Grass always greener

For millions of years, the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate has been burrowing like a mole under the North American plate.  At present, it's crawling eastward at only about a half inch per year, but over millions of years, those half-inches do add up.

The result -- in addition to many earthquakes -- has been the Cascade Range with its series of volcanic outbursts.

Last week I flew down to Santa Rosa to meet up with family.  Clouds covered the route over  Washington and Oregon.  But the clouds were high clouds and my plane -- a turbo-prop -- was flying at a much lower elevation than would a jet.  The clouds were above us, and the scenery was below.

The scenery was the Cascade Range, in all its February glory.  I was sitting at a window on the right side of the plane, and watched as one by one the volcanic peaks marched by -- brilliant snow cones and crags, rising out of forested hills.  First, of course, right out of Seattle, was Rainier.  Then Mt. Adams.  Then St. Helens, the mountain that served as the beacon of my childhood -- now, shrunken and devastated, a giant snow-lined crater scooped out of its once symmetrical cone. 

As we crossed the Columbia river into Oregon, the sharp peak of Mt. Hood (photo above) came into view.  Then Mt. Jefferson, and finally the complex of peaks known as the Sisters.

I gazed out my airplane window, realizing that, if I lived anywhere else in the world, I'd be willing to pay a heap of money to come visit this snow-peaked paradise.  And yet, there it lies all about me and -- for most days, most of the year -- I take it all for granted. 

Back in Seattle, I'll glance at Rainier out of the corner of my eye and shrug as I stroll along, daydreaming of walking through Central Park in New York.

A girl's life

Mary McCarthy, whose novel, Birds of America, I discussed last week, was a leading American author and intellectual, with deep roots in Seattle.  In my prior post, I indicated having earlier read her autobiographical Memories of a Catholic Girlhood.  I've since discovered that I "misremembered" (as the word currently in vogue expresses it) having done so.  At most, I merely skimmed portions of it that interested me at the time.

McCarthy, born in 1912, was the granddaughter of Harold Preston, co-founder of the Seattle law firm that later claimed William Gates -- father of Microsoft's Bill Gates -- as a named partner.  Preston's wife was Jewish, at a time when being Jewish was a matter of some social importance.  Her father's family was Irish.

As she recounts in her Memories, both parents died of influenza within days of each other in 1918, while on a family visit to Minnesota leaving McCarthy, age six, and her three brothers orphans.  Her Minneapolis relatives, on the McCarthy side, farmed the kids out to an aunt and uncle who "cared for them" in scenes of Dickensian cruelty and neglect.  When she was eleven years old, grandfather Preston got wind of what was going on, and brought Mary back to Seattle.

While her early years are unsettling to read, her personality as a girl rather than a victim began to bloom during her years at Seattle's Forest Ridge school (since moved across the lake to Bellevue), under the tutelage of strict but caring nuns, the "Ladies of the Sacred Heart."  It was while at Forest Ridge that she "lost her faith" -- not because of mistreatment or intellectual ferment, but almost by accident: she craved more attention from nuns and fellow students, and decided that a spiritual crisis might secure it.  In trying to prove to a skeptical priest the reality of her overnight conversion to atheism, she actually succeeded in talking herself into believing that which she thought she'd been only pretending to believe.

After eighth grade, Mary attended Garfield high school -- my own neighborhood public high school -- for her freshman year, with disastrous consequences academically.  Being in daily contact with boys made algebra and composition seem tedious by comparison.  Her grandparents whisked her off to Annie Wright's -- an Episcopalian girls' school in Tacoma -- for the remainder of high school.

Mary McCarthy is a fine narrative writer -- humorous, detailed, and unexpectedly compassionate to the people who surrounded her in her youth.  She was clearly a brilliant child, with an underlying rebellious streak.  Although popular at times, she was something of a loner.  She feels she must have possessed some qualities, something odd, unknown to herself, that prevented both faculty and fellow students from ever quite accepting her as one of themselves.  She recalls specific students and teachers with both fondness and contempt -- but always with care.

She brings to life long-forgotten eras of education.  Memorably described was the play -- written by her stern Scottish-born teacher -- based on the Roman struggle between Cicero and Catiline.  Presented to Annie Wright's students and their parents, it featured a female Cicero presenting, from memory, Cicero's first Cataline oration:

"How far, at length, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?  To what ends does your audacious boldness boastfully display itself?"

How far, at length, Miss Gowrie, [interposes McCarthy], could you abuse their patience?  Cicero's oration lasted thirty-one minutes by Miss Gowrie's watch.

And the play had barely begun.  Mary played Catiline.  As she recalls the performance, her interpretation of Catiline's response, which she decided upon on the spot, was a tour de force -- one that brought the audience to its feet, in "thunderous applause."  Well, maybe, Ms. McCarthy.

McCarthy, despite her life-long atheism, avoids the common habit of blaming her Catholic upbringing for any adult woes or inhibitions.  Instead, she is pleased with the strong academic foundation it provided, and she recalls "with gratitude ... the sense of mystery and wonder" she absorbed.  Because of both the decade in which she lived her youth -- the 1920s -- and the other-worldly ambience, foreign to today's readers, of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, McCarthy's Memories call to life an alien, and yet oddly alluring, world.

As though in anticipation of this week's clamor over "misremembering," my edition also includes McCarthy's lengthy post-publication discussion following each chapter, analyzing the points about which her memory may have been mistaken, where she had deliberately reshuffled events for narrative purposes, and where she had presented possibilities or probabilities as certainties.  Taken together with the original text, the result is a book the combines the best of both documented history and historical fiction.

Nature is dead, mein kind.

Peter Levi is a tall, awkward, strongly introverted, nineteen-year-old.  He is the son of divorced parents: a college professor and a concert pianist. 

Peter lives within his own head, while yet trying to understand the world in which he lives in 1964 -- his story told against a background of the civil rights movement, increasing homogenization of American daily life, a "junior year abroad" in France and Italy, and the gradually intensifying war in Vietnam. 

Throughout, he endeavors to live his life according to Kant's "categorical imperative" -- "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law." 

Peter can be obstinate, frustratingly single-minded, painfully self-conscious, strangely innocent, and often irritating.  He is also eminently loveable, a boy you'd be pleased to have as a son or nephew.

He is the creation of Mary McCarthy in her 1965 novel, Birds of America -- a book I read soon after it was first published, and just finished re-reading today.  My acquaintance with Ms. McCarthy goes back to undergraduate days, when her essays on Florence, published over time in the New Yorker, were assigned reading in a class on Renaissance history.¹  I later read her memoirs of her childhood in Seattle.²  But by 1971, McCarthy was best known as the author of The Group, a scandalous (at the time) best-seller that followed eight young women after graduation from Vassar.      

From a scholarly painting of Renaissance life to a controversial sex novel -- Mary McCarthy's interests and talents were diverse.  In Birds of America, she contemplates -- through her hero's bewildered adolescent eyes -- the tension between democracy and elitism, between mass culture and the life of the individual, between the conflicting demands of humanity and nature.

The book has no plot, as such.  In the early chapters, Peter and his mother move back to Rocky Port, a coastal village in Massachusetts, as a sort of closing chapter of their unusually close, almost Oedipal relationship. Peter eagerly awaits his return to Rocky Port, and has flashbacks to his earlier stay in the village, back in "the old days" (when he was 15!), a time when life was recalled as wonderful -- especially the birdlife and other natural aspects of the coast. 

Now, however, four years later, everything seems degraded.  A beloved owl has disappeared, as have some favorite cormorants.  A highway has been cut through.  His mother, a prototype of today's amateur cooks, finds everyone eating canned and frozen food.

Except in the field of civil rights, he was opposed to progress in any direction, including backwards, ... and wanted everything in the sensuous world to be the same as it had been when he was younger.

The later chapters examine Peter's experiences while a student in Paris at the Sorbonne.  Anyone who visited France in the 1960s will recognize Peter's problems with the peculiarities of French bourgeois culture, food, and customs.

He sat hunched in his corner -- Peter Levi, noted misanthrope.

Peter, at least, is able to speak fluent French. 

Like many of us back then, he finds the French almost impossible to meet, and falls back on American expatriate life -- and finds his fellow Americans appalling.  (His Thanksgiving, as the guest of a NATO-based American general, is wickedly funny -- especially the host's belligerent insistence that one of his wife's guests -- a vegetarian student -- dig into a plate heaped high with a real American turkey dinner, with all the fixin's. And her passive-aggressive efforts to withstand his bullying.)

I recall once telling a fellow undergraduate that I was fascinated by Europe during the Middle Ages, when only the rare adventurer ventured much beyond his own village -- when no one knew quite what you'd find only a few miles down a winding road.  He was appalled at my "romanticism."  But Peter would have understood.

So arriving in a strange town by yourself with just your guidebook for a compass is the nearest equivalent we can find to being alone with Nature, the way travelers used to be in the Age of Discovery.

"Nature" is thus conflated with aloneness, with discovery, with thinking and feeling, and is contrasted with mobs of people, with mass civilization.  Peter later attempts to explain to an unsympathetic academic adviser he unfortuately ran into in the Sistine Chapel that art can only be understood and loved in solitude -- not while being led about by a group guide.  He suggests limiting admission to overcrowded museums by a combination of competitive art examinations and lottery.  His adviser denounces his opinions as undemocratic and elitist.

When I say that the novel has no real plot, I'm also suggesting that Peter's interior thoughts, a lengthy letter to his mother, his discussions with peers and adults, all present at some length what I assume to be Mary McCarthy's own thoughts on a number of subjects.  This in no way indicates that the book presents an ideological diatribe, however.  Mary McCarthy is not a liberal Ayn Rand.  Peter's personality would not permit him to be made use of in that manner.  Although he is stubborn and persistent, he is also subject to continual self-doubt.  He not only encounters well-presented arguments against his positions from others, his own mind is in constant ferment as it develops and presents its own counter-arguments to Peter's own deepest and most cherished beliefs.

Birds of America is a novel of ideas discussed less with an intent to persuade than with a love of playing with them for the sake of playing.  It is also a humorous study of a boy who's an unusual young "bird" himself and -- for us today -- it's a nostalgic reminder of what life was like in the simpler and more innocent mid-twentieth century.

Peter Levi -- boy philosopher -- receives his most profound and devastating insight not from his teachers, his friends, or his own conscious reasoning.  At the novel's conclusion, while delirious from an infection, Peter receives a visitor.   His hero, Immanuel Kant, appears at his bedside, bearing an unsettling message for Peter:  "Listen carefully and remember.  ...  Perhaps you have guessed it.  Nature is dead, mein kind."
-----------------------------
¹Collected in book form and published as The Stones of Florence (1956)
²Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957)

Petrified

Last night, it happened again.

I woke up about 4 a.m., noticing both my cats noisily jumping off the bed and dashing elsewhere.  I lay there for a while, thinking various thoughts about various subjects.  Finally, I decided to get up, get a drink of water, and see what the cats were up to.  But I couldn't.

I felt entirely weighted down by my light electric blanket, as though I were covered by a pile of heavy quilts.  I could make only slight movements of my legs.  Try as I might, I couldn't swing my legs over to the side of the bed and stand up.

"Sleep paralysis."  I quickly realized exactly what was happening.  As I lay in bed helplessly, I even knew the term for it.  But, as is the case so often in life, understanding the problem didn't solve it.

As a kid, I often had the same experience, often accompanied by nightmarish sensations that someone -- a burglar, perhaps -- was in the room with me.   I was petrified, unable to defend myself.  Those youthful experiences are very common, according to Wikipedia.  Folklore in virtually every culture is full of stories of nightly terrors, a sleeper awaking paralyzed and in the presence of a ghost, a hag, a demon, a witch, a djinn.  Or, in modern American folklore, an alien intruder.  The intruder is often pictured as sitting on the sleeper's chest, or in some other manner preventing him from moving or escaping.

Fortunately, although I still occasionally experience sleep paralysis, it's now rarely accompanied by nightmares.  Even in my paralytic state, I understand the cause.  I'm more frustrated and irritated than frightened.

Sleep paralysis is believed to occur when a sleeper passes from a period of REM sleep -- during which he dreams and his body is prevented from moving so as to avoid acting out the dreams -- and a waking state.  Usually this transition is managed in an orderly fashion, but sometimes the REM paralysis continues for a time after the sleeper becomes conscious of his surroundings.

I usually try to fight my way out of my predicament by struggling to move my legs over the side of the bed and stand up.  Sometimes, after heroic efforts, I succeed; sometimes I instead drift back into sleep.  Last night, I seemed to struggle endlessly.  Finally, I felt I had succeeded.  I walked out into the hall looking for the cats, still worried that they were chasing around after mice or other tiny intruders downstairs.  But when I walked into the hall, I discovered both cats sleeping peacefully, side by side, like two young children, bundled up warmly in what appeared to be small sleeping bags.  I decided that all was well.

I awoke some time later.  I am able now to conclude, quite reasonably, that -- despite what I believed at the time -- I had definitely returned to sleep and to renewed dreams.

Whether scary, irritating, or merely a bit humorous, awaking while paralyzed is a peculiar and confusing experience -- regardless of how many times one's gone through the experience in the past.  I recently read an account of a boy who had, for unknown reasons, lay in a coma for ten years.  During most of that time, he was fully conscious of everything that was going on and being said about him.  But he could make only the tiniest movements with his muscles, movements too slight to be detected until he was finally examined closely by a trained professional.

The boy spent ten years in a state of frustration and despair.  I totally sympathize.  Five minutes of "sleep paralysis" is sufficient to give me a glimmering of what he went through.