Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (9 page)

When the structures of the past no longer satisfy, no long serve to make life lively, we must now begin to ask new questions and to create new answers to old questions. We have been given cosmic permission to think differently. In fact, we are required to rethink everything once we have begun to rethink anything. It is a no-holds-barred moment in life out of which have come some of the greatest additions to the social order the world had ever imagined: Picasso, for instance; airplanes and floating hotels; heart transplants and women priests; manned air flights to Mars.

Certainty dies in the mist of these new questions. New data, demanded by the new questions, turn the world
upside down—like the Kinsey Report, the atomic bomb, feminism, desegregation, transgenderism. And creativity—an attempt to put things back together again but in whole new ways—touches every dimension of the human condition. Art thrives, human relationships change, classism dies, national boundaries begin to seep.

We look at our lives now and as the poet says, “We see it again for the first time.”

Confusion becomes the dream state of the awakened mind. The fragments of life, scattered now in broken and bizarre ways, can be restructured in freakish new ways, the results of creativity in every field. Like Picasso’s mother superior, government minister, washing machine and Eiffel Tower, the shakeups of our lives settle into a fresh and dynamic way of seeing the world.

So the marriage of confusion and creativity is the beginning of new life. We start now from places we have never been allowed to imagine before and out of them we can imagine new conclusions, as well.

It is the dream state of the soul reaching for new heights, new understanding, new insights into what it might mean to be alive in different and more productive and more provocative ways—which in their turn will also grow old and worn and overdone and so, eventually, prompt their own demise and their own resurgence.

It is the symphony of resurrection played over and over in us, every day of our lives. As Daisaku Ikeda puts it, “You must not for one instant give up the effort to build new lives for yourselves. Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway to life.”

All parents drum ideas into their children’s heads and all children remember them forever, however hard they tried to ignore them as they heard them. As in, “Too much speed, too little progress” or “Don’t eat that, I just bought it!” My own mother’s favorite was “Joan, think!” It was a mantra in my house. When I put a blouse on a hanger backward, it was “Joan, think!” If I spelled an “ei” word “ie,” it was “Joan, think!” Years later, if I turned north instead of south in the car, it was “Joan, think!” If it was a life question that demanded some kind of wisdom for an answer, it was “Honey, just think a little harder; the answer will come to you.”

So pervasive was the idea that thinking was the answer to everything in life that years later, when I was trying to configure a screen saver for my computer, I found myself using three-inch-high letters to inscribe across my desktop, “Joan … think!”

The great god of rationality ruled life—in school, at home, in religion, in those terrible word problems in arithmetic, in relationships and certainly in the kind of decision making across the years that would surely change life. Living the right life depended on getting the right answer to everything: where to go, what to do, whom to go through life with, when to make a move, why to bother.

Except that it didn’t. All the thinking in the world did not save me from buying the wrong kind of gifts, or going to the party with the wrong people, or accepting the wrong invitation or taking the wrong course or ordering the wrong thing off the menu. Surely there was something else to life besides reason.

I had friends who did all those things and seemed to truly enjoy talking about their mistakes. I watched other people laugh about the bends in the road of life that had led them to one dead end after another. I found out that one bad decision is often more enlightening than what the “right” one would have been. I found out that dating the wrong person does not signal the collapse of a person’s social life. Clearly there is something other than rationality that is required if life is ever to have the spice and flavor, the nudge and nonsense that real living brings with it.

The interesting thing is that I found the missing link where I least expected it. One day, out of the blue, I went out and got a bird. I’d owned two large dogs years before, an Irish setter and a golden retriever, both of whom I loved. I’d even had a parakeet and a small conure, one of the smaller species of parrots, for a couple of years. The dogs were amiable, trainable, easily satisfied, submissive.
The little conure was simple, self-absorbed, predictable. The new bird, the caique, which I was sure would be more of the same, suddenly turned my world upside down.

She didn’t do rational. She did love. She did play. She did experience. She did energy and curiosity and boundlessness. She did not stay where she was put. She did not eat on Tuesday what she had inhaled on Monday. She could not be bought off. She was a bird with a mission: try everything, go everywhere, seduce everyone. Life to Lady had its own rationality made up of its own crooked lines to whatever it was she wanted. She was impervious to data and dedicated to fun. If she fell off the cage trying to reach for the yogurt dish on the table, she simply got up, fluffed herself off and merrily crawled up someone’s pant leg to try again.

I learned from Lady that life was too short to get in a rut. Ruts might be rational but they were highly stultifying, as well. Lady didn’t care about right or wrong. She cared about doing. It didn’t matter to her if something was on the schedule, carefully thought out, reasonably arrived at. What mattered was doing it and then deciding if it was worth doing again.

She didn’t shy away from people to protect herself from life. She went out to life with all the energy she had. Strangers were a challenge, not a threat. There was nothing so important that she wouldn’t stop for a cuddle on the way to doing it. There was nothing so necessary that she wouldn’t take another road to get to it, just for the sake of trying a new path.

Because of her, I myself began to see life in a very different
light. No, pets are not the acme of human life but they do have the capacity to make human life more human. They simply refuse to allow us to see life as solely, only, fundamentally, rational.

Pets teach us to play, to live our own lives more freely. They bring experience where only thought has been. They plague administrators to put their administration down for a little while, to air their souls and learn that things can always be done in more ways than one.

They teach us to love and enjoy things we have never taken the time to see before: A string on a plant leaf becomes a delight, a mirror on a stick becomes a love affair, a toilet paper roll becomes a valuable piece of machinery. Life becomes an adventure rather than a math problem. People become potential friends rather than potential enemies. Every day becomes another possibility to do things differently, do them better, do them often, do them with abandon.

“Until one has loved an animal,” Anatole France wrote, “a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.” It is the awakening of that soul that is really the only really rational thing about being alive.

The average advert of the Western world tells the whole story. Women are voluptuous, or weak and curvaceous, or—according to the more pious ones—motherly, nurturing, protective, and self-sacrificing. Always self-sacrificing.

What women face, in the midst of what the human race has long known as a “man’s world,” is the obligation to propagate, to care for, to sustain the other half of the human race. They are just what it seems a good human being should be. Provided, of course, that they are at all times, and in all situations, quiet about it.

The problem is that for some reason, the formula has never really worked. In every generation women, unlike the template, have emerged full of life and zesty about it, bright and visionary, clear and confident. These women,
churchmen, statesmen and insecure men declared, were to be put in their “place.” Churchmen theologized female inferiority, philosophers explained female inferiority, and small-souled men of every ilk enforced male domination and took their own superiority for granted, as a result.

The great iconic model, of course, on which they built the notion of female inferiority, irrationality and subservience was Eve, mother of the human race, first woman, spouse of Adam. His nemesis. His failed partner. His weaker side. The one whose “sin” had upended the history of humanity, made it a tale of disgrace and women the very eidolon of distrust. And all of this despite the even greater declaration of the same Hebrew scriptures that both females and males were “made in the image of God.”

Public myths, jokes, and wisdom stories have all enshrined the fantasy of female disrepute so that women might never be foolish enough to suspect the slander of it all. “There are three ways to send a message,” the old saw taught. “You can telephone, tell a friend or tell a woman.” Or advice to men taught that “If a man steals your wife the best revenge is to let him keep her.” Or better yet, as F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in
The Great Gatsby
, “I hope she’ll be a fool. That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world—a beautiful little fool.”

Girls got those messages—and denied every one of them.

For centuries, the attempt to define women has been a losing task. Era after era women had to be told again and again what they were supposed to be, what Creation had
created them to be, how their position in life was domestic. Female. Secondary. “Helpmates” of men as translators of Genesis in the Hebrew scriptures put it. And that despite the fact that in the over thirty other places the Hebrew phrase
ezer kenegdo
was used in scripture, the words the writers used were always translated “a power equal to” rather than “a helpmate for.”
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For centuries, up to our own time, women have been trained to be docile, meek, quiet, and nonthinking bearers of the human race. They were considered the appendages of men who had defined themselves the crown of creation.

But women did not surrender the fullness of their humanity easily, without a struggle.

Women also claimed the active, thinking properties of humanity that men had long claimed as sole owners and called masculinity. Until eventually, everywhere, the denial of the intellectual, spiritual, leadership capacity of womanhood became the chicanery that fooled few any longer. Instead, women emerged over and over again, from one side of the world to the next, as rational, powerful, thoughtful, talented, spiritual, and effective human beings. Just like men.

A list of the “Ten Most Important Women in History” is nothing but a sampling of growing lists of women from every country in the world now being recognized everywhere in the world. All of them unsung for ages but now hailed everywhere, not as the exception to the rule, but the very rule of nature itself.

The lists are legendary. James Frater’s list of the “Top Ten Greatest Women in History” is only one of many, but it demonstrates the involvement of women in every major human activity throughout time. He cites: #10. Emmeline Pankhurst, 1858; #9. Boudica, 60 CE; #8. Catherine of Siena, 1347; #7. Eva Peron, 1919; #6. Rosa Parks, 1925; #5. Tomyris, c. 6 BCE; #4. Hatshepsut, 1479 BCE; #3. Joan of Arc, 1412; #2. Florence Nightingale, 1820; #1. Catherine the Great II, 1729.

Or more telling yet, of the “Top Ten Most Influential People in History,” as defined by the
Historical Atlas of the Mediterranean
, there is only one woman, Olympe de Gouges. But she’s on the list because she wrote “The Declaration of the Rights of Women and Female Citizens” in 1791.

The choices may be arguable but the choosing is not.

Scholars now compete to create lists of great women that stretch across every culture on the planet. All of these women were once condemned to the anonymity of history. Now all of them have risen again in our times as signs of the underdeveloped half of the human race whose gifts have, regardless, lived throughout time.

Yet, tragically, still in our own era, women are two-thirds of the hungry of the world. Women remain two-thirds of the illiterate of the world. Women are still the poorest of the poor. On what grounds shall we continue to ignore, suppress, and deny the gifts of women? On what grounds, social, scientific, or theological, shall we seriously argue as long as we do it, that we are fully human, rational, wise and visionary ourselves?

The truth, we know, is that women are not meant to be “female females.” They were born to be fully functioning co-creators of the human race, of human civilization, of human equality. Just like their brothers. To deny them the masculine or active side of their humanity is to deny them humanity to the full.

Everyone knew the boy was different, most of all his father. Small for his age, Rob loved the piano and hated football. Fortunately, his father took care of that. He insisted that he play football “no matter how much it hurt.” After all, he said, he wanted Rob “to be a man.” But Rob who headed his class but was physically too small to ever shine in anyone’s sports arena could never hope to meet the standard, either his father’s or society’s in general. He suffered all his life from the lack of physique, of brawn, of dominance and so, of course, the male swagger that came with them.