim. 

As part of my spiritual searching, I have committed to reading and copying the verses of the Bhagavad Gita by hand. The Gita is part of the Mahabharata, one of the seminal epics of Hinduism, the religion I was raised in.  There are 700 verses, so it will take a while to write them all down. In a Tedx talk at the University of Nevada in February of 2016, Foreman says, “the creator and composer of time and space” has given each of us a unique song to sing. Bhagavad Gita means The Song of the Lord and to me, that creator is Krishna.  Through the Gita, He reveals the power and mysteries of the Universe “the song of the stars, of [His] galaxy dancing and laughing and laughing again” to the dejected and despairing warrior Arjuna, who symbolizes humanity and the struggle for an end to suffering.

Only Hope begins with the words, “There's a song that's inside of my soul/It's the one that I've tried to write over and over again/I'm awake in the infinite cold/But you sing to me over and over and over again.” The “infinite cold” is the Universe in which the seeker, the individual soul, feels separated from the Supreme Soul and seeks comfort and solace, which the Lord gives in the Gita. The song referenced in the lyrics is the soul’s desire for liberation, its yearning to be joined with the Supreme. Past attempts have been unsuccessful because the singer has been wrapped up in an identification with the body and the mind, which have limited the capacity for full awareness.

Foreman talks about the inner melody inside each individual that was “pure, honest and free” during childhood but over the course of time that purity has become obscured by feelings of guilt, shame and inadequacy. The melody is a metaphor for the soul that is struggling to liberate itself and be free once again. Foreman talks of being silent and still in the present, in order to be aware of all the thoughts, feelings and sensations that can be experienced at that moment, which is the objective of meditation. As he observes, “There is a void in the symphony of life when you are silent. The pain, the anger, the frustration, the dissonance” do not affect us in those moments. Instead, we feel peace and are able to hear that inner melody once again.

Krishna asks Arjuna to surrender, not to him personally, but “to the primordial and mysterious energy that permeates the cosmos.”( http://www.osho.com/iosho/library/read-book/online-library-krishna-arjuna-surrender-6b7f1d49-4cb?p=31b2580e549cd2d89745f659b7fb6644). The lyrics of “Only Hope” and the song’s title symbolize the singer’s decision to surrender in complete faith, trusting in that which cannot be seen. In that spirit of surrender, the singer resolves, “I give you my destiny/I'm giving you all of me/I want your symphony/Singing in all that I am.” The lyrics continue, “When it feels like my dreams are so far/Sing to me of the plans that you have for me over again.” 

God, or the Universal energy has a plan for everyone and it is only in that state of surrender can we begin to comprehend what that plan is. It is a rephrasing of the mandate in the Gita to live in the present, to accept the present situation and not to worry about the future outcome, “the fruits of action.” This in turn will open a pathway for the energy of the cosmos to merge with the individual soul. It requires dedicated and continuous effort over a lifetime to be open to and aware of the power of the Lord’s song, but He exhorts us to through Arjuna to have courage, or as Foreman says, “be brave and sing the truth, one note at a time.”

The Enduring Appeal of the Romantic Musical

One of my students was recently asked to analyze the longstanding popular appeal of Les Misérables. As I helped with the research, I began to notice some of the thematic parallels to Wicked. To begin with both are adapted from novels, the former by Victor Hugo and the later by Gregory Maguire.  They are also both influenced by historical events. The musicals are not only noteworthy for their theatricality: the costumes, the songs, the scenery, but also for the way in which they portray issues that are an integral part of human interaction and relationships. There is corruption, struggles against authority, the pain of unrealized love, friendship, sacrifice, compassion, despair, hope, determination and faith.

Les Misérables first opened on Broadway in 1987. Theatergoers assume that the bloody French Revolution of 1789 is the setting for Les Misérables, but it is actually the July Revolution, which occurs nearly 50 years later, in 1830. General Jean Maximilien Lamarque was a general in Napoleon’s army and an opponent of the restoration of the monarchy under the House of Bourbon (to which Louis XVIII and Charles X, the younger brothers of the guillotined Louis XVI belonged) and the House of Orleans, to which Louis Phillippe, a cousin of the Bourbons and the king in 1830, belonged. Lamarque was sympathetic to the plight of the poor and his impending death threatened to upset the progress they had achieved under him, causing small groups of supporters of the republic to rise in rebellion in Paris. As in the musical, the rebellion was quickly and brutally put down, with heavy casualties.  Wicked opened on Broadway in 2003, six months after President George W. Bush authorized Operation Iraqi Freedom to overthrow Saddam Hussein and his oppressive regime in Iraq.

In the adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel, Eponine and Cosette have both had lives marked by poverty and hardship. In the beginning, Eponine is the selfish privileged child of the socially opportunistic Thenardiers, who appropriate the money that Cosette's mother has paid them for her care for themselves. Eventually, the family ends up living on the street, resorting to petty crime and conning the unsuspecting. Cosette’s origins are not highlighted in the musical but she is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy but feckless student and Fantine, a naïve young orphan from the working classes whom he seduces and later abandons, the consequence of a power imbalance against which Fantine has no recourse. Cosette is later adopted and her life from then on is one of comfort and security. She gets a fairytale ending while Eponine’s life takes a downward turn.  

The personality of the two male love interests are at first a study in contrasts. In Les Misérables, former law student  Marius is intense and idealistic; in Wicked Fiyero appears entitled, vain and superficial. He just wants to have a good time, is dismissive of anything related to academia and tries to motivate others to follow his example. Both come from socially prominent families. Marius’ grandfather is a wealthy royalist and Fiyero is the Prince of the Winkies. Both young men become champions of the rights of the dispossessed, the most accurate translation for the French term misérable.  Marius and his friends protest a return to a royalist government that has violated the rights of the common people. Fiyero helps Elphaba to free a lion cub after he sees her outrage at the violation of the animals’ rights in Oz.

The love triangle in both musicals especially resonates with a female audience. In some stage versions, Cosette is a fair skinned blonde while Eponine is dark haired actresses with dusky skin, in a subtle nod to the contrast between innocence and awareness. Cosette is portrayed as just another pretty face without the maturity or experience with the realities of life that make for character depth. Marius has known Eponine longer and is familiar with her character, but he predictably makes the conventional choice by falling in love with Cosette. Eponine's hard edges and street savvy persona have been watered down in the musical, making it difficult to dislike her even though she has been mean to Cosette as a child, because many women can sympathize with her pain in loving someone out of your league who doesn’t love you back.  

The situation is reversed in Wicked. In the beginning, Glinda, blonde, pretty, wealthy and popular and Fiyero are a couple, sharing many of the same traits, while Elphaba, the dark haired, green skinned outcome of a liaison between the wife of the mayor of Munchkinland and an itinerant peddler is the outsider. She thinks Fiyero will never be able to see beyond the surface but he does and ends up choosing her and committing to her goals, which shows how he has grown as a character. Love inspires his commitment. Marius takes the opposite path. He is committed to his goals but his love is shallow until his experiences change him, maturing his understanding of what it is to really love.

Different forms of love motivate the sacrifices that are made in both stories. Jean Valjean sacrifices his freedom to keep his sister’s family from starving. Fantine sacrifices her well being for that of her daughter. Elphaba sacrifices her public reputation in order to save the animals from abuse and Fiyero from dying. Eponine gives her life to save Marius. Glinda sacrifices her ambition to be a witch.

What distinctively differentiates Wicked from Les Misérables is that Cosette and Eponine have known each other as children but they never reconcile their differences to become friends as adults.  Love for the same man also gets in the way. Eponine’s actions are not fueled by her concern for Cosette’s welfare, but by her love for Marius. In contrast, although at first, they actively dislike each other when they first meet, the friendship between Glinda and Elphaba forms the backbone of the story and becomes a relationship that is even stronger than their romantic rivalry. As Scarlett Harris writes in her November 4, 2014 article on Junkee. com (http://junkee.com/the-musical-wicked-is-as-much-about-feminism-as-it-is-about-witches/44428), “Where many musicals position romantic relationships as the be all and end all of companionship, Elphaba and Glinda’s alliance is most important: they complement each other’s attributes and shortcomings, while supporting the other’s magical and political goals.” Most importantly, she says of the women's relationship with Fiyero, “each witch is willing to give him up to spare their friendship.”

Perhaps, as other critics have suggested, it is a reflection of the times during which the stories were set. Women had no identity except as wives and mothers during the time of Les Misérables so their only form of validation and acceptance was through the men in their lives, which is why their roles are secondary to that of the men in the musical. It is just the opposite in Wicked: the women and their actions drive the story while the male roles are peripheral. The women make their own choices, whether for love and marriage or individual development, and the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. What unifies both musicals is hope, the hope for a better, brighter and happier future, a common dream for audiences everywhere.

America Needs More Gentleman...And Ladies, Too

In the Op Ed section of this Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan described the declining nature of the interaction between men and women as she analyzes the sexual harassment charges against Aziz Ansari. Although she does not specifically identify him by name, it is pretty clear whom she is referring to. While as a woman, the story is in itself disheartening, as a side note, I am particularly saddened because it paints one of my countrymen in a less than favorable light after we have spent decades striving for respect and recognition in a foreign country.   

Noonan says that the country is suffering from the fact that there are not enough men behaving like gentlemen. Ansari was “boorish, a slob and wished to use the woman (who is given the pseudonym Grace) sexually and didn’t understand her reservations.” She uses the example of the interaction between Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story” in which Stewart refuses to press his advantage because Hepburn was under the influence and could not give clear consent. But in the case of Ansari and his unnamed accuser, there was fault on both sides. The fact that some men do not act like gentleman does not completely exonerate women who fail to respect themselves enough to stick to their standards.

An article by Jaclyn Friedman, self -professed sexual consent educator, on Vox.com blames Ansari for ignoring Grace’s boundaries.  Yes, Grace deserved to be treated with the utmost respect as all women and people in general do, but respect is earned, not automatic, and Babe.net gives a spotlight only to her version of events to show that she was sexually harassed. Reading her account on the website, it seems as though Grace did not clearly enforce her boundaries from the beginning and Ansari was acting on the ambiguity she was projecting. He was neither naïve nor unsophisticated about dating or relationships, so he deserves to be believed when he said, “It was true that everything did seem okay to me, so when I heard that it was not the case for her, I was surprised and concerned.”

Caitlin Flanagan’s article in The Atlantic  provides a more detailed account of the incident. According to Flanagan’s article, it was Grace who was the initiator, ignoring her date and pursuing Ansari at a party in Los Angeles, while he continued to ignore her. She was looking for attention from Ansari and her actions were engineered with that aim in mind. Flanagan suggests that alcohol was a contributing factor to the ambiguity, lowering the inhibitions of both parties, a fact which Noonan leaves out of her analysis. As Grace herself says of that first meeting when she saw Ansari, “I stood up, and I’m like tipsy at this point and feeling really confident.”

She continued to flirt with Ansari by text, later accepting his invitation for a date and agreeing to meet him at his apartment when they returned to New York. She returned willingly to his apartment after dinner, so I find it difficult to believe that she had no idea what might possibly occur after that. Ansari and the young woman engaged in mutual acts of a sexual nature, just short of actual intercourse, but throughout Grace never expressed any sort of strong objection, leading him to believe it and any further activity was consensual. Flanagan sees this episode and others like it as indicative of the fact that modern women, for all their progress in the classroom, the athletic field and the workplace, lack the strength of women of previous generations in being able to enforce their boundaries. When Ansari implied that he wanted to have sex with her shortly after they arrived at his apartment, by saying he was going to get a condom, that would have been the ideal time for Grace to have expressed her objections if that was not something she wanted to do. Instead, she says, “I said something like, ‘Whoa, let’s relax for a sec, let’s chill.”- a very different response from just saying No! 

Noonan seems to sympathize with Grace against her detractors, who say she constructed her story to characterize herself as a helpless victim when she was anything but, because she wanted to be identified as a member of the #MeToo movement.  Natasha Lennard of The Intercept criticizes those who condemn Grace for not just walking out when she felt uncomfortable and violated. She points to the words of Halima Mansoor, a journalist, who writes, "Privilege blinds people who have it to assume everyone else has the same power and therefore should react how they might.” Lennard uses the letter written by Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, a national organization of 70,000 female farmworkers to support her contention that all victims of sexual harassment lack empowerment. 

That contention has validity when there is a distinct power imbalance as between employer and employee, teacher and student, priest and parishioner, therapist and patient, etc. But Grace exercised her free will (muted perhaps by alcohol) long before the date to contact Ansari, flirt with him, accept his invitation to go back to his apartment and to engage in some acts of a sexual nature with him. She never claimed that Ansari used any type of force or intimidation to get her to engage in such activity, only that he ignored the nonverbal cues that she was uncomfortable. On Mansoor's Twitter feed, she says, "Many people I've spoken to -- men and women -- will tell you sometimes it is very difficult to hit stop or say 'No' in a sexual encounter where the other person isn't listening and is rushing so much that there is no space to think." Grace was aware that Ansari was rushing her at the restaurant and that should have made her stop and think for a moment about why he was in such a hurry. If she felt things were really getting out of hand, she could have given him a verbal indication that she did not want to continue and left at that point. She also had a cellphone with her to call for help if necessary and a way of leaving the situation at any time. That hardly qualifies her as a powerless victim in the same category as the farmworkers that Lennard references.

As the evening wore on and the suggestions of activities became less palatable, she accused Ansari of being the same as all the other guys. Flanagan believes that the young woman had been familiar with this type of interaction before and had behaved in a similar manner on previous occasions. 

Noonan speaks at length in her article about what it takes to be a gentleman. She says that she was told once by a man that “it’s hard to be a gentleman when fewer of the women around you seem interested in being ladies.” That’s a pretty broad generalization about women. There are two misconceptions in this argument. First, the man is assuming that fewer women are interested in being ladies perhaps because of the small segment  of the female population he has been exposed to. Maybe it’s just that he is choosing to associate himself with the wrong type of women or meeting them in the wrong environment. The women, conversely, have been indoctrinated to believe that in order to get a man to notice them they must present themselves in a sexually attractive light and behave in a way that attracts the man’s attention or risk being overlooked. So it’s something of a Catch 22. 

Noonan says that is when the men should try harder and “step up your gentleman game.” 

The second misconception is the flip side of the dilemma of being a gentleman. In her article, Noonan says, “we are all here to teach and inspire” but given the changed social environment of modern times, many women may not recognize that the man’s reserve and courteous behavior is actually a mark of respect for her, so they will label him as dull and boring and ignore him in favor of a man who is more aggressive and exciting, one who may ultimately end up victimizing them, thus creating the self-fulfilling prophecy that all men are pigs.

Grace subsequently responded to a text that Ansari sent her the night after the date. She begins by acknowledging that she enjoyed meeting him and then calls him out on his behavior, which to me is sending out mixed signals. He could have denied her feelings or blamed her, but he sincerely apologized for his role in the misunderstanding, which is trait #12 in the Gentleman’s Journal's "List of 20 things that make a man a gentleman" which Noonan refers to in her article as a guideline for appropriate male behavior. 

As more details emerge about the story, they depict the young woman as a calculating misandrist, searching for her 15 minutes of fame. When closely scrutinized, Grace’s version of events is vaguely reminiscent of the story of the boy who cried wolf. It is evidence that a movement that began with the highest of intentions, providing public support for victims of sexual harassment and censure and punishment for their victimizers, has become a revolution that has gotten out of control, destroying both the guilty and the innocent in its wake and leaving men and women even more embittered with each other as a result.

The Awakening Soul

I’ve been trying to meditate sporadically for several years, having heard about its benefits for the mind and body but have been unable to persist in the practice for an extended period of time. I do a lot of introspection throughout the course of the day, some of it accompanied by my favorite tunes on my playlist, which I optimistically considered a form of audio meditation.  I had made no resolutions for the new year, but I found myself increasingly unsatisfied with the conditions of my life and knew I had to make a change if I was ever to achieve the peace and serenity I craved.

I had the greatest success at sustaining meditative focus many years ago listening to a tape of a guided meditation aimed specifically for pregnant woman while I was pregnant with my daughter. In my second trimester I was hit with a serious injury that left me temporarily disabled so I was in essence a captive audience during this time.  I also developed a bad cough that persisted for a few months, despite all attempts at a remedy. Strangely enough while I was listening to the meditation tapes, the cough disappeared.  Over the years, I have tried other types of guided meditation but had been unsuccessful in creating a sustained habit. This time was different because for the first time, I wanted to do this on my own, and not because anyone else tried to convince me that it would be beneficial for me.

I never really liked getting up early in the morning, although I had done it more or less automatically for years but I committed myself to one session early in the morning and a second session just before I went to sleep at night. I planned to do a half hour session  each time but initially thought that it would be too uncomfortable for me to sit that long, and that like any other type of exercise routine, I would have to build up to it slowly. I was immediately disabused of that notion by my cousin, who had been meditating for several years and told me that I couldn’t just dip my toes in the shallow end but had to jump right in and swim, metaphorically speaking.

My introduction to this new methodology was done under his instruction. The first session involved nothing more than sitting still and quietly in the dark, observing my breathing for 15 minutes and noticing the sensations in my body. In his blog on mindful meditation, Ed Halliwell says that the purpose of meditation is to stay rooted in the present moment and when mindfulness becomes a goal, meditation becomes more difficult because it creates a gap between the present and the future.  When mindfulness becomes an intention, on the other hand, “there is no required result—we are simply connecting to our chosen course.” During the session, I felt a growing sensation of heat near the area of my heart. and the only thing that relieved the discomfort was to keep focused on my breathing. As I continued on my own over the next few days, I could see thoughts racing across my mind, like sentences on a blank screen. The heat was replaced by either numbness or tingling in my hands and arms, a sign, I was told, of energy shifting in the body.

The written thoughts were soon replaced by voices. I could name them as I heard them: Miss Envy, Madame Insecurity, Mr. Angry Bastard, the seductive Red Lotus, the Fearful Girl, the Evaluator, the Critic. I could even thank them for the questions that they raised. The fact that I knew they were there and could hear what they were saying and hear the voice that responded was a sign that I could separate my thoughts from my awareness. It seems completely bizarre and it was the kind of behavior that used to get people locked up in an asylum in the 19th century and placed on strong medication today. But for the first time I can begin to comprehend what it must be like to feel that you have absolutely no control over your thoughts and the devastating effect it can have on your emotions and behavior if you have no healthy way of coping with them. Every time I found myself drawn into the conversations these voices were having inside my head, I had to make a conscious effort to shift my focus back to my breathing and resist identifying myself with what those voices were telling me. 

After any injury, the body needs time to heal and regenerate. Meditation is said to be helpful in unlocking the blocked energy in the body so that it is free to move and release the toxic buildup of thoughts and emotions that cause physical illness, much like the blood carries toxic substances away from the body’s organs to be released to the outside environment.  Ironically enough, I started this process a few weeks after being once again plagued by a chronic cough, the symptom of a widespread epidemic of flu. I tried the usual remedies: lozenges, cough drops, heated water and honey, but nothing seemed to work. Yet when I come out of a session of meditation, I notice that the cough seems to have disappeared. Coincidence or the heretofore untapped power of mindful meditation?  I’ll have to exercise patience, that other quality that I have been wrestling with, to find out.

I am not yet at the stage where I am completely immersed in meditation to the point of being unaware of the passage of time or of the distraction of outside stimuli. I confess that I still tend to wait for the timer to go off ending a session, so I know I still have a lot of work ahead of me. But I've been told the rewards of mindful meditation are indescribable and I am excited to find out what is in store ahead, just given the tiny glimpse I have had in the short time since I have started.

The Little Prince: A Lesson In Patience

I recently read an anthology by Will Schwalbe called Books for Living, which he describes as a manifesto for readers. It is a compilation of  lessons from variousbooks that he had read, which help him deal with the challenges of modern life and some of the issues that frustrate or puzzle him. One of the stories in the anthology was The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Schwalbe titled the chapter containing the story “Finding Friends” but I think it would have been much more appropriate as a lesson on patience. The narrator is, like Saint-Exupery, a pilot. He meets the title character, who is an alien from another planet, in the desert where the narrator's plane has crashed. He needs to fix the engine soon or he will die of dehydration. 

The prince is traveling around the earth when he meets a fox who asks the prince to tame him. The prince at first refuses, saying that he has many things to learn, to which the fox responds “The only things you learn are the things you tame.” 

The fox tells the prince how to do this, saying that he must sit at a distance, not say anything and simply let the fox observe him. Over time, the prince will be able to sit closer as the fox learns to trust him. Patience is needed in many areas in life and is an essential requirement to learning any skill. Finding friends may not be difficult but maintaining friendships, or building relationships of any kind requires infinite patience. The fox tells the prince that language is the source of misunderstandings. In the digital age, we have become accustomed to an immediate response to our texts, calls and emails and when it doesn’t arrive, we become agitated and impatient, a phenomenon writer Stephen Miller classifies as communication anxiety. As anxiety increases, it leads us to be reactive.  Out of our fear of being ignored or taken for granted, we may speak impulsively and end up creating barriers instead of bridges.It may take years to build a friendship and just one ill-considered word to destroy it completely. 

The people we encounter in our daily lives teach us important lessons as well. I found and read this anthology shortly before receiving a phone call from a friend whom I hadn't heard from in a long time. We had known each other since childhood and she had always been an inconsistent communicator so I learned to accept that it was just a part of her personality. I assumed that maintaining a friendship required frequent communication especially when we were not able to see each other in person so I was usually the one who made the effort to keep in touch. When we did meet or talk, we were easily able to re-connect and had lengthy conversations. However, as the years passed, the communication became more sporadic. I tried reaching out several times but never got a call back, so I assumed that I must have said or done something that offended her.  My sense of insecurity caused me to feel hurt and rejected so I distanced myself and eventually stopped calling. Her recent phone call was to let me know that she had been dealing with some difficult personal issues that had consumed her focus, leaving little room for anything else. 

She asked me to be patient and not to give up on her because she relied on my support and advice to help her stay balanced. In her words I found the echo of the lesson in Saint-Exupery’s story. Perhaps the reason I was led to forming this friendship was to test my patience, a quality that I always assumed I had in abundance. Understanding this, I realized that I could afford to wait for her to get in touch, as there was nothing I really needed from her in a tangible sense. I was not sacrificing anything when she didn’t respond and it only made each conversation more rewarding when it did occur. In the words of French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Tiehard du Chardin, “it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability-And that it may take a very long time.. “ Having patience when things didn’t go my way would help me progress on the path of my personal and spiritual journey, where I was bound to encounter bigger and more difficult challenges. Learning to exercise this quality was a way of building the strength I would need to face them.

What's so odd about odd numbers?

Hordes of anxious high school students are anxiously awaiting or have already gotten confirmation of acceptance from one or more of the colleges to which they have applied earlier in the fall. It is the annual culmination of a long and arduous process, one component of which are the personal statement and supplemental essays. Each university has a standard set of writing prompts ostensibly aimed at assessing the applicants’ writing and communication skills. Most of the essential information about the student's academic aptitude and personality has already been culled from transcripts, test scores and teacher recommendations.

College is not strictly necessary for everyone, except for those who seek to pursue a career in a field requiring a specialized set of skills such as medicine, engineering, accounting or law for instance. Neither Abraham Lincoln nor Bill Gates needed a college education to do what they have done. Edgar Allen Poe dropped out of the University of Virginia, yet he is one of the most acclaimed writers of 19th century America. Knowledge is easily available through so many mediums today and an inquisitive mind has more than one way to quench that thirst. 

 There is a very sophisticated methodology at work behind the type of essay questions students are required to answer. Some attributes such as intelligence, athletic ability, musical talent, or leadership ability are innate and others have been honed with training and practice. Students claim to know what they want from a college but rarely do they know themselves well.  The next four years of the students’ collegiate lives will be a journey in maturity, discovery and self-examination which can challenge many of their preconceived assumptions. Beyond these qualities, the way these students learn to look at life and what they think about themselves and their role in the world will shape their perception of the world and influence their interaction with it in the future. What admissions officers really want to know is “what kind of person are you and how can you make the world, whether a university campus or the larger society more meaningful?”  In a way, the prompts are a variant of John F. Kennedy’s adjuration to “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

The University of Chicago is legendary for its rather eccentric prompts that, at first glance, don’t seem to follow any logical guidelines.One of my students told me about this question, "What's so odd about odd numbers?" which was first introduced in 2009, so I decided to take a stab at answering it from the vantage point of my years of experience in the outside world.

One of the earliest mathematical concepts taught in school after counting and adding is the concept of odd numbers. They are the foundation for other topics like division, and prime numbers. So what is it that makes odd numbers odd? Perhaps it is that they cannot be easily pigeonholed into one category. The mathematical definition of an odd number is a number that is not evenly divisible by 2. An odd number is an integer as well as a natural number but it is also a prime number. An odd number is missing a counterpart that allows it to be evenly divided.  If an odd number is divided by 2, it results in a fraction, a type of number that is less than whole.  This specific property means that even numbers are easier to manipulate mathematically because we are used to balance and symmetry. As a society, we value wholeness over fragmentation.This concept of balance is central to an understanding of “oddness.”  Two odd numbers added together always equal an even number, which is balanced because it has equal parts of the same number in it. On the outside, the human body is symmetrically divided into two parts with two eyes, two ears, two hands, two arms, two legs, one on each side. Riding a bicycle requires a good sense of balance. Riding a unicycle requires good balance but takes more effort to achieve, because the rider's weight is unevenly distributed on one wheel. We are used to seeing bicycles in our daily lives but unicycles only as a form of entertainment at the circus, probably because they look odd.

The common definition of odd is “different from what is usual or expected; strange.”  To be odd is to have something essential missing. We seem to have a morbid fear of oddness because it is considered a negative quality and is interpreted to mean that there is something lacking that makes a person or thing unacceptable or unwelcome.  Informal British English includes terms such as “an odd sort” or “odd duck” or “odd man out” to refer to a person or thing differing from all other members of a particular group or set in some way.

In a June 11, 2015 article in the online magazine “Frontiers in Psychology”, researchers James Wilkie and Galen Bodenhausen postulated that objects, actions and concepts can even have gender associations and further found that such associations profoundly influenced people’s perceptions and decision-making processes. In a 2012 experiment they conducted, “participants rated the concept of “even numbers” as relatively feminine and the concept of “odd numbers” as relatively masculine. Further, they found that when odd numbers were arbitrarily paired with gender-ambiguous stimuli (baby faces or foreign names), the stimuli were rated as more likely to be male, yet when even numbers accompanied the same stimuli, they were more likely to be seen as female.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4462645/ 

A 1994 study by Eagly and Mladinic referenced in the same article found that qualities that were generally perceived as feminine were associated with greater likability. Therefore, since odd numbers were considered “masculine” they tended to be looked on less favorably than even numbers.

Because “odd” stands out, it seems to require something else that earns societal acceptance or approval. The late singer David Bowie was known for being a highly gifted individual. In his early years, he was also known as someone who was prone to get into a lot of fights, stemming perhaps from undiagnosed high anxiety. Today, educators would consider him twice exceptional both for his musical genius as well as his personality deficits. Growing up, however, he would have been considered “odd” for his inability to conform to societal expectations. Jeremy Lin, currently point guard for the Charlotte Hornets, parlayed his above average height into an education at Harvard and a reputation for being one of the few Asian Americans to play in the NBA. But in the Asian culture, his height made him an oddity. 

Symmetry and beauty are often associated together. The Storm Modeling agency has represented many conventional beauties such as Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss and Behati Prinsloo, all of whom have very symmetrical features. Women plagued by insecurities about their physical appearance can be inspired by British model Moffy.  She first appeared on the cover of Pop magazine in the summer of 2013. Although she has many of the features that are conventionally pleasing for a successful career in the fashion industry, Moffy is noticeably cross eyed. However, that has not stopped her from being one of the new young faces of the Storm Agency.

Almost every society values uniformity and conformity so we don’t know how to deal with things that deviate from our comfort zone. However, what is familiar can also quickly become uninteresting and be easily ignored because of that very conformity. Evenness could not exist without oddness. That which is unusual or falls outside the norm requires more work to understand and appreciate so it is not as easily dismissed.  A 2000 article in the European Review by I.C. McManus, entitled “Symmetry and asymmetry in aesthetics and the arts” https://www.ucl.ac.uk/medical-education/reprints/2005-EuropeanReview-Symmetry_Asymmetry.pdf contrasts symmetry and asymmetry as “a struggle between two opponents of equal power, the formless chaos, on which we impose our ideas, and the all too formed monotony, which we brighten up by new accents.”  So being “odd” would actually seem to be a desirable attribute because it forces a second look at something which would otherwise be overlooked and also serves as an inspiration, compelling us to envision our world in innovative and exciting ways.

What's so odd about odd numbers? Nothing, except that we have somehow managed to convince ourselves that even is "even" better.

Limiting the Power of the Press

When my daughter was a junior in high school, she took a class in psychology. One of the choices for her final project was to play the role of a psychologist in studying the mind of a serial killer.  The purpose of the project was to understand what made these individuals do the horrible things they did. I did not allow her to choose that option on the grounds that the subject material was too disturbing and she didn’t have enough maturity or objectivity to deal with it appropriately and I didn’t want what she learned to have a negative effect on her psyche. 

At the time, she felt that I was unfairly censoring her choices, but later she told me the teacher herself reported being seriously affected by the content of the papers.  Ironically, a few months ago, one of my students had to do a project on a current event and I suggested she write about the Las Vegas shooting by Stephen Paddock, which had been featured in the news.  To date, no one has been able to come up with a motive for the shooting, although the case has been extensively studied by psychologists and law enforcement experts. My student was taking a class on American government and chose to talk about the incident in the context of the Second Amendment and the interpretation of the right to bear arms.

I wrote my own version of the article, in which I said that one of the motivations behind the actions of mass shooters is that the Internet has allowed news to reach a larger audience than ever before through many different platforms. The horrific deeds of these mass murderers are subject to endless commentary and publicity, which creates a twisted fascination which may inspire emulators, eager for their share of the spotlight.

The larger issue was not about the Second Amendment, but about the scope of the First Amendment, which protects the press and media from government interference except for threats to national security.  The movie Zero Dark Thirty grossed over $95 million dollars in the US when it came out in 2012 and was nominated for Best Picture, attesting to its popularity. One of the scenes showed the torture of al Qaeda terrorists by the US military in an effort to get information from them that would lead to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. We were supposed to understand that this is fictionalized violence and therefore give it artistic license.  But paradoxically, the movie seemed to desensitize us to the fact that content has meaning, and violent and vulgar content goes against the standards of moral and acceptable behavior. 

When Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, the book was banned by many high schools in the US despite vigorous protest for its use of vulgar language, sexual and sometimes violent content.  It was easy to limit readership since the Internet did not exist at that time. Almost 30 years later, Mark David Chapman attributed his shooting of John Lennon to the book’s influence, showing the impact of such content can be on easily impressionable minds.I believe that some censorship of visual and print media is necessary. First, because the potential audience has gotten bigger through the Internet and the global reach of social media,  second because it limits the glorification of morally reprehensible acts by not publishing them,  and third because it benefits the public welfare by not exposing them to harmful or dangerous behaviors.  Canadian psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson suggested that if we are ever to stop such incidents from repeating it may be more advisable to get the press to voluntary restrict what it reports about  violent crimes. Since such individuals are characterized by attention seeking behavior, he believes that negative reinforcement should result in extinction.

According to an article in the Op Ed section of the January 8^th edition of the Wall Street Journal, the 1931 Supreme Court case of Near v Minnesota, denied a petition by the state of Minnesota to limit the exercise of free speech and freedom of the press. The background for the decision was the passage of a gag law in the state in 1925 to combat the spread of yellow journalism.  J. M. Near was the publisher of The Saturday Press, a Minneapolis newspaper which reported on corruption in city politics. The county attorney filed a lawsuit against the newspaper, alleging that the reports were defamatory and false and violated the gag law. The lower courts supported the suit and prohibited the newspaper from publishing such articles in the future. Near took the case all the way to the Supreme Court where in a 5-4 decision the Supreme Court declared that the lower court ruling was a violation of the First Amendment. Chief Justice Hughes explained his reasoning by saying that the Founding Fathers felt that the public should be aware of anything the government did wrong and the press should not be restricted from publishing such information simply because it portrayed government officials in an unfavorable light. This was a defense of accountability journalism, which reports on the actions of powerful people.

Writer Barton Swaim has written a book review of Michael Wolff’s book, The Fire and The Fury, a tell all account of the goings on in the early days of the Trump administration in the same edition of the Wall Street Journal. Trump has threatened to sue the publisher of Wolff’s book for libel in an attempt to block publication but it is unlikely that he will win his case.Wolff’s book falls under the category of access journalism, characterized by the website  https://theoutline.com/post/1604/access-journalism-is-not-for-you-or-me as  journalism that “too often reports bullshit without identifying the source of the bullshit.” It is more gossip relying on hearsay and interpretation of events rather than factually based reporting and therefore not guilty of libel as Trump would imply. Trump's case is further weakened by the fact that any news he doesn't like is automatically considered fake news. The standards of responsible journalism have declined over time, but the media still has an undeniable effect on the shaping of public opinion and perception, and if it has been reduced to reporting that is either factually unsubstantiated or unnecessarily sensationalized, perhaps the time has come to re-visit its limits.

A Lady's Approach to Harassment in the 19th Century

A January 2^nd article in the Wall Street Journal by Paula Marantz Cohen, English professor at Drexel University, tackles the topic of the appropriate response to the advances of a sexual harasser by referring to the reaction of Elizabeth Bennet to the marriage proposal of the oleaginous Mr. Collins in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In her thesis, Marantz claims that the reason harassers behave the way they do is that “a powerful man equates his power with attractiveness and confuses [the woman’s] resistance with playful seductiveness.”  This is what Mr. Collins does in the novel and Elizabeth responds by being decisive and clear in her rejection.  She is able to do so because she is repulsed by Collins’ personality and behavior. Mr. Darcy is younger, better looking, wealthier and much more powerful than Mr. Collins, and is a more attractive prospect. Rather than using those attributes to victimize her, he antagonizes her by refusing to dance with her because he doesn’t think she is pretty enough.  Had he flattered her instead as Wickham did, she might have responded with “playful seductiveness”, and if he were the kind of man Wickham was, things would have turned out very differently, as they almost did for Darcy’s sister Georgiana and unluckily did for Colonel Brandon’s ward in Sense and Sensibility, another Austen novel.

Kitty and Lydia are not impressed with Mr. Collins, because he is only a clergyman and not a soldier. In the opening lines of the novel Austen says, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.” In Austen’s view, it is often the women who pursue powerful men rather than the other way around. Darcy goes out of his way to avoid mixing with the people in the town because he knows this to be true.

Charlotte Lucas accepts Mr. Collins with the same motivation that causes Miss Bingley to pursue Darcy. She has neither money nor looks, and she is 27 to Elizabeth Bennet’s 20, an age at which women of those times were considered on the shelf. She has run out of time to find a better match and has no other options. Marantz compares Elizabeth to Jane Austen and says that the author has brothers with whom she could live after her father’s death while Elizabeth has only sisters so in real life she might have had to accept Mr. Collins or work as a governess and be subjected to harassment for being in an inferior position.  However, Elizabeth Bennet’s older sister Jane has already attracted the attention of the affluent Mr. Bingley, and if Jane marries him, her sisters, including Elizabeth will have a chance to meetother young men in the same social and economic class and make an advantageous marriage, just as in the case of Duchess Kate and Pippa Middleton. Therefore she is not in the same position as Charlotte and that gives her the strength to refuse Mr. Collins.

Yet if Austen talks about how to stop harassment, she is also aware of how much the woman can influence a man to respond favorably to her. Modern dating advice for women includes ways to flirt with a man to spark his interest, but it is hardly new. Charlotte says, “Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on." She recognizes that the man wouldn’t initiate contact unless he gets some sign of encouragement from the woman and that is how she gets Mr. Collins to be interested in her. Marantz claims that one can sometimes know what is the right thing to do but not be able to do it and suggests that we not leap to judgment about the actions of people who may not be able to act freely because of their circumstances.  But sometimes people put themselves in risky situations and later claim that the circumstances prevented them from being able to react. 

A 2010 article in Forbes magazine written by Dr. Lois Frankel commented on the harassment experienced by Mexican sportscaster Ines Sainz during an aftergame interview with the New York Jets. According to Frankel, she was wearing a low-cut blouse, skin tight jeans and high heels. Frankel recognizes the dilemma that women face in the public image they present. While she agreed that a woman should not be harassed for the way she dresses, she also says that “a professional image doesn't include push-up bras with low cut or tight blouses, skirts so short that you have to continually tug at them when you sit down or bend over and dresses or pants that you have to pour yourself into. There's a lot of leeway in between that and a tailored navy blue suit.” 

She ends her article by saying that “sex sells but only in the short term. Don’t rely on it to boost your career.”  Self expression doesn’t obviate good judgment and a little common sense so she cautions that it’s better to prepare for a potential inappropriate response than be placed in the trickier position of fending it off later.