Menagerie

Stephen Sweeney, via Wikimedia Commons

The New York Times is currently running a series of essays, under the heading “Menagerie,” about the relations between humans and animals. I’m interested in the word “menagerie,” its relationships to other words, and what those connections among words suggest about the liaisons between the creatures themselves, ourselves.

The French word ‘ménagerie,’ a collection of wild and exotic animals, comes from the word ‘ménage,’ meaning household. ‘Ménage’ can also refer to a sexual relationship among the members of a household.

But words are related not only by etymology but also by association. When I see ‘menagerie,’ I think of ‘ménage,’ then ‘ménage à trois.’ And then, because I love French, I begin to think about merry-go-round horses and Edith Piaf.

“Tu me fais tour-rrrr-ner la tête. Mon manège à moi, c’est toi.”

This is Piaf singing about a lover as “my merry-go-round” in the 1958 song “Mon Manège À Moi.”

“You make my head spin. My merry-go-round, it’s you,” the translation goes.

‘Manège’ means riding arena, a ring where people ride horses round and round. It can also refer to the ring’s amusement-park equivalent, the merry-go-round.

Because menagerie refers to animals, because merry-go-rounds often consist of horses (plastic or metal though they may be), because ‘manège à moi, c’est toi’ sounds like ‘ménage à trois,’ I at first thought that ménage and manège were the same word. In the song, Piaf—well, actually lyricist Jean Constantin—equated the two. Her ménage, her relationship, was her manège, her merry-go-round, her thrill.

But no, they are different words with different roots. ‘Manège’ comes from the Italian ‘mannegiare,’ to handle. It’s based on the Latin word for hand, ‘manus,’ and the idea, I suppose, of maneuvering horses in the ring. 

But how does ménage relate to menagerie? Consult Le Petit Robert, the very thick yet somehow abridged French dictionary, and you’ll find that ménage, in its modern usage, has no animal association. Yet menagerie comes from this root. Is a menagerie a household for animals? Or are houses—and relationships—cages for people?

It turns out that centuries ago, the word ménagerie, at least in French, did have an animal connection: it referred to the running of both household and farm. Along those lines, there is such a thing as a house-barn, where farm animals live in the same building as their owners, conserving body heat. A ménage can be a menagerie.

‘Ménage’ is derived from ‘mansio,’ a Latin word for house or dwelling, and that from the Latin verb ‘maneo, manere,’ meaning to remain, stay.

Thousands of years ago, humans didn't remain anywhere for long; they moved with the beasts they hunted. Dwellings were accordingly temporary. Why stay in any one place unless the animals—and more generally, the food supply—do so, too? With fenced in animals and crop cultivation came more permanent homes. The development of ménages and menageries went hand in hand. 

Thinking of nomadic cultures brings to mind another vagrant, human-animal coexistence: the circus. A circus is collection of people and animals unique and amazing. It involves captive animals, yet it is not sedentary; it migrates, equipped with both cages and tents.

Circus was the word Philip Astley, known as the father of the modern circus, used for a riding ring. Thus the circus began, literally, as a manège, for trick riding, and later grew to include other acts, other animals. A circus is both manège and menagerie.

I once bought a t-shirt showing two birds perched together in a birdcage with its door wide open. The idea, the street vendor explained to me, was that the birds could fly away but chose to stay together in their birdcage (birdhouse?).

As I see it, the chief difference between a ménage and a menagerie is that in a human household, people choose to stay, while captive animals have no choice. There are grey areas in both domains, however. Humans who could quit their ménages at any time feel many pressures to stick around. As for animals: though you might rightly call indoor pets “captive,” they don’t necessarily want to run away.

The message of the Piaf song is that the singer is so enthralled by her lover that she feels no need to rove. “Je ferais le tour du monde; ça ne tournerait pas plus que ça. La terre n’est pas assez ronde pour m’étourdir autant que toi.”  (“I could go around the world and that wouldn’t turn more than this. The world isn’t round enough to stun, or dizzy, me as much as you.”) A merry-go-round is, in part, a way to experience the feeling of covering distance without going anywhere, and the merry-go-round relationship is a stationary thrill. The motion of the manège, however metaphorical, enables the stability of the ménage.

When the cage door is open, my fancy flies pretty far and returns with diverse ideas for me to assemble. I want them all in my menagerie. They make my head spin.

Postmodern Chivalry

This is the second article in the "Too Much Independence?" series about social atomization in the US. 

Meet a Postmodern Knight

On the Fourth of July, I went to join a friend, Emma, for dinner at the home of two of her friends. The minute I walked up to the Park Slope stoop, Emma pulled the cushion out from underneath her and gave it to me and also proffered her plate and knife. In this small but symbolic way, she took care of me not after she was situated comfortably but at her own expense. “I hate to see people hungry,” she commented later that evening, once we were all seated at the dinner table inside. Emma is a rail-thin vegetarian runner who loves food and revels in the sensations of hunger and satisfaction. Yet I wonder if other people's hunger pains her more than her own. 

Emma is, in a word, chivalrous. In the spirit of a medieval knight, she puts others before herself. She's also a rarity. The vibe coming from Emma is such a different one from that of other students and young professionals I have known. I think the focus on independence and individuality in the US today has caused people to regard chivalry and altruism, which were once seen as laudable character traits, as unrealistic and irrational.
Emma and others like her prove that altruism is possible. It may not, however, be consistent with the packed inflexible schedules and obsessions with measurable self-improvement that characterize so many people today.    

"Organization Kids" and the Decline of Chivalry

In a 2001 Atlantic article, David Brooks characterized what he called  “organization kids,” the elite college students who work all the time, sleep little, and make appointments to see their friends. "Often," Brooks wrote, "they don't get serious [about romantic relationships] until they are a few years out of college and meet again at a reunion—after their careers are on track and they can begin to spare the time.” The particular kids he was talking about were undergraduates at Princeton. Yet zealous personal striving is not unique to college students; many working professionals are also this way.

            The organization kid, as Brooks describes him, avoids controversy, confrontation, and politics because they get in the way of the smooth running of things. “They are disconcertingly comfortable with authority," Brooks quoted Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow as saying. "They're eager to please, eager to jump through whatever hoops the faculty puts in front of them, eager to conform."

            Brooks’ article was written before September 11, 2001, written before the Great Recession, before Occupy Wall Street. For this generation of kids, as Brooks said, “there have been no senseless bloodbaths like World War I and Vietnam, no crushing economic depressions, no cycles of assassination and rioting to foment disillusionment. They've mostly known parental protection, prosperity, and peace.”

I am of the same generation as the students Brooks interviewed, and even during Occupy Wall Street, I didn’t let the protests happening in my city (New York) distract me from the obligations of school and regular exercise. I didn’t see how my participation in the protests would change anything about society, whereas I knew that my individual efforts could make a difference in my own life. Moreover, I was quite sure that neglecting my personal responsibilities would have measurable negative effects. Participate in social affairs to no definite societal reward and the possibility of personal harm? To someone who prioritizes the self, it just doesn’t make sense.

            In “the Organization Kid” piece, Brooks compared the Princeton class on which he reported to classes of the early 20^th century, which, he said, were encouraged to follow a “chivalric code.” Brooks quoted a 1913 speech by then Princeton president John Hibben urging graduates to heed “the human cry of spirits in bondage, of souls in despair, of lives debased and doomed.” Nowadays, we are encouraged to avoid getting involved with such souls who may drag us down with their “drama.”

For fun, imagine a knight's to-do list:

•       Help those in need
•       Be generous to everyone
•       Defend honor
•       Take care of horse, etc.

You get the idea. This is not the schedule of an "organization kid." When your job is to help those in need it's impossible to be organized—you can’t organize the world—and likewise it's impossible to help everyone in need and maintain one's schedule. I’m not just talking about actual medieval knights, of course. I’m talking about people who believed in chivalry, such as the past Princeton leaders Brooks cites. Of course organization kids are less chivalrous than past generations. 

            Brooks claimed that today we don’t teach our children character or talk with them about morality. “Although today's Princeton and today's parents impose all sorts of rules to reduce safety risks and encourage achievement, they do not go to great lengths to build character, the way adults and adult institutions did a century ago.”

Barriers To Ideals

I would say that we were taught that ideals are too simple to be true and that morality too often veers toward moralism. We have a natural skepticism toward all things warm and fuzzy. It’s difficult for me to even speak in idealistic terms without scare quotes. The right thing becomes "the right thing," implying that there's more than one way to live and that no one way is completely right. People of my generation have grown up with the idea that there's very little anyone can do without causing someone else harm. It's always a choice between two evils, and you try to choose the lesser one. Today people accept that every time they turn on a light, they contribute to global climate change. People live with the idea that things you do with a positive goal in mind also have a negative side; for example, frugality, a positive ideal, means buying inexpensive goods, which comes at a cost to the people earning not-enough money to make the cheap products. On the other hand, even refraining from materialism, not buying crap at all, cheap or expensive, can hurt the people who can no longer be employed to make the stuff you're refraining from. 

We are all enmeshed in human society whose unfairness has been pretty well uncovered. It's hard to try to live according to ideals without feeling like a hypocrite. Maybe in the 60s, people thought an ideal world was possible. That's just not the way we think today.

 Susan Sontag was a bit more blatant about the decline of idealism in her 1996 afterward to Against Interpretation and Other Essays. “Instead of a utopian moment,” Sontag wrote, “we live in a time which is experienced as the end—more exactly, just past the end—of every ideal. (And therefore of culture: there is no possibility of true culture without altruism.)”

I don’t know what Sontag meant by “true culture,” but she recognized (in 1996) the decline of altruism and the sense that ideals are "unrealistic." “Now the very idea of the serious (and of the honorable) seems quaint, ‘unrealistic,’ to most people, and when allowed—as an arbitrary decision of temperament—probably unhealthy, too.” Her seriousness, I think, means deciding what’s right, what separates right from wrong, good from bad, okay from great, in life and in art, and proceeding according to those ideals. That seriousness isn't gone from today's young people, but I think that some large part of what people are serious about is keeping up appearances. 
For example, students today are serious about getting good grades out of the fear of failure and rejection. But are they serious about the material they are studying? An example of unserious scholarship: In high school, a teacher who wanted me to join the academic team once described how I might need to study lists of great books and their authors; it wasn't necessary to have read the books, just to know trivial information about them. I was not interested. Or to take an example of my own lack of seriousness: in college, where I studied biology, I was very interested in doing lab research my senior year. I loved experiments and liked molecular biology but I didn't have any specific research interests beyond that. I expressed interest in working in the lab of an immunology professor not because I cared particularly about immunology but because I had already done an internship in the lab of an immunologist and I thought the experience would give me an edge. I pursued success rather than science. An academically serious science student would not disregard the larger questions: What is this research ultimately about? Are the questions this research is trying to answer the ones that I want to pursue in my life? I have much more admiration for the student who decides they want to learn about Alzheimer's because their beloved grandmother died of it and they want to help people like her than for the student who wants to get good grades and succeed at things.

The Role of Empiricism

In a 2013 column in The New York Times, Brooks revisited his collegiate character assessment and suggested that the perceived decline of idealism might have to do with the rise of data. Brooks quotes from a student of his at Yale, Victoria Buhler, who describes what she calls “the Cynic Kid”: “We are deeply resistant to idealism. Rather, the Cynic Kids have embraced the policy revolution; they require hypothesis to be tested, substantiated, and then results replicated before they commit to any course of action.” These empirical tendencies could explain why our generation is less political than those before us.

Because we are only willing to do things with a tangible effect, because we are wedded to cost-benefit analyses, we stick to self-improvement, actions whose effects we can measure.

Try to analyze how your choices will affect the whole world and the results will be fuzzy, leaving you back where you started, acting on faith and hunches. If you require measurable ends to justify the means, then it’s hard to argue for faith in ethics—or in love or in anything. 

It is unclear to me whether the trend toward empiricism has made people less idealistic and more self-centered or if people are more interested in data because it appeals to their self-obsession.

The Benefits of Altruism

What Brooks calls chivalry, biologists refer to as altruism—according to Merriam-Webster’s second definition, “behavior by an animal that is not beneficial to or may be harmful to itself but that benefits others of its species.” For example, altruistic bacteria infected with a virus kill themselves to stop the pathogen from spreading to other bacteria of their species. Altruism does not pass an individual cost-benefit test, but it does help a group.

As everyone knows, helping people is gratifying. A New York Times Magazine article about a professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Adam Grant, whose research has found that people who believe that they are helping others are more motivated than when they are working to help themselves. They’ll raise more fundraising money at a call center when they know how much the money benefits its recipients; they’ll wash their hands more thoroughly when they think of it as a way to keep others healthy. Grant is obsessively devoted to his students. He's no roving disorganized knight, though; his schedule is packed; his chivalry involves packing it fuller.  

In my opinion, altruism is a big part of why families function, when they function. I think that kids thrive in part by making their parents proud and that parents get up and go to work with thoughts of their children. I think parents make dinner with a starch, a meat and a vegetable for their families when, on their own, they would eat PB & J or cheese and crackers or Lean Cuisine or their cultural variety of easy food. On the other hand, family devotion can also go too far, swallowing up individual identities. Think of the parents who willingly subsume themselves in their kids, and the kids who lack a sense of identity apart from their parents' expectations. Still, I think a lot of good comes from thinking of the other people in your family and having them there to think about. Pets and plants play an analogous role.  

Some Faith Required

The good news is that being altruistic really isn't that complicated. My friend Emma is not Mother Teresa; she's not a saint; she's a real person. In her generous behavior, Emma sees herself as just being polite. And I think it’s true that a big part of chivalry is manners—traditionally, manners governing the behavior of men toward women. Built into those manners is the idea that people should take care of each other: “After you”; “ladies first.” At the dinner table, manners dictate that you offer food to people around you before starting to eat, which is a formal way of making sure that everyone gets fed. As manners become ingrained in people, so does altruism. Though hopefully it won't go entirely unexamined, altruism is blessedly simple. It is based on the faith that putting others first is the right thing to do, the correct thing, not in the empirical sense but in the moral one.  

Too Much Independence?

This post is the first in a series of articles about social atomization in the US.

“Fasten your own oxygen mask before assisting others,” they tell you on airplanes. If you black out for lack of air, the logic goes, you won’t be able to help anyone at all, so look out for yourself first. Theoretically, the oxygen benefits should sort of trickle down—the instructions are rational—but I find it hard to imagine a mother who would not strap the lifesaver to her child’s face first.

The self-centered oxygen-mask instructions have become the standard approach to life and relationships in the US today. Accumulate a stable income of your own before starting a family. Put education and career before friendships and dates. If you do pursue relationships, make sure that they stand up to a cost-benefit analysis. Prioritize individual responsibilities over politics and causes.

It is a time when many people, of all economic classes, are struggling for air. From the Occupy Wall Street protesters who want jobs and places to live to Ivy Leaguers whose ideas of being situated involve university tenure, law-firm partnerships, establishment in top hospitals, etc., it seems as if everyone wants to move up; nobody is settled. It’s as if life has become a permanent state of emergency to which people respond by focusing on themselves. Not helping the situation is the tendency toward the collection of data on everything from SAT points earned to steps walked and stairs climbed; these empirical leanings place quantifiable personal achievements over imponderables of great importance, including such fuzzy abstractions as morals and ideals.

Taking care of oneself has become the cause and the struggle.

The Turn Toward Independence: A Shifting Cost-Benefit Analysis

Being independent is more important than it once was. In the past, women largely depended on men for financial support. A relationship was key to a woman’s stability. Now, at least in the Western world, unless the relationship leads to marriage, it risks undermining a woman’s individual stability by stealing her away from school and work.  What once was key to security is now a threat.

In the much-discussed New York Times article about “hookup culture,” or casual sex, among college students, reporter Kate Taylor described young women at the University of Pennsylvania as regarding “building their résumés, not finding boyfriends (never mind husbands), as their main job at Penn.”

 “We are very aware of cost-benefit issues and trading up and trading down,” Taylor quoted one student, “A,” as saying of relationships, “so no one wants to be too tied to someone that, you know, may not be the person they want to be with in a couple of months.” Another interviewed student saw her plans to go to law school as a blockade to starting a relationship in college.

I’m not interested in the sexual preferences of college students, nor do I think that one can extrapolate from news stories about the dating styles of women at Ivy League schools to US women in general. What interests me about the hookup culture articles is that they are an example of the way people prioritize individual achievements over relationships.

Young people not only defer dating; they also postpone marriage and childbirth. At the time of a 2009 Pew Research Center survey, 21 percent of Millennials (people who came of age around the millennium and were 18 to 29 at the time of the survey) were married, as compared to 29 percent of people of Generation X and 42 percent of Baby Boomers at the equivalent age, according to a Pew report on Milliennials. People also have children later and more often resort to assisted reproductive technologies, whose use doubled in the last decade, according to the CDC.

In delaying childbirth to establish themselves financially and professionally, parents subject reproduction to a cost-benefit analysis. A woman weighs the costs of declining fertility with the benefits of the career advances and savings that another full year at work could provide. Childbearing becomes a deliberate, rational act, as opposed to sex itself, which, despite whatever rational conversations about children may have taken place between partners, is in the moment, a sensual, intuitive thing. I certainly don’t say this to encourage unprotected sex and unplanned pregnancies; rather, I want to make the connection between rationalism and having children later in life.

Granted, weighing the costs and benefits of relationships is not a new thing but an old idea leftover from the days of marriages arranged to keep money in the family. The difference today is that the conclusion of the cost-benefit analysis is not "marry someone else" but “stay single.” New or not, the problem with these cost-benefit analyses is that they discount what can’t be measured, things like warmth of feeling and love, things that require a certain faith or reliance on intuition. Maybe relationships don’t make total sense. But do they need to?

Independently Poor

The employer-employee relationship has also weakened and turned to its own version of hooking up: part-time employment. Hiring a cohort of part-time employees gives a company the benefits of having employees they are needed without the cost and commitment of responsibilities like paying for health insurance or contributing to retirement funds. Part-time work, often without benefits, is on the rise according to The New York Times Economix blog and other sources (though the rise described has to do with the Great Recession and not necessarily with a longer-term trend), and many of those who work part time do so not by choice but because they cannot find full-time work.

More generally and beyond the most recent recession, with the widening gap between rich and poor and the decline of middle-income jobs, people can depend less on their employers for economic security. Globalization did away with the idea of US factory work (à la Ford Motor Company) that paid a living wage. Downton Abbey-style live-in help (though of course Downton Abbey doesn’t represent the US or reality), in which families of servants counted on employment and room and board from wealthy families, is relegated to television and the homes of the unusually rich. Call it the employer-employee relationship or call it the relationships among the economic classes: the relationship between the rich and poor is dysfunctional.  The weakening of class distinctions may give some people a chance at the American dream; it may also make life harder for those who remain on the lower rungs of the workforce.

***

On both individual and societal levels, we are failing to cooperate and work together. Much of this probably has to do with the Great Recession and scarcity of resources—in case of an emergency, fasten your own mask first. But as I’ll discuss in a subsequent post, there was a time when altruism, or helping another at one’s own expense, was an ideal to which even the elite college students were encouraged to aspire, whether or not doing so made sense. A state of emergency was a time not to hunker down but to stick out one’s neck and demonstrate one’s chivalry. In this time of too much independence, the ideals of chivalry and altruism have weakened.

There’s a cost to this tendency toward independence. Less dovetailing of lives. Loneliness. A sense that everything important depends on what happens to you and the resulting anxiety. Independent striving alone doesn’t account for anomie and similar complaints, as I’ll discuss in a subsequent article. Post-modernism, cynicism, and a preference for hard truths over ideals also contribute to the way things are, and no list of factors will ever fully capture culture.

I have no prescription for changing the way we live and certainly don’t want to return to a previous era. My only exhortation is that people not discount the immeasurable benefits that relationships of all kinds can bring to our lives.

Bleeding In Style

Bleeding on the page is something that students of writing are taught not to do. “While she’s not bleeding on the page,” a professor might say of some essay, “she gets across her melancholy by selecting vivid details.” To bleed on the page is to release a bolus of emotion, an uncontrollable gush, a repetitive torrent of self-pity. I can’t illustrate it with published examples, perhaps because the sanguinary submissions were rejected. I can, however, give some examples from my own writing, since I started thinking about bleeding on the page after I noticed myself doing it in my notebook (I had also taken to writing about myself, occasionally, in the third person):

Having given up on sleep, the writer settled onto the couch with her notebook, writing quickly in cursive and slashing out forbidden letters, half-written names. The messier the better. At five words or so per line, the pages were covered quickly, making it seem as if she had “gotten out” more than she would have in a notebook with wider pages and less space between the blue squiggles.

            Bleeding on the page might seem like just a catchy phrase, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to connect many of the questions and doubts I had about writing, specifically, about style, which I would define as the way a writer chooses to present information or ideas to a reader.            

The antithesis of style, bleeding on the page involves no choice and serves no reader. A means of excreting misery, it has a certain literalness, as if rather than evoking woundedness, you provide a blood sample. Though this release may serve the author, it doesn’t consider the reader at all. In thinking about what was “wrong” with bleeding on the page, I came to appreciate style.

I’m sure that some proportion of readers will question my definitions–always great sources of confusion. I remember talking with friends on Friday night about who within our group of school acquaintances had “drunk the Kool-Aid.” After going on for a while about who had drunk it, we realized that we couldn’t agree on exactly what “having drunk the Kool-Aid” actually meant.

But however you define it, style is one of the most basic aspects of writing. To those who have drunk the—ehem, studied writing, it’s given that writers think about their audience and write in what, to the uninitiated, might seem a calculated way to communicate to that audience. I now know that all writing possesses style, even if the style mimics spontaneous speech or thought. Yet I did not always know that.

A college biology major, I wasn’t introduced to style until graduate school, where I studied journalism and read A Room of One's Own for my elective about essays. It did not make a good first impression.  

When I learned that Virginia Woolf’s celebrated essay, so conversational and spontaneous in tone, was more stylized than genuine, I felt as if I had just bitten into a beautiful apple and gotten a mouthful of wax. It seemed counterintuitive, like fake fruit or buying plastic flowers in the spring. Why should Woolf work to sound as if she’s just speaking her mind? Why should she labor, while preparing to deliver a lecture about women and fiction, to make it sound as if she just happened to recall the day when she walked along the river and then was told to stay off the turf and couldn’t use the library and then had a dinner of stewed prunes? Perhaps my true question was, or is, ‘You mean I can’t just write what I’m thinking and sound good?’

The attitude that leads to asking such a question is, I think, the same one that leads to bleeding on the page, some blend of selfishness and naïveté. There was a time in my writing life when no distinction lay between what I wrote for myself, in my diary, and what I wrote for publication, since I had published almost nothing, and the things that I did intend to publish were rejected. Writing was just writing and I tried, in my naïve way, to make it good writing, which I defined as saying what I thought in the clearest way possible. Implicitly, I meant “the way that seems clearest to me.” As “writing was writing,” my voice was my voice. I thought of it as something to develop, like a muscle, and that once it was mature, the words it chose would be the right ones. Bleeding on the page epitomizes this way of writing: its aim is self-expression, not communication.

Consciously or not, I had imagined or hoped that Woolf and David Foster Wallace, another extemporaneous-sounding writer, had developed their voices so that when they sat down to let their thoughts wander, what came out was A Room of One’s Own or A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. The idea of writing in a particular way to have a particular effect on an audience struck me as deceptive and manipulative. I felt duped to learn, for example, that Woolf wasn’t displaying genuine modesty when she suggested that the reader or listener could “throw the whole of it into the wastepaper basket” but, rather, was stooping to make that reader feel at ease.

Alas, it’s true: Virginia Woolf is not really making conversation in A Room of One’s Own; her epistolary essay Three Guineas is not a real letter; A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again isn’t actually David Foster Wallace’s minute-by-minute thoughts about his time on the cruise ship, provided by some sci-fi thought-transcription service. Santa Claus is not real, either. Style can feel like deception on one level. On the other hand, everyone should know that pieces of writing are just pieces of writing, essays, composed at desks and tables, meant to communicate certain ideas to readers. To make them seem like conversations or diary entries or stream-of-consciousness thoughts or anything requires style.

            Maybe style is less add-on than necessity. Without it, all a writer can do is confess immediate feelings, which, in the extreme, is exactly what bleeding on the page is.

I’m trying to forget you. I think about you every time I pick up a book or a pen or…I would not have tried to cry on your shoulder. But my cool letters lie: I cry about you on other people’s shoulders.

Confession has its limits. Even when high emotions are involved, something beyond literal confession is necessary in order to capture the grief of fictional characters or to recall our past selves or to temper present grief to levels befitting a public persona.

Me 1: This is going on and on. I’m not sure what this is. As literature, it is bleeding on the page. 

Me 2: But I am bleeding! Why not put it on the page? 

Me 1: Go to a hospital.

Bleeding on the page has more than limits: it has real problems. It is not written at a desk after breakfast; it’s written in the middle of the night, between bouts of crying, and this is not an advantage but a handicap.

Writing from emotion is something Virginia Woolf has quite a lot to say about, and I have come to agree with her stance. Woolf thinks that it is wrong to write in a state of high emotion because it prevents one from “think[ing] of things in themselves.” In a vivid scene from A Room of One’s Own, Woolf goes to the library to research women and fiction and, as she reads tomes with titles like The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex, she starts to doodle her impression of the author, a man whose “expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained.” She later gives these volumes up for “worthless” because “they had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.”

The failure to think of things on their own is not unique to men or to history. In the past (A Room of One’s Own was published in 1929), Woolf believes, resentment hobbled women's writing by getting in the way of clear thinking. Charlotte Bronte, she writes, may have had this problem. Woolf quotes a passage from Jane Eyre and then comments that its sentences seem to contain some barred emotion trying to escape: “If one reads them over and marks that jerk in them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius expressed whole and entire. Her books will be deformed and twisted. She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters.” Today, women still write of themselves from defensive positions in “explaining” their choices.

In the scribblings that punctuate this essay—“writing quickly in cursive and slashing out forbidden letters, half-written names”—I am guilty of a similar crime. This notion of “getting out” something by writing is exactly what Woolf advises against. But hold on: Woolf was talking about published books, here. I am talking about a diary. Isn’t it okay to be self-centered in your own private notebook? I don't think so, both because, as I said, I tend to hold all my writing to the same standards and because being in an emotional state, period, is bad for writing. “I think about you every time I pick up a book or a pen.” Oh dear. The ideal writer, in Woolf’s view, has nothing to get out, no misery to excrete, and thinks of nothing but her subject when she picks up her stylus. As Mary Gordon writes in her 1981 foreword to A Room of One’s Own, “The clarity of heart and spirit that [Woolf] attributes to writers like Shakespeare and Jane Austen who have expressed their genius ‘whole and entire’ demands a radical lack of self that might be required of a saint.”

Virginia Woolf thought that writing with a clear head was essential and bleeding on the page, anathema. But if you are writing with a clear head, then emotions you do express have to be fabricated, recreated, and the argument against bleeding on the page becomes an argument for style.

I began to wonder what would happen if a writer chose not to bleed on the page to but to write “in the style of” bleeding on the page. I think that in Woolf’s view, the only acceptable time to write in a “bleeding on the page style” is when one is not at all upset but one’s character, including the narrator of a first-person essay, is. For Woolf, style has is not just about aesthetics; it has an almost moral element.

I'm not going to go into Susan Sontag's ideas on style, but I can't resist mentioning here that Sontag believed that in order for an act to be moral, it had to involve choice. In her essay "On style," she discusses the way even art that seems transgressive is moral because it develops one's sensibility and extends our bounds of thought. "It is sensibility," she continues, "that nourishes our capacity for moral choice and prompts our readiness to act, assuming that we do choose, which is a prerequisite for calling an act moral, and are not just blindly and reflexively obeying."  Writing with style, that is, writing deliberately, is the moral way, in that view, while bleeding on the page is not.

Anyway, style may be necessary, obligatory and the alternative to bad writing. But what’s good about it? I need to know because something still bothers me about the whole thing: I still don’t like the idea of fake flowers. Maybe the problem lies in the analogy. The writer of stylized words isn’t buying sentences off the shelf; the writer is creating them. Maybe instead of comparing stylized writing to fake flowers from the dollar store, a better analogy would be to hand-painted blossoms. There, the advantage of a style is clear. It lets the artist create things as they choose instead of accepting what reality provides. Wouldn’t you rather have Van Gogh’s sunflowers?

Style lets a writer tailor her prose, and one way to do that is to write for a particular audience:  to think about readers already know, what information you can give them and what kind of language they are likely to respond to. In that way, style, which I once saw as manipulative, seems accommodating.

It can also convey ideas by embedding metaphors in the very structure of a piece of writing. For example, I once wrote an essay (unpublished) where some parts were in the style of a play. I had thought about making it a play altogether and was advised against it. I wasn’t a playwright, and the essay would not have worked well as a play. Yet giving it that style improved the essay because it helped me show the reader that what was happening was like a play. By combining the forms, I gave the piece more wiggle room and leeway to be its own thing. It was admittedly not quite a play and not quite a memoir and I hope that, in the reader’s mind, it finds a legitimate existence somewhere between the two.

On the subject of metaphor: In the introduction to The Broken Estate, a collection of James Wood’s literary criticism, Wood says something about fiction that expresses the power of creating something in the style of another. Wood describes a scene from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. Two parent characters, each in a lidded bin, are talking to their son, Hamm, through their servant, Clov. It's a surreal situation. When the mother, Nell, dies, and no more sound issues from her bin, Wood comments on how much it moves him even though Nell isn’t a real mother, even though the scene is “not quite” like reality: “This ‘not quite’ is a big enough connection between my real world and Beckett’s imagined world,” he writes.  “Perhaps what this scene reveals is that representation needs only a very small point of connection, and the smaller the point of impact, the more acute the effect.”

What is it about this "small point of connection" that gives it such potency? Maybe the answer lies with the reader’s imagination. The more abstract the art, the more the reader or audience member can fill in. Everyone has a unique connection to a piece of art—everyone will connect to Endgame’s parents, Nell and Nagg, in a slightly different way because they draw on different memories of different parents, which they can superimpose on the abstract figures onstage. The abstract is more accessible than the literal.

Style is, in some way, a form of abstraction. Something “in the style of” something else is “not quite” like the real thing but evokes it, limns it. Maybe literalness is the ultimate fault of bleeding on the page. It is not Virginia Woolf's spider web of fiction “attached ever so lightly, perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners,” four small points of connection to reality. Bleeding on the page is so bound to real life that it seems, to use Woolf’s description of science, “dropped like a pebble on the ground.” Woolf was writing about fiction, but I think this concept applies to essays, too; though they are more fact-bound than fiction, essays are still works of art.

The bleeding-on-the-page essay cannot choose when to touch down: it is practically bent over, burdened by its literalism. I remember getting a graded essay back from a teacher and seeing “too much” written where I had added one detail too many. If one extra detail weighs down an essay, then you can image the sagging of an essay that bleeds on the page.

How would a “bleeding on the page” style be different?  It would show the reader, a particular reader, what heartsickness is like, presenting a birds-eye view of the diarist on the couch, not just a transcript of her writings. It would give just the right number of details and leave room for the reader’s imagination to do its job. It would be written not in a state but in Woolf’s “white light of truth.”

I wish I could be more dramatic about the end of my journey toward style, but in fact, I came to realize these things not while walking along a river, not at gunpoint, not while flipping through books at the British Museum, especially not crying over a notebook. Yes, I read Woolf, Wood and Beckett; yes, the occasional idea came while jogging alongside cornfields, but I often couldn’t remember the good idea when I got home from my run. The real ‘ahah’ moments about style and bleeding on the page came at a desk writing an essay.

Wayne Koestenbaum’s Descriptions

I distinctly remember, in college, going to talk to my creative nonfiction professor, suggesting that I write a personal essay about my mother, and the professor pointing out that my love for my mom (which was the gist of it) would not an essay make. “How about my favorite piece of music? How about ballet class pianists? Music boxes?” I would later ask myself in a similar vein. Since then, I’ve explored plenty of conflicts and tensions in my writing, but I’ve held onto that desire to write about things I love. That’s why Wayne Koestenbaum’s My 1980s & Other Essays (2013) makes me so happy.

With titles such as “Hart Crane’s Gorgeousness,” “Frank O’Hara’s Excitement,” “Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sentences,” and “Roberto Bolaño’s Tone,” some large proportion of his essays in this collection are about things he likes and why he likes them, chronicles of the search for that telling though not obvious detail that makes a work pop. In one of Koestenbaum’s essays, “Epitaph on Twenty-Third Street,” a paean to a poet, he describes waking up one day with this task in mind: “My aesthetic health depends on describing accurately what is remarkable about James Schuyler’s poetry.” Granted, he’s not writing about his mom; he is writing about works of art, features of culture that many relate to and anyone can Google. Still, it gratifies me that he writes about the things he adores. 

In this cup-half-full approach, Koestenbaum is following Susan Sontag’s advice for criticism as expressed in her 1964 essay “Against interpretation.” Sontag argues against looking for hidden meaning and metaphorical equivalents in artwork. As alternatives to hermeneutics, she recommends "more attention to form in art," and adds that "equally valuable would be acts of criticism that would supply a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art."

Let me say up front that Koestenbaum is wont to interpret, particularly when it comes to poetry, and in that respect, he is certainly not following Sontag’s advice. It’s the latter part of Sontag’s recommendation, the idea of a “loving description,” that Koestenbaum exemplifies in many of his writings and most strikingly in “Cary Grant, Nude,” in which Kustenbaum imagines himself in the room face-to-face with the Cary Grant portrayed in a series of paintings by Kurt Kauper. Koestenbaum describes the paintings, formally and in great detail via this imagined meeting between him and the actor. The results are often funny.

Koestenbaum never lets us forget that “Cary Grant Nude” is a painting, and his descriptions can be patently formal: 

“Formally, the painting’s principle members are rectangles: fireplace bricks; wedge of tile on which Cary Grant stands; sections of white mantelpiece mirror; segments of bureau; outlet; baseboard; book spine. Cary Grant’s head is itself a rectangle, as is the trim portion of abdominal infrastructure we glimpse through his skin. His tan line reveals the ghost of rectangular bathing trunks.” 

But we're formally describing someone with a boxer tan. Humor emerges from the clash of the formal and the mundane. Another source of laughs is that what seems normal in a painting can seem ridiculous in real life. In the first section of the piece, called "Cary Grant Nude by the Fireplace," Koestenbaum refers to Kauper's "Cary Grant#1." Koestenbaum describes the painting as if he is standing in the painter’s place but the imagined scene is not the painting of a portrait but something quotidian. Cary Grant just happens to be "nude":

“I never expected to see Cary Grant nude. 

I’m not turned on; he’s not hirsute."

 Koestenbaum's observations:

          “His right tit has begun to sag.          

          Someone has groomed his pubic patch, shaved his balls, powdered them with baby talc.            

          His long, expressive fingers appear deft as a fey banker’s, an insurance executive’s. I picture these hands writing Wallace Stevens’ poems.”

In looking at a painting, the nudity, the grooming of the subject's genitals, hardly register. Yet to encounter such things on a regular day would of course be bizarre. In the second section, “Cary Grant Nude Walking Toward Me,” based on "Cary Grant#3," Koestenbaum makes a similar juxtaposition: “I can almost feel how warm this palazzo must be, to allow Cary Grant to walk around nude,” Koestenbaum writes, as if Grant isn’t posing for a portrait but just hanging out, naked. But Koestenbaum doesn’t say naked. He uses, and reuses again and again, the word 'nude,' the artistic equivalent of unclothed. The word keeps the reader with one foot in the world of the painting even as the rest of the essay has us imagining the odd scene between Koestenbaum and Grant.

In interpreting the paintings, Koestenbaum obviously goes against Sontag's main thread of advice in "Against interpretation." Alternate meanings emerge everywhere; for example, in "Cary Grant Nude on the Daybed," based on the aptly-named "Cary Grant #2," a cigarette continues the line of a penis and an ashtray stands in for an anus or a urinal. Wrinkles in the blanket parallel the ashtray/anus/urinal. 

Another layer of symbolism is the cracked open window with its “black curved lever [that] allows the eye to consider opening the window that will never open. That lever’s black curve, almost alphabetic, or like a newly invented piece of punctuation, doesn’t touch the sea’s horizon line, though it almost does. That averted intersection arouses erotic expectancy.” He finds other almost-touchings in the painting: “The fact that his elbow will never touch the curtain means that I as viewer (or as the one who is seduced by Cary Grant) will never adequately grasp the painting’s meanings, will never make my peace with realism.” Nor will he sleep with Cary Grant. Koestenbaum sleeping with Cary Grant is a metaphor for fully appreciating a work of art. A meta-metaphor.
         But I don't mean to criticize Koestenbaum for interpreting art; I would argue that since interpretation is part of the way that Koestenbaum appreciates artwork, it is integral to any "loving description" of it.

On the other hand, "loving" is not exactly the first word that comes to mind when I think of Susan Sontag's criticism: "arch" and "harsh" come more readily. But Sontag suggests description over interpretation, not praise over criticism. Before "loving," Sontag requires descriptions to be "accurate" and "sharp."  Her writing has incredible nuance; in her articles, praise and criticism coexist. For example, "Notes on 'Camp'" is a kind and detailed description of what she calls a sensibility, but Sontag's views of it are not entirely positive: "I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can." Hers is tough love. 

 I didn’t think much of "Cary Grant Nude" on first reading. It seemed like a clever conceit. It also seemed like a lot of effort to devote to paintings that don't particularly interest me. Was Koestenbaum really so taken with these paintings? The practical motivation for the essay probably had to do with the publication of a book of Kurt Kauper paintings in which the piece first appeared. But for me, what’s remarkable about the essay is that I connect it to Sontag. Without that link, I would not be writing about it. Who knows if the connection existed in Koestenbaum's mind, but I find it sweet, a subtle tribute to a writer he revered. 

The essay "Susan Sontag: Cosmophage," also in his new book, is Koestenbaum's overt homage. He had these words for her: "Cosmophagic, Sontag gobbled up sensations, genres, concepts. She swallowed political and aesthetic movements. She devoured roles: diplomat, filmmaker, scourge, novelist, gadfly, essayist, night owl, bibliophile, cineaste...She tried to prove how much a human life--a writer's life--could include." 

Koestenbaum, too, is a cosmophage, who savors taste through sentences and takes care to compliment the cook. 

Found Art: A Garden For Its Own Sake

"All art is quite useless," Oscar Wilde once wrote. Immanuel Kant thought of taste as disinterested satisfaction and beauty as having no external purpose. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Susan Sontag and doubtless others I haven't heard of elaborated this idea that art is something about which the viewer is emotionally detached. It's not only that art inspires or guarantees detachment in the viewer; he bears some responsibility for his experience: "However much the reader or listener or spectator is aroused by a provisional identification of what is in the work of art with real life, his ultimate reaction--so far as he is reacting to the work as a work of art--must be detached, restful, contemplative," Sontag wrote in her essay "On style."

Yesterday, The New York Times published an article about another kind of purposeless treasure. "The Good-for-Nothing Garden" portrays a man, James Golden, who raises a garden that is useless by design. "I don’t want it for anything utilitarian at all," he told the Times reporter, Michael Tortorello. Golden considers the purpose of New Jersey garden, called Federal Twist, to be "aesthetic, ornamental, even emotional” and sees gardens as places "to sit in, think about, look at the sky in, live in,'" Tortorello reported. Golden seems to respond to his garden the way great thinkers believe people should respond to art. 

Appreciating things for their own sake is endangered in a world in which more and more aspects of life come with a cost-benefit tag. People make attempts to justify art, but in doing so, they risk undermining it altogether. For example, a recently published study found, to speak very broadly, that reading literature makes people more empathetic. In an NPR story, study coauthor David Corner Kidd is quoted as saying, "We're having a lot of debates right now about the value of the arts, the value of the humanities," and goes on to say that empirical evidence, such as that provided by his study, about the value of the arts is missing from discussions of whether or not to fund them. But looking for the value of art is missing the point. Once you discover how art can be useful and approach it with that mindset, it's no longer art. In the same vein, once a person starts visiting a garden in order to...do anything but "visit a garden," the aesthetic quality is weakened.

A potential retort to the "garden as art" idea is that Golden feels emotions in his garden and is therefore not emotionally detached. Yet to say that art involves emotional detachment doesn't mean that it inspires no feelings; on the contrary, art is known for tapping into our emotions. Emotional detachment means, I think, that the emotions inspired by art are separated from the world outside the artwork. When I listen to music, for example, I feel love...for music. It's a contained emotion. Paintings of nudes viewed as artwork, do not (in theory) inspire desire for sex--something external to the art--the way pornography does. There's also something to be said for a state of contemplation allowing feelings to rise to the surface, ones that may have little to do with the thing contemplated. 

Seeking nature as a place to think and reflect is so common it's cliché. Some poets really do get ideas on walks in the woods. Staring at the ocean is my form of natural contemplation, and it is an aesthetic, emotionally-detached experience. The movement of the waves has nothing to do with me. I don't affect the ocean (in that moment), and it won't react to me. A lobsterman might not be able to see it that way. 

To some extent, beauty is in the mindset of the beholder.

UPDATE: 10/21/13: In the last paragraph of "On style," Sontag addresses the idea of the aesthetic experience outside what's traditionally seen as art: "So many items in our experience which could not be classed as works of art possess some of the qualities of art objects. Whenever speech or movement or behavior or objects exhibit a certain deviation from the most direct, useful, insensible mode of expression or being in the world, we may look at them as having a 'style,' and being both autonomous and exemplary."

The Einstein of Ballet Class: Pianist Ai Isshiki

               Imagine the minutes before the start of ballet class. The dancers are lying on the specially-surfaced gray floor, the contours of their thin bodies hidden by baggy warm-up wear, limbs radiating out in all manner of stretching positions. Those who know each other talk quietly. Those new to class just stretch, and wait. An unusual figure appears in the studio, not dressed for class, and walks across the floor in street shoes. Soon, the character makes his identity clear: he sits down at the piano and begins his own method of warming up, which is strident and loud. It is the ballet pianist, the sole musician in a room full of dancers, at once essential and alienated.

Ai Isshiki is a ballet pianist. She is also a composer. She has been accompanying classes for four or five years, first in Boston, now, in New York, at such studios as the Mark Morris Dance Center, in Brooklyn, and Ballet Arts, in Manhattan. No archetype, Ai does not represent ballet pianists as a group; however, I know from dancing in classes she has accompanied that she is a remarkable individual, and I wanted to try to see ballet class from her perspective. I interviewed her in a café before Kenny Larson’s intermediate ballet class at Ballet Arts. These are my impressions, those of a sometimes dancer, of ballet pianists and of my time with Ai (pronounced like eye). 

          Ballet class is the bread and butter of dance, a daily ritual that underpins the athleticism and artistry that we see onstage. Class depends, in turn, on music. While some classes use recorded piano music, in cities, a live pianist is a standard and essential component of every class. It’s also a role that’s easily overlooked. The dancers watch and listen to the instructor, the only one who talks during the lesson; they watch, gesture and whisper to each other. Though they hear the piano, their only real interaction with the pianist may be a curtsy or bow during the clapping at the end of class.*

Class is a living, panting, grinning, sighing, sweating thing. The pianist's beat holds it all together, leading synchronized motion in a room of otherwise independent bodies. Body to body, class to class, sameness and individuality coexist. The sequence of combination types—pliés, tendus—is the same for every class, but the details vary. The teacher shows each combination, saying the steps in rhythm, and while the dancers try to memorize the routine, the pianist decides what to play. Then the dancers do the exercise on each side, and the process repeats, from combination to combination, barre to center, culminating with leaps from one corner of the room to the other, the “grand allegro.” Within the 90-minute ballet class, Ai may play 15 to 25 different pieces.

How does the pianist choose the music? It can be quite simple: There are books of ballet class music, with songs eight or 16 bars long and organized by exercise, and Ai bought one of these when she started playing for ballet classes. She was not content to play by the book for long. Ai is determined not to play the same thing twice throughout the day—a tall order when you play up to four classes daily, as Ai does.

“For a musician like me who doesn’t wanna repeat—anything—I just needed to have thousands of repertories. I went to the library every day—I worked at the Harvard library before this free score Internet developed—I went to the library and I copied.”  

Ai is attuned to how dancers respond to her music and chooses what to play based, in part, on her sense of the energy in the room. “I see air—it sounds creepy—I see air sinking down or spinning up whenever I play and then however dancers react to it.” As we talk, I start to see the studio as more than a floor to dance on but as this rectangular prism of energy in four dimensions: dancers move through three-dimensional space according to the meter of the pianist.

Different music “gives different feelings to the space,” Ai says. She remembers one teacher calling her, the pianist, “the Einstein of the place.” That teacher was Marcus Schulkind, dancer, choreographer, teacher, and founding director of Green Street Studios in Cambridge. I asked him about this phrase, and he explained that the pianist, by setting the tempo, determines the relation, or relativity, between time and space.

            “Maybe I can tell you how I got hooked,” Ai says, “the first time that I thought, ‘this is really cool.’” The class was going okay. The energy in the room was low. It was time for the grand allegro. Ai, who is also a composer, decided to try something: she started scoring the movements, playing a different motif for each step, instead of playing a tune. “The dancers, the energy came up and the air, I don’t know how you say, sparkled?” Ai tells me, clasping her hands to her chest in that classic pose of glee. “It was very good. The first time in the ninety minutes that the music and dance got in tune or gave each other something to inspire.”

This interaction with other people is something Ai craves as an artist. 

“I never wanted to be a ‘pianist pianist.’” Ai tells me.  It took a little while for her to explain to me what that meant.“You can do everything on piano. It’s not supposed to be an issue. You can cover the whole range of orchestra, which is wonderful but which is horrible because you don’t need anybody to play with you.” Ai, who also plays in a band and composes, likes to play with other people. Though in a dance class, Ai is the only pianist in the room, she isn’t exactly playing alone—she’s playing with the dancers. They are interdependent. Her music—time—affects their movements through space and, the reverse is also true.

"ai is a very wonderful accompanist," Marcus told me in an email. "good range of music and styles, very in the moment attentive and caring; very connected to the process and very sensitive to the structure and process of training.”

Ai is is seated, barefoot, at an upright piano made of blond wood in a rectangular room full of ballet dancers.

There is a handwritten sign on the piano:

“PLEASE Do Not play the piano so Hard

Be Gentle.”

On the piano’s stand, in place of a paper score, is an iPad.

Barre is over, and center is underway in Kenny’s class at Ballet Arts, which began right after our interview. It is time for the “petit allegro,” a series of foot-twisting small jumps.

“We’ll mark it with music,” Kenny says, snapping his fingers to indicate a tempo. “And.” Ai begins to play after Kenny gives the upbeat. “Two groups this tempo, two groups a little faster.” With a jump on every beat, a dancer can bounce up and down the whole time with what’s called “ballon.” If you don’t quite get the steps though, you feel stuck to the floor. After the dancers had all done the combination at the first tempo, Kenny claps a faster beat, and Ai immediately speeds up. It is a bit fast for the dancers, but that’s the point.

The pianist, sometimes in contrast to the dancers, is a professional. One of the reasons that it’s possible to overlook the pianist is that the pianist rarely messes up—noticeably.

The dancers gather in the back corner. Ai starts to play, and in groups of five or six, the dancers begin running, jumping, bouncing across the room. It is the grand allegro. Ai plays a piece so rousing that it looked like her left hand is bouncing up and down on the piano as the dancers leap; her hand completely flops over at the wrist as it comes high off the keys. The music rumbles with anticipation as one group finishes, with a split leap toward the front corner, and the next group gets into position.

At the end of the class, Ai puts on her sandals, walks across the studio past the dancers, stretching or going over tricky steps, and goes on to her next engagement.

* Of course, the ballet pianist is not always overlooked. Many teachers and students do acknowledge the pianist at the end of class. One teacher I know signals the start of each combination by thanking the pianist by name. Ai is greatly appreciated by the teachers and students she works with. Yet a coupling of mystery and necessity still hangs over my impressions of the ballet pianist as a figure. I'm lucky to have gotten to know Ai a little bit better.