Tag: Marriage

The Pleasure Principle

A post for Valentine’s Day, something I’ve never done before, as far as I recall.

I imagine it as an Ode to Narcissus, which is my own personal meaning attached to this holiday.  Through the Greek myth we are told that Narcissus fell in love with his reflection in a pool of water and up to modern times there are myriad explorations for what that represents.

The most well-known today, coming from Wiki:

The myth had a decided influence on English Victorian homoerotic culture, via André Gide‘s study of the myth, Le Traité du Narcisse (‘The Treatise of the Narcissus’, 1891), and the only novel by Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Most often in our modern era it’s considered a negative thing—a forsaking of the beloved or even God, or the destructive self-love of a tyrannical ego, or the folly of youth.

Echo and Narcissus, oil on canvas by Nicolas Poussin, 1627 (Louvre, Paris)

But for myself, I imagine its original intent as being more pure and innocent.  I don’t imagine the Greek myths were to be taken as literal stories of living people and Gods, but rather the mysteries and processes of Nature.

Eros is Cupid, but I imagine that what’s being unveiled between these 3 figures is depicting the process, the mystery, the intimate and delicate balance with Cupid (Eros) manifesting through  Narcissus’ love of beauty and pleasure.   

That something bigger than we mere mortals is occurring when we fall in love, sometimes even against our own will, awakens and evokes the spirit of Eros.  A natural force so powerful we think of it as a drug, capable of making us behave in uncharacteristic, undesirable and even dangerous ways.

Narcissus is in love with love, which is to say, in love with life.

In the water, a classic symbol of emotion, he truly saw himself in the spirit of divine love.  

The latest modern remaking of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

What came after that initial myth were the modern cultural assaults and chronic misunderstandings cursing him with egoism, arrogance, selfishness, cruelty, taken to the extremes of self-absorption, self-loathing and eventually self-destruction, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Eros as uncontrolled self-obsession.

My belief is that to fall in love with anything, or anyone, is to fall in love with oneself; that is, an aspect of one’s own reflection.  Just as Narcissus is our first flower to appear in spring (it’s blooming right now in fact) Narcissus symbolizes the coming reawakening of all our natural pleasures as spring approaches and life is renewed.  

Before the Easter ritual of fecundity, first the pair must meet, and fall in love.

In celebrating the courting rituals, it’s the one holiday that’s not considered a family affair, and conjures an atypical respect for intimacy in our mass-loving modern culture.

To me it is a holiday of guilty pleasures, quirky pursuits, strange beliefs and peculiar tastes. 

What’s your pleasure?  Do you indulge it enough?  Or perhaps, too much?  Narcissus wants to know!

Do you prefer the cake or the icing?

Immediate reward or delayed gratification?

Are you the driver or the passenger?  

Is ‘fun’ the same as pleasure?  

Is your pleasure a particpatory adventure, or to be delivered on a silver tray?  

Active or passive?

Photography or painting? Reading or writing? Listening or singing?Watching or playing? Cooking or eating?  Looking or being seen?

Is there one without the other?  Is there the other without the one?

A personal story of guilty pleasures.

A fine restaurant, with a fine atmosphere, and fine company, is my guiltiest pleasure of all.  I’d spend lavishly without reserve, relish with abandon, obsess over every detail, waste hours, or weekends without a second thought.  Dionysus takes the reigns when I experience such exquisite care, such regard for pleasure and beauty, I’m easily swept away.  (And unfortunately, just as easily disappointed.). 

Hubby did not know that about me.  How could he possibly, he’d only known me a week or so.

Perhaps it’s not such an unusual thing, considering the love affair with food that’s shared across seemingly all cultures, if not always appreciated to the same degree with all people.

I’ll forever cherish the singular date when Hubby won me over, especially because I know the chances of something remotely similar ever happening again are microscopic.  It was one of those one in a million evolutionary occurrences, kind of like the Big Bang.  

As we all know, it just takes one miracle.

He planned it to the letter—chose the best restaurant, actually went there in advance to choose the best table overlooking the water, spoke to the chef personally, tipped the maitre’d in advance.

Who does that?  I mean, I would probably, but who else?  Only in the movies, right?

It wasn’t on Valentine’s Day, there was no chocolate or champagne.  But I did drink too much, and he swiftly transformed into my white knight on a scooter.  He was the crafter of the most perfectly romantic night of my life.  And romantic is not something he’s ever aspired to, by any standards, and by his own admission. 

Like I said, just one miracle. Perhaps a little help from Cupid?

I was ho-hum before that.  Not that he wasn’t a good catch, of course.  Certainly loads of divorced 30-something women are attracted to a man who finds it to be bragging material that his belongings fit into a backpack with few aspirations besides spending half the year in a hammock on a Thai beach.

We had a lot in common, as in we were both fairly uncommon vagabonds.  Not trust-fund kids or military brats, that was most common in the ex-pat scenes in those days.  We worked and scrimped and hustled and snubbed our noses at such privilege, when we could afford to.  Otherwise we enjoyed their parties and their company and their contacts.

We met at one such fancy affair, and he wasn’t my type, that’s how I saw it in the moment.  Not because of any of those previously mentioned assets, those I actually found pretty charming, especially that he would be bragging on them with a woman he’d just met.  I was far more impressed with his stories of rugged adventure than any of other’s comfort and privilege.

Not our photo, though we do have great ones, somewhere. This one is from kingscup.com

But I was just barely out of another failed relationship; I just wasn’t on the market, according to me. 

He perceived otherwise.  I dare say, I have never been pursued with such seemingly carefree precision.  He is/was not ever a lady’s man, had less relationship experience than me, and was not there looking for love.

It didn’t help that my just-failed relationship was with a photographer, and that he was there as another photographer’s assistant.  Of course I noticed he was fit and handsome and friendly and funny.  I imagined we could become friends, maybe even friends with benefits.  My imagination stopped there.

This is a stock photo, the resorts we stayed in were even more glorious.

We bumped into each other often, as would be expected, since we were all covering the Phuket King’s Cup Regatta.  They had us all staying in top resorts, sailing the seas by day and attending parties every night.  It was amazing and overwhelming and so deliciously extravagant and foreign. 

Even under such conditions, he was able to corral my attentions, redirect my intentions, and totally capture my life’s trajectory (as dismal as that was looking at the time considering I was living in an old, drafty single-wide in my dad’s trailer park in Mena, Arkansas.)

Though I’m sure he won’t admit it and questions who was doing the seducing, I will still insist, it surely wasn’t me.  Narcissus, perhaps? 

We are told it’s human nature to pursue pleasure and to recoil from pain.  But all around us we have plenty of evidence that’s not the case at all.  In honest observation it looks much more true that pain and pleasure have a very mysterious relationship that is quite unique to each individual.  

I personally will not allow the Dorian Gray’s of the world to eternally spoil the beauty of Narcissus, so I celebrate Valentine’s Day as a gateway into the new season’s promise of pleasure.

Happy Valentine’s Day to all the Lovers of Love, Beauty, Pleasure and Life!

What Is Retirement?

Retirement is Unabashedly Selfish.

As the entitled, privileged, white western woman I identify as, I now have Hubby all to myself.

Now his best, his most creative, his most talented and productive self gets expressed here, at home, instead of off in some far away place for some unknown people.

“Every man looks at his wood pile with a kind of affection.” ~Henry David Thoreau

The benefit for me has been huge, off the charts. Most recently in the form of a beautiful Christmas gift. We’ve spent most Christmases of our 20 year marriage apart, usually with Hubby working offshore. This never felt like such a big deal to me considering we don’t have kids and we are neither religious nor consumer-oriented.

It was a pretty good deal actually, because he got bonus pay and we got to feel generous at the same time—offering the holidays to the Dads among his co-workers.

No matter how good of a sharer one is entrained to be, especially I guess as a selfish, entitled, privileged, white, western woman, giving the best years of life to ‘the system’ is not nearly as fulfilling as it might sound to some.

Like most modern Westerners we worked hard for many decades—we devoted years of education and training in order to fulfill our function in the economy and we played by the social rules and did some right investment things and we feel we’ve earned our relative liberty.

We’ve bought our freedom, so to speak. For as long as that lasts anyway.

We have earned our right to withdraw our energy, time and talent from an insane system earlier than scheduled. A ‘gift’ hard-earned and well-deserved, I’d say.

Many years ago I was told that “Americans live to work, while the French work to live” in an attempt to describe the comparable ‘work ethic’ of these two cultures. In general, I’d agree, at least back then. Certainly in past centuries Americans have prided themselves on their reputation of being hard workers, with high productivity, and all those industrious accolades that go along with that—like ingenuity and resourcefulness and determination. Now we desire to benefit from those hard-earned character traits.

Retirement is Redefining Fun

I preferred the French style of cultivating more joie de vivre and laissez-faire attitudes, but not just for the more obvious reasons of the pleasure and sensual rewards of the good life. I also saw how unhealthy it is to encompass so much of one’s raison d’etre —self-esteem and community connections and social structure and really most aspects of life —in with one’s professional occupation. But this is what the majority of us have been trained to do.

“Because work is an activity in which all initiative and energy is extorted from the individual in order to generate profit for someone else, and because it is unbearably unpleasant, futile and barren, ‘free’ time looms before labour as a garden paradise. Fake sickies are then engineered and labour-saving devices purchased to extend the Pastime Arcadia by a minute or two. But because access to wild nature and genuine culture is curtailed, weekenders are forced to buy their pleasure as they buy everything else, from huge corporations which, to turn a profit, appeal to the lowest common denominator of its demographic, thereby producing, in lieu of satisfying art, addictive titillation and anxiety. In other words, once we have freed ourselves from work, we then have to submit to a world made of work.” 
33 Myths of the System: A Radical Guide to the World by Darren Allen (2021)

Leaving all the variables aside—like retirement wasn’t exactly intentional and was certainly untimely, yet irresistible, and as yet permanently untenable—the rewards still far outweigh the risks.

Retirement is Reprioritizing.

The old adage ‘time is money’ casts an evil word spell. In actuality, time is precious, as money is profane.

“The second new technology of control invented by the Greeks , was MONEY — an impersonal, indestructible abstraction which rendered people, objects and, eventually, the entire universe as a collection of homogeneous quantities, things which could be bought and sold. It was thanks to the attitude that money engendered that Greek philosophers began to view the entire universe as a composite of discrete, rationally-apprehended granules, or particles (a.k.a. ‘Atoms’), and ideas (or ‘platonic forms’), chief among them, the tragic atom—cut-off, isolated, alone — we call ‘man’.” (D. Allen)

When man is no longer ‘trading hours for a handful of dimes’ to borrow a Doors’ passage, fantastic things can occur. I’m not saying they will occur, only that the potential is created that they might. That is, a space where no space existed before, where money’s place in time is squarely upstaged by something infinitely more appealing.

Some folks plan multiple decades for retirement only to be overwhelmed by time’s infinity once they reach it. They succeeded in their dream. Right?

Whether they scrimped and saved or invested and won, still they cling to the ‘time is money’ fallacy and once retired spend much energy agonizing over their dwindling resources and increased hours to fill with distractions—some new fanaticism —be it sports or politics or shopping or so, so many other means for their entertainment, that is, their entrainment. Your money and your mind.

They’ve been so acclimated to the Earn-Spend Ferris wheel of existence that time shifts almost instantly from precious to perilous. The ‘never enough’ crowd, born and bred to earn and burn, to forever cast the pearls of their finite energy into the infinite abyss of acquisition.

Where to burn, once that ride threatens to end? Could a new retirement hobby ever be enough?

Or will it take a new lifestyle? A new way of being and perceiving in the world? Maybe even re-integrating the simple satisfaction of chopping wood and carrying water? After all, why pay a gym membership?

Or, as my beautiful Christmas gift suggests, maybe making furniture?

As best we could, with limited knowledge, skill, money, we set ourselves up to succeed at this moment, and against the odds. Will that be enough? There are no guarantees.

But, the meaning of ‘succeed’ has shifted with the territory. It’s our own meaning now. No masters above, no slaves below. It’s working at our leisure, at our pleasure, on projects and activities that reflect who we are, what we want out of life, how we envision a better future. It’s personal and imperfect and it’s the way we are trying to practice more than we preach.

Retirement is spontaneity. After having planned ahead.

Yes, it was a tornado that took down that cedar, and many other trees as well. Yes, our tools are still inadequate. No, we don’t have the money to ‘upgrade’. But the financial restraints require creativity and frugality, which we’ve cultured over the decades. And the self-reliance fosters self-confidence, which we’ve been diligently cultivating for decades as well.

If the best things in life are free, what to do with our freedom?
Do we spend our precious time perfecting the dance of life, or perfecting our costumes? Do we spend our greatest efforts making it easier for ourselves to play, or for others to watch?

Perfection is the enemy of the good. In the world of corporate work, perfection is the goal. Perfection is the construct upon which all human effort is poised. Your regenerative human resource creates their sustained capital. Perfection in the eyes of the corporate beholder is maintained through mechanization, that is, mechanization of the resource, be he human or time, quotidian or universal.

Retirement is unstructured.

Our only intention now is to never go back. It is a soul-sucking system, not just a time-sucking one. I’d say that’s why so many don’t get out sooner, or whenever they have the chance—their souls have been too drained already.

Mechanization of the body or soul is equal under the laws of the system. But, unstructured time allows plenty of opportunity to de-mechanize.

What is one man capable of without the lifetime expectation of the system? Without the chaotic pressures of the market? With just a bit of time and skill and opportunity?

That’s what retirement should be, according to me. The freedom to be unpredictable and unperfectable. The freedom not to be adjusted or tampered with anymore in order to support a slippery system we unwittingly inherited.

“Most people do not know what to do with free time and when it appears they feel only an anxious need to consume corporate fun or, at best, cultural familiarity.” (D. Allen)

A great number of disjointed fragments came together to make this whole—including a tornado, a scamdemic, a hand-me-down gift of turquoise stones, a random forum post about ‘steampunk style’ and a lot of time, and desire, and a good bit of skill—none of which had anything to do with me directly.

I only breathed just a hint of enthusiasm at just the right time and voila—he has crafted a unique treasure that will forever recall the transformation of a painful memory recast into magnificently unique beauty, form and function.

The deeper fissures in the wood filled with lovely turquoise stones.

If it’s the only piece he ever creates, I am over-joyed! If it leads to a hobby that fills his desires, I am thrilled! If it leads even further, to actual work, like, for others, well, maybe, I’ll be forced to pull that Retirement is Selfish card again.

Happy New Year, y’all, thanks for stopping by!

For Better Or Worse

This year Hubby and I passed our 17th anniversary Test of Marital Bliss, more or less devoted, mostly minus the bliss.

While at first blush this post might read like something of a roast of us both, I mean it actually to be a tribute to us both, to our loving growth, as well as a bit of advice to newlyweds, who will most certainly ignore it, bless their young hearts.

“Never go to bed angry,” was my grandfather’s advice, at my first wedding. That marriage lasted just shy of five years. While I did learn some great life lessons from Grandpa, that particular one proved pretty useless.

I’d rewrite it now as something close to the exact opposite: Never try to resolve any issue while angry. What better way to overcome your anger? A good night’s sleep.

Exit Glacier, Alaska, stock photo

My second attempt at marital bliss showed far more potential immediately. I’ve told this story of Hubby and I many times before, because it’s a great story. When he first proposed to me, in a tent at Exit Glacier in Alaska, we had just high-tailed it out of a precarious and perhaps even dangerous situation in the wee hours of the morning from the tourist boat where he’d been working for nearly a decade previously and had invited me to join him that summer season.

My presence there and his devotion to me was apparently causing a serious rift between him and his good friend/employer.

We found ourselves sneaking off the boat pre-dawn, strategically, while everyone else was out, because Hubby had lost all confidence in his boss’ professionalism and maybe even his sanity after an extremely inappropriate altercation the night before.

It reads more like fiction than real life, I do realize. But, isn’t that often how life goes? As we pulled out of Prince William Sound in the compact rental car stuffed with the duffel bags of all his possessions, we drove straight into a glorious and totally unexpected rainbow. Cross my heart, no exaggeration at all, across the valley as the sun rose above the mountain pass was the most gorgeous rainbow I’d ever witnessed.

I barked and awed and carried on enthusiastically to a mostly apprehensive man trying to hold it together during this incredibly bold and unprecedented move.

How could it not be auspicious, a wonderful omen, I raved, on and on?! After all, it was the most exquisite rainbow I’d ever seen. How could that be totally by chance?!

That is, until a few days ago.

On my birthday, as Hubby was flying offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, as he’s been doing for about a decade now, he took this shot from his helicopter.

Gorgeous, auspicious, but, he didn’t even think to send it to me at the time. That’s the real point of this post.

He took this shot because he knew I’d love it, that’s for sure. He’s not the synchronicity believer that I am, he thinks celebrating birthdays is for kids and he’s not nearly as impressed with rainbows as I am, clearly. I doubt he shared this shot with his offshore crew, because I doubt there are any among them who are so eager to gush over rainbows in the Gulf.

I requested ages ago he take more photos while offshore, but I get it, he’s got a job to do out there, he’s not a tourist, and no one’s paying him to take photos.

But a couple of days ago when I asked if he had more good photos, he sent this one. I laughed out loud! I said, REAL photos please! NOT fake unicorn CGI gonna-fool-my-wife type photos! How dare you make fun of my rainbow love!

He swore up and down it’s real and totally un-retouched. And I gazed at it, truly amazed, stunned, in true AWE for at least a solid minute.

Then I said: “Oh My God! How on earth could you have not sent me this photo on my birthday, since it says right there that’s when you took it?!”

He looked at me like a deer in highlights for an extended moment, until I laughed. I shook my head, rolled my eyes, and laughed some more.

This was exactly the sort of thing, early in our marriage, that would’ve set me off. Proof, right there, front and center, of his thoughtlessness and insensitivity! Oh and how I felt that enticing tug of self-righteousness, don’t get me wrong!

But the wisdom of 19 years of loving this man, 17 years in wedlock-down, threw me, suddenly and unequivocally, into what I think is a State of Atlas Shrugs. She said, “So you got it a week late, and in a totally off-hand manner, but still, you got it. You really gonna cause a stink about that?”

And the still small voice of Wisdom replied, “No, ma’am!”

And the Reason of the middle-aged woman, now a Devoted Gardener for a decade, well accustomed to planting seeds three times before the right time strikes, realized the greater truth in that moment, beyond the banal ‘perfect’ timing desires of us mere mortals: Nature has a timetable that doesn’t match your Personal or Man-made calendar.

DUH!

And, better late than never!