is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Not Normal.
This morning my thought upon waking was: how strange is it that I'm about to be 40 years old and I really have never been to a bridal shower, a baby shower, or a bachelorette party of the normal kind? Caroleen's bachelorette party doesn't count because whenever I tell people what we did for it they look at me like I'm weird, because it wasn't a normal bachelorette party. I'm tempted to put the word normal in quotation marks to draw attention to it, but I think it operates just fine on its own. To be normal means to conform to norms. There are norms that say going to an amusement park is not a bachelorette party, just like there are norms that say that your family gets a generous discount if they stay in guest rooms on campus but your friends do not. Neither of those norms tend to be questioned in this society, so it's safe to call them norms.
I am looking forward to going to the bridal shower and bachelorette party that I am helping to plan for my sister, so do not get me wrong.
Also, there is nothing wrong with norms. We need them. We all operate by means of a number of them constantly. But today I'm thinking about what it's like when you find yourself outside of them.
Anyway, I was laying in bed thinking about this, and thinking about how glad I am that my sister's friends are involved in helping me plan her bridal shower and bachelorette party, so I don't miss the boat on planning games and penis-themed outings, etc., because I want her to have the events she really wants (and what she wants is already somewhere between the norm and the not-norm) and am full of a sense that I have no idea what I'm doing... when I looked at my SK and got a message from my sister consisting of a link and the question, "why didn't you tell me!?" I clicked on the link and it sent me to an article in the New York Times with the headline "Jill Stauffer Is Married." Ha. Apparently the daughter of one of the Stauffer Chemical family branches got married to some other richy-rich of the Northeast. I read the whole article. When I got to the end I thought how strange it was that the article was all about the parents and not about the married people. Then I realized that "Jill Stauffer" is now "Mrs. Cobbs," so much of that content was about her, not her mother-in-law. Ha. I guess it would have been helpful to me if the headline had also stated, "Jill Stauffer Is Now Mrs. Cobbs."
It would be a hardship for me to have to pull off two monosyllabic names at once. Jill Cobbs. My Ass. Sure, Liz Dunn does it just fine. But that's because her real name is Elizabeth.
Not that I've ever really thought I'd change my name if I got married. Not that I've ever really thought about it! Because I am not normal. When you're a rebellious teenager and you say that you are not normal, it's an act of defiance, a way of showing how different you are from all the other snowflakes around. But when you're not normal because you're a 40-year-old unmarried woman with a Ph.D. and a friend-based family structure, it just means that you're not normal.
The difference between the two is, I think, in how one inhabits one's life. The non-normality of youth is exhausting in its need to inhabit its non-normality. One has to dress for it, speak for it, think about it, think through it, be it, ha, make it an ontology. But 40-year-old woman non-normality has already taken care of all that for you. You are who you are, you live your life, hopefully fairly happily, and your attention is drawn to your own non-normality by the outside world, not your inner world. You get reminded that you are not-normal when your friends have to pay double what your non-existent in-laws would have to pay at the campus guest rooms, or when you realize that you won't be included in some social activities in QB because you're unmarried and no one knows what to do with you. You might feel bad about that occasionally, but if you do, it's mostly in a way that regrets how the world gets divided into couples in a certain way. By which I mean not that I do not like couples or that I do not see how lovely it is at times to be in one. It's that the world gets divided into couples in a certain way. Let's call that way: normal.
Normal couples become for each other a self-contained unit. They don't need to socialize outside the unit, or, if they do, their social experiences are oriented around couplehood, with other couples, or doing things couples do. Such couples think it is strange if a single interloper wants to establish a friendship ritual like "TV Night" or "Restaurant Night" or anything else that might tie their social life to something outside the unit. It's not even that I think these self-contained couples have made the wrong choices. It's just that the choices they do make (many times without thinking of them as choices, of course) are precisely what make me not-normal. It's what makes it difficult to be a a 40-year-old unmarried woman with a Ph.D. and a friend-based family structure, separated from that structure. Those normal couples can't see my life at all. If they ever took the time to try to represent it to themselves, they would have no idea what to picture.
Believe me, I've tried to institute some friendship rituals here, and I tried in Amherst as well, and, well, so far it hasn't worked. None of this is to say that I didn't have lots of fun getting to know a few new people in Amherst, or here in QuakerBubble during this first year here. And, to be fair, in Amherst much of my 'failure' had nothing to do with couple-structure, but had to do with illness and grief and other forms of understandable self-absorption. It just saddens me at times that aging people, in or outside of couples, so rarely allow new friendships to lift them even the slightest bit out of their understandable self-absorption.
Levinas writes about transcendence, and that makes everyone think he is talking about religion. But when Levinas uses the word transcendence, he means transcendence of concern for self-only, being lifted out of self-absorption. The fact of other people pulls you out of yourself, and makes you respond to them, which is a form of responsibility for them. We are always responding to others because we are covered with sense organs and are vulnerable to the presence of others and also to our thoughts about them. Sometimes that responsibility can be burdensome, but other times it is precisely what makes life worth living. There is nothing more depressingly self-oppressive than the way in which each one of us so easily can remain self-absorbed even in a world where it is impossible not to be affected by other people. We are oppressive to ourselves when we don't let the needs of others 'oppress' us. Part of Levinas' point is that only a form of thought (or non-thought) that has a really bad definition of freedom would think of owing things to others as 'oppression' rather than 'the human condition.' And yet I'm willing to bet that most of us, when we form questions to ourselves about why we have duties, say something like "how did I ever come to owe anything to anyone?!" By being born, OK? We are asking the wrong questions. We have been taught the wrong things.
Sure, it's nice when we live within fairly stable political communities which allow us to choose what we owe, the commitments by which we would like to be 'oppressed' or, more fittingly, held or moved. But every stable political community is full of the kinds of injustice that result from that very stability, let's say, the tears the civil servant can't see, the unfairness performed by 'formal equality,' etc. Here being not-normal is just the tiniest example of a pain that can't be seen because it is not represented. That is why the 'stable political community' can't be left to weigh only on its own account, because that will always produce injustice. And so you are responsible. But you should be thankful for that. Because only in that way are you freed from the burdensome self-absorption of concern for self-only. Only in that way can you actually be part of a world.
Being freed from self-absorption is why we all want to be in love and in couples anyway, right? To love someone is to care about more than yourself. But the structure of two, while lovely, is inherently unethical, in that it doesn't care a whit for the world. That is part of its grace, that it is protection from the larger world. But that is also its danger. It stands for oblivion of the human condition, that we have to live together, and that we have the power to make other people's lives happier, or less desperate, or more desperate, with our choices.
It's not that this account of how the world works asks you to be a saint giving everything to others. Instead it points out that it is part of the structure of human happiness to be pulled out of concern for self-only. We aren't only about self-preservation. The things we (probably) most admire about the world could not have been built by people first and foremost concerned with self-preservation. But: admitting that we can't be concerned only with ourselves and have a world we desire is the same as admitting that we might owe things we wish we didn't owe. Maybe you think this point doesn't matter because I'm not normal.
Ha.
If you're wondering what it all means, this is as close to a prescription as I can get (and I have my reasons for avoiding giving prescriptions, as if making new norms were the only point here): Instead of asking "how did I ever come to owe anything to anyone?", ask yourself what you have to do with justice, or with forming a world larger than your own life. And know that the answer cannot be "nothing." All your choices end up mattering. Sure it is exhausting and barely possible always to try to think about everything. But if you tend to avoid thinking about such things, at least, on occasion, ask yourself what kinds of norms are made possible by that lack of thought.
Of course, norms are powerful, but they are not all-powerful. They make lots of lives invisible, but those invisible lives are still lives, lived to the full. Let us not forget that, either. I guess maybe it would be good if we reminded ourselves, every now and then, that what we can see has as much to do with norms as it does with what appears in our frame of vision. There's a lot we don't see even when we are looking directly at something, especially when that something is another person.
10:43 a.m. - April 22, 2006
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