Rilke 2
Not ready for love? The great poet says that’s only natural.
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May 14, 1904
…To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another:that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far into life, is–solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves. Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate–?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim on him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.
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The story of Dolores Martin-Woods, called Dee:
It was a little nineteenth century chic to be committed to a mental institution. Sure, they didn’t call them asylums anymore—asylums were where Batman villains went—but Inpatient Psychiatric Services was no less frightening in the image it called to mind. White walls, doctors with German accents, a file cabinet under lock and key containing the documentation forged by a rich and powerful man to sign over a boisterous, perfectly healthy girl. I was no woman in white, but it was unexpected that I should have been at Ravensglen Clinic. I was a physically healthy, fairly pretty, socially conscious, straight-A student at one of the top colleges in the country. My parents had given me the kind of comfortable life that constituted the American Dream. I had the potential to be anything and live anywhere. All I had to do was reach for what I wanted. Then an ill-timed breakdown knocked the whole house of cards to the ground. Madness could ruin lives that way. Even as I spent the prescribed eight weeks in the clinic, slowly working my way back to being my successful self, I feared that things were ruined forever.
Feeling she is not ready to return to college, Dee decides to go to live with her aunt in a small town in Utah called Revelation.
I saw my future in stark relief for the first time since leaving school. It stood like sun-fire stone arches in a desert, ancient monuments pointing me to the new path of a fresh life. Pioneers made a home out of nowhere. I would go there to build an existence of fearless ambition, mild moods, calm tempers, and a victorious ascent into full-grown, extraordinary me.
Dee appreciates finally getting to know her aloof aunt.
She was my mom’s youngest sister whose tumultuous time in high school had her sent off to a women’s college, sparking the inevitable assumption that my short-haired, single aunt would never introduce an uncle to the family. It had been difficult for Sally to live in the shadow of my mother, who saw herself as an infallible authority on everything. Sally could laugh about it now, for the most part.
Dee is upset, though, when she finds out that her mother had lied to Sally about why she left school.
The only thing I hated more than my disordered life was people saying things about me, about what I was going through, uninformed, as if they knew anything, as if they had any idea. I was flooded with memories– “How do you stay thin? I’m jealous!” the chorus rang at college. Nevermind the life-ending inability to function or the pleas of my friends: “Dee, I’m going to sit here until you finish your sandwich. You have to start eating again.” They just kept chirping, “You are so crazy!” as if it were a character quirk and not an illness that made me send e-mails to my best friend asking for a divorce. Strangers found my tears disturbing. “Officer, she’s fine. She wasn’t drinking, she’s just upset,” they had to explain before I was hauled off to the health center. “Every time I come in here, you’re always under the covers, facing the wall. Are you sure you’re okay?” my roommate wanted to ask. I could see it was on the tip of her tongue, but she stayed quiet and let me languish. My professors hardly guessed that I wasn’t sick with the flu. “I can give you an extension on the paper until the end of the week. I hope you feel better.” And still the chorus kept bleating: “Come out with us. You won’t be alone. It’ll be fun!” like I lived in some other reality where the vampire heartache hadn’t made fun impossible.
No one wanted to face the reality of my condition. I couldn’t blame them. If I wasn’t going to be normal, then I should have been some romantic conception of a woman gone mad. Instead, I was just a life-bungler. I botched even the simplest of things. I was a letdown. The details of my failure were too depressing to repeat, so my story was sanitized and reduced to a cliché. Yet, the real story, the one painfully written on my heart, never made it into the light of day. Outside of myself, it was trapped within the walls of Ravensglen. Only my therapists, after hours of working through it, could express some understanding of the story’s themes. But in the rest of the world? In college, in Revelation, in my childhood home—those issues didn’t exist in the same way. They just tricked people into thinking I was sullen or contemplative or crazy. Could I share them with anyone, explain them to the ones I cared about or might care about in the future? I was sure I couldn’t. So, one day, I knew, I was going to snap again. I was going to have to run away, farther, faster. My life would end with a frantic flight from myself. It had to.
Dee eventually befriends Maisy, a misfit who was sent to live with her aunt after a family tragedy. The two girls begin a series of conversations about the dark worldview they share and the reasons they are set apart from others.
“It’s kind of like we can see four dimensions and they’re living in three,” Maisy said.
“Like that book we had to read in Geometry–Flatland!”
“I haven’t taken Geometry yet. I had to repeat Algebra,” she mentioned.
“Oh. Well, I’m not a math geek either,” I added quickly. “It’s so pointless to someone who’s interested in literature.”
“I don’t know,” Maisy disagreed, “I think mathematical principles can be very symbolic in a literary way. Think about it: there are equations with no solution, zero in the denominator, something called an imaginary number which I don’t quite get, but which my calculator has a button for. There are all kinds of things that defy the rules and logic that math is based on. It can fail. Any human creation can fail.”
Maisy puzzled me. She was a sixteen-year-old from a remote Western state founded by peculiar religious fanatics and she spoke as if she had endured all of world history. She was a philosopher in the way some of my peers in college had been. Exposed to the brilliance of human thought, only the best people turned into philosophers. So, I wondered how this very young person could have such profound beliefs without ever being told to read the great works. She was a self-formed philosopher. I had never encountered one before. I was dazzled to the point of adoration and decided immediately that she was my Owen Meany, my Demian. My Rumpelstiltskin—she spun straw into gold.
Growing impatient, Dee’s parents make it clear that she needs to return to her East Coast life. Maisy is unsympathetic.
My mind kept revolving around one thorny thought. It wasn’t just my parents who wanted me to go back. If that had been the case, it might have been possible for me to fight them and buy more time in Revelation. The awful, inescapable truth was that I felt obligated all on my own. I didn’t enjoy looking like a failure. At the very least, I wanted to appear normal. I blamed my parents or the school for being unbending, but ultimately I was the one who was going to give in. I was always the one who surrendered—to madness, reality, life. I was a leaf in a stream. Some days I floated, some days I sank, but every day I bobbed inexorably along. Maisy could stand up and walk against the current, but not me.
I tried to explain this to her the next morning when we met up.
“Maybe it’s not what I want, but it’s going to happen anyway.”
“Bullshit,” Maisy replied.
“It’s true,” I insisted.
“Ever heard of resistance?”
“Yes, but that’s the problem. I can’t protest exactly. I want it to happen. I want to be normal.”
“Of all the things you could possibly want in this world, you want normal?” Maisy asked, taking off her big ironic sunglasses and looking at me with unadorned eyes.
I had never seen her without the signature black liner and heavy mascara. She looked younger and more vulnerable. I couldn’t help staring. She noticed and slid the glasses back into place.
“Normal is for losers,” she scoffed.
“Normal is for every other person on the planet,” I said.
“Dee, I don’t believe you.”
“I’m just admitting a fact.”
“So you’d seriously betray everything we’ve talked about and trot your way back to the same life that left you fucked over in a mental asylum?”
“Sorry I actually have to make real decisions!”
I put my hands on my hips.
“You’re not making a decision! You’re giving in.”
“Sometimes decisions are made for us.”
“No, Dee. This is completely in your hands. You’re just too scared to do anything about it. Do you know how rare it is to have a moment of actual choice? Why would you throw it away?”
“I have no choice!”
“You don’t even understand what choice means. And you were the one lecturing me on Satan’s power! Every event involves an act of choice, even when it looks like there is none. Especially when it looks like there is none! I had no choice in my sister dying, but I chose to react to it the way I did. I had no choice in coming to Marilyn’s, but I chose to be your friend. It wasn’t cosmic destiny that brought us together. It was the fact that you and I, independently of one another, decided to talk, hang out, whatever. Our individual wills collided.”
“Yeah, but we exist in a goddamn vacuum here!” I shouted, trying to break through the haze of Maisy’s speech. “This isn’t real life!”
“Why do you keep saying that? What’s not real about it?” Maisy demanded, growing angry.
“For one, neither of us is in school, though we both should be. Neither of us works. Neither of us pays for our food or shelter. We’re parasites. We talk philosophy and we claim we understand things beyond the grasp of everyone else but we’re cheating. We’re not really living.”
“So, what are you gonna do, Dee? Crawl back to ‘real life’?”
“Yeah, that is what I’m going to do.”
We glared at one another silently, fuming.
Does Dee leave Revelation? What happens to Maisy? You’ll just have to read the whole book!