A Kiss of Warmth
better than blowing hot air up your....right?
Well, hello there lovely creature,
It’s March! I recently went out with a friend from out of town and she gave me a bouquet of early daffodils. It made me think of countries where gift-giving is inherent in being a friend. When I was little, there were occasionally parties to welcome new neighbors (I won’t tell you the disastrous ones where we brought things over that were unwanted or where we stood, embarrassed because no one opened their door to let us in) — but there was a constant story (myth?) playing out on TV in old shows where neighbors would welcome each other with a casserole or at least a visit…
(Hey, what ever happened to all the shows about families? It feels like all the new shows are about groups of friends or single heroes or anti-heroes.)
I have great neighbors. Honestly — it’s surprising if you think of NYC as this lonely place where no one knows anyone. Last year, our vibrant artist-neighbor across the hall got very sick and died, and this year a different set of neighbors and I have taken to hanging out with her surviving spouse. We watched the Superbowl together and have instituted a bi-weekly Happy Hour which is really quite lovely. He’s a quiet guy from another era—he wants us to explain social media and often says things like: “Why are you happy?” (as though dull indifference or tolerance is humanity’s default feeling and happiness requires a cause and an explanation.)
Let’s think about that. What IS the expected default feeling of a person? When we are at rest and nothing is bothering us and we have had normal dinner and are not yet tired enough for bed, and nothing and no one is bothering us at the moment, what is the “right” way to be feeling?
What do you (yes, you) feel when everything is simply ordinary?
(Is anyone saying “contentment”? Do we still take time to feel content in our everyday lives?)
Why do I suspect that most of us wish that this default feeling was happiness?
Writing News:
I wrote and sent out a fiction story this week. First one in a long time. The editor read it immediately (I sent it out after midnight and got a response in my wake-up inbox). She thought it was “beautiful” but couldn’t take it for her genre publication (reasonable - I’m not sure why I thought it was genre…oh right, because the four main characters are all druids.)
Otherwise, I thought an interview would be published with me today but I just found out it’s coming out on March 31, so you’ll have to wait!
Inspiration-wise, I went to see the Kafka exhibit at the Morgan Library this week and first of all - WOW. I could write a huge post about Franz Kafka. I think that he is so misrepresented in the Zeitgeist. He was funny and well-liked by his friends, wrote hilarious postcards to his sister, and if he wasn’t happy 100% of the time, well MAYBE that was because he was a 24 year old man living in his childhood home because he couldn’t afford to leave. He didn’t hate his day-job, in fact he was well liked there and did a great job and felt good about his work—his supervisors had nothing but good comments about his work and gave him copious time off to deal with his (significant) health issues. He was a maniac for routines and read a health book someone wrote and obsessively followed it trying to get well. He loved nudist colonies but was so self-conscious about his Jewish penis that he was called “The Guy in Shorts” at one colony! He was always passionate about his writing, however. Passionate! He worried that if he started to write he would forget to eat and forget to do anything else (this also sounds familiar to me). By all accounts, he was a joy to be around when out with friends, made everyone laugh, and stayed out late because he loved the City so much. The thing that struck me the hardest was that he didn’t want all his work burned because he hated it: it was in fact a kind of ritual that he did on occasion - for example when he was very sick and living with his third girlfriend (the guy was rarely alone!) he asked her to burn all of the writing he had ever done in the order that it was written “to cleanse his creative psyche” so that he could write something entirely new. That’s not someone despondent and self-hating! That’s someone who is eager to do even bigger and better and stranger things. I just love this guy. Here are some photos and comments from Instagram in a kind of photo-journalism montage of my main thoughts.
I watched the international (ANNY) animation festival again this month. Some great animation techniques - really it’s incredible how much story can be told without words. Hard to translate that into writing which is ONLY words.
I also went to see Ibsen’s Ghosts at Lincoln Center - a very emotional performance (really Ibsen was terrific at creating interactions and relationships that transcend time.) In this new translation, the core of the play is the relationship between the mother and her very charismatic 25 year old son who has come home and is inexplicably failing to launch….
Random Final Thought
I wonder what it was like for people when the Gregorian Calendar was first instituted. Did people fight about what to call the date?
I went to look up the Julian Calendar to see how different it was from the Gregorian one that we all use and…get this..the only image of it I could find was on the United States Forestry Service’s website. What????
Good stuff. As far as our default state, if given a scale, almost everyone will report their happiness or contentment in the upper half. That people do this to me is kind of strange to me, but to some, it is entirely natural. I was in a personality/social psychology grad program where happiness was one of the faculty's areas of study, and I remember one of my fellow students telling me that if you didn't report your happiness as at least 5 on a 1-10 scale, you must be clinically depressed. Later, for one of my classes, we did inventories anonymously to create a dataset, and indeed, everyone except me did say they were very happy. I think there is some truth to the idea that to be healthy is to be happy, and to be healthy (and alive) is the default state. To live is a gift but also a daily choice, which we say "yes" to....(here I ape a Viktor Frankl title).
You've intrigued me about that Kafka exhibit, and I appreciated the detail you provided there. Reminds me of an exhibit I went to in the city on Salinger a few years ago (New York Public Library 2019?), and he also came across as lovely, magnanimous, and funny. I know all about self presentation and public relations, but at the very least, he had loyal friends who were willing to protect him, and there's a lot to be said for that. To me, it's not about whether these writers were good people or bad people, but really just about trying to understand them. I think of your blog from a few weeks ago, about where the artist places themselves in their work, and what they say in the business of introducing it. About whether we want to see the writer at all, or whether we want to look away.
yes, to flowers and good neighbors!