The incense is sandalwood, the candles are pear, and I am once again contemplating the mind of Camille Paglia as I settle into my evening and try to make sense of my day and the cosmos. Today, frank conversations with families about rehabilitation potential, the sort of conversations no clinician really wants to have. Their lives are changing in big ways, and they want me to tell them it will all be okay, that it will be the same as it was before, and I can't. It won't be the same, but it WILL be okay, and I try to help them see that. I try to guide them as best as I can, with grace and tact, and help them see positive aspects of situations where they can only see the negative. I am an optimistic pragmatist, lighting candles against their darkness, one step ahead of them on the path. They keep their eyes on me and that candle, as I lead them into their dark and tell them not to be afraid. We grasp hands as we hurtle toward heaven.
At the end of the day, a good hard run through the cemetery in the pouring down rain makes me feel alive again. I connect with the earth by running her roads, splashing through her puddles, a run that is a swim and my dolphin-self is delighted because I don't have to choose between water and earth. A hot bath with sandalwood oil and a quote I love from Paglia (1992, in Sex, Art and American Culture, from her work Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson), worthy in my mind of preserving here, because it rings so true for me:
"Jung says every man has a repressed female self, the anima, and every woman a repressed male self, the animus. In my case, it was the anima that took longer to emerge, for the animus was never repressed. I remember my fifth-grade teacher making me stay after school because of some shoving and wrangling, I was always fighting with boys to be first in line. Furious, she pushed a dictionary toward me and made me look up the word aggressive, which I did, hot tears of shame rolling down my cheeks. Colorful incidents abound, such as when, as a student shopping in Liggett's drugstore at Yale, I broke my umbrella over the head of a rash molester. From childhood to the present day, I have considered it my task to challenge, by word and deed the public standards for female behavior. Marooned in the conformist, domestic Fifties, I felt little connection with the boy-chasing girls of my time. Instead, I was galvanized by late-night movies from the Thirties and Forties which showed quite a different kind of woman, either bold and pioneering, like Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year, or elegant, sophisticated and sexual like Marlene Dietrich in Dishonored. Film became my door into a lost world. What I was glimpsing was the first phase of feminism, born from the push for the vote and then peaking in those rugged individualists, the brilliant career women of the prewar era, like Dorothy Parker..." pp. 110-111.
She had me at wrangling and shoving. While I don't agree with everything Paglia writes, I do agree with quite a bit of it, and I certainly relate to her experience of kicking against the barn door of convention. Her stories brought back my own memories of being sent to the principal's office in the fifth grade for leaping on a boy who was teasing me, wrestling him to the ground and sitting on his chest while I punched him mercilessly. Or the third grade, when I slammed my Miss America lunchbox down on the head of another neighborhood boy who would not leave me be at the bus stop. Or the age of three, when I stood up and whacked the neighbor boy over the head with my toy shovel. For some reason I find it comforting to find out that Paglia sports a similarly checkered history, and writes about it so eloquently.
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