A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

It took me 124 pages to become so annoyed that I decided to live-blog this book. Given that it is written by a hippie named Richard Alpert who changed his name to Ram Dass after becoming the follower of a guru named Maharajji, my annoyance was quite predictable.

Page 124: Ram Dass disapproves of an old woman who says that she will never forgive her dead parents. He condescendingly states that she is only hurting herself, and her refusal to forgive her parents (who, for all he knows, might have not just been unsatisfactory but actively abusive) will keep her "tethered to this resentment forever."

BARRRRF. Forgiveness is an emotion; like any other emotion, it is neutral in itself, subjective, and not something that can be commanded by others. Nor, often, is it something that can be commanded by oneself.

Forgiveness is not necessary to mental health or peace of mind. If it comes naturally, it can be very healing. But the recognition that some wrongs are unforgivable, and that victims don't need to forgive perpetrators, can also be very healing.

Who is he to judge? Did he experience that woman's pain? BAAARF, I say!

The book, which I have to read for a workshop on aging, consists of vomitous platitudes interspersed with some true but obvious statements about aging and acceptance.

Summary: We all get old. American society is prejudiced against aging and old people. We may not automatically like the changes that come with aging. But we should accept them and try to embrace them. If you don't accept and embrace, you are willfully being unhappy. If you do accept and embrace, you will be blissfully enfolded in spiritual peace. The Soul lives forever. God exists. I know this because I am the disciple of Maharajji, my totally awesome guru, who embodies all wonderfulness and Godly qualities. If he told me to drink Koolaid, I would accept and embrace.

Obviously, he's correct that many issues of aging are really issues of ageism. But some things do suck. It's one thing to talk about accepting and embracing wrinkles, and another to talk about accepting and embracing Alzheimer's disease. (I especially disliked his statement, not scientifically supported so far as I'm aware, that people with Alzheimer's who become paranoid, depressed, violent, or afraid are having previous, unresolved psychological issues surface.)

He seems judgmental and blaming toward people who feel anger or fear or depression and don't quickly move on to peaceful acceptance, and toward people who see anything as inherently negative or bad.

It's one thing to counsel people to look for moments of hope and happiness in their lives, even if they're in a generally bad situation. It's a totally different thing to counsel people to see a situation which they think is bad as actually being good. The first is healthy and reasonable. The second is denying people their honest feelings, and telling them they're wrong to feel the way they feel.

It's fine if people eventually, in their own time and way, come to the decision that something they originally thought was bad is actually good, or at least okay. But it's creepy, manipulative, and cultlike to tell them they have to think that.

Cut for discussion of death and dying.

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Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying

Annoyingly, I have to read ANOTHER book by Ram Dass in a totally different class this quarter! WHY.

ETA: Went out before finishing book. He is now quoting some woman who channels "a disembodied being named Emmanuel." Not enough BLECCH in the world.

Normally I hate it when authors self-promote by discussing how bad someone else’s book is and how much better theirs is. But it’s impossible for me to discuss Elizabeth Gilbert’s obnoxious memoir without at least mentioning my own (much better!) one, All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit In India, as they have some notable similarities and when I describe mine, people keep asking me if I’ve read hers. ("Oh, your book is about how you became a cynical atheist after growing up surrounded by crazy American hippies on an ashram in India? In that case, you will love this other book about how an American woman learns the meaning of life and finds enlightenment, self-worth, and joy on a beautiful peaceful ashram in India!")

Obviously, my own miserable ashram childhood contributed to my detestation of Eat Pray Love. (To be fair, Gilbert’s ashram, which is not mine, sounds well-run and sensible, if you’re into that kind of thing.) So I'm making that disclosure, but honestly, there are many other reasons to detest Eat Pray Love.

But since I cannot type the name of my own memoir without some wistful hope that readers will be inspired to seek it out and purchase ten additional copies to give as gifts to their loved ones, I cannot even disclaim any intention of self-promotion. Given that, all I can do is apologize in advance.

Sorry!

Gilbert is a rich white American writer undergoing a painful divorce when she becomes suicidally depressed, finds God while collapsed in a puddle of tears on her bathroom floor, and obtains a hefty book advance to live abroad for a year and write about it. She decides to explore pleasure in Rome, spirituality in an unnamed Indian ashram (spiritual center), and balance in Bali.

In Rome she eats lots of excellent food and banishes depression with sheer force of will and grace of God. In India she has amazing spiritual experiences via meditation and introspection, including getting zapped by an inner blue light. (The ashram section, unsurprisingly considering that it mostly takes place inside Gilbert’s head as she attempts to empty her mind of thought, is narcissistic and boring.) In Bali she hangs out with two traditional healers, raises money to help one of them buy a house, and finds True Love with a sexy, confident, passionate, loving, sophisticated, and generally perfect Brazilian man who is just like her, only older, male, and did I mention perfect?

I finally forced myself to read this book, which from other people’s recommendations (“She goes to an ashram and has amazing spiritual experiences! You’ll love it!”) I felt sure I’d hate, because I want to get into travel writing and I wanted to see what made this particular travel book a bestseller. The answer, once I finished it (with increasing hatred of the smug, self-absorbed, self-righteous Gilbert), was clear:

1. Wish-fulfillment. Who wouldn’t want to be paid to spend a year abroad, going wherever you want and doing whatever you want? I sure would! Moreover, she gets over her awful divorce, breaks her cycle of bad romantic relationships via True Love, does a substantial good deed, finds spiritual peace and fulfillment, and eats the world’s best pizza. And then comes home and publishes a best-seller.

2. It tells a certain cadre of readers— middle to upper class Americans with vaguely New Agey leanings— exactly what they already believe is true: that enlightenment can be found in India, that personal fulfillment is a profound and meaningful goal, that all things natural and Asian are superior to all things manufactured and Western, that charity is satisfying and worth doing but you have to be kind but firm with your poor Third World recipients or they’ll rip you off, and that if you try hard and navel-gaze and seek spirituality in exotic foreign lands you’ll be rewarded with everything you’ve ever dreamed of, right down to a fairy-tale romance.

3. Gilbert is a pretty good travel writer in the few parts when she’s looking outward rather than inward. Portions of the book are well-written and funny. (Those portions are concentrated in the first third.)

I find it difficult to separate my loathing of the book from my loathing of Gilbert from my memories of people and attitudes I loathed at the ashram where I spent my childhood. Her attitude about antidepressants (“I really needed them, but you peasants who lack my superior contempt of them shouldn’t be allowed to get them as easily as I did”) mirrors an attitude about India that I often got from Westerners at the ashram, and which oozes from every page of Gilbert’s memoir: “I need my Western medicine and appliances and education and opportunities, but you’re actually lucky not to have them because that stuff sucks, really, and anyway you have herbs and yoga which is so much better. Bye-bye! I had a great spiritual experience in your beautiful country which I will treasure forever as I relax in my New York penthouse.”

I’m not saying that herbs and yoga are worthless, or that Westerners should be banned from having spiritual experiences in Asia. It’s the self-centeredness, entitlement, lack of perspective, and lack of empathy for the actual occupants of the country which bothers me.

Gilbert does show kindness and compassion when she raises money to buy a Balinese woman and her family a house. But I wish she’d sat down and had a discussion with the woman about what she wanted, and what she would like Gilbert to do to help—and that, when the deal got rocky, Gilbert had sat down again and discussed both of their concerns instead of bullying the woman for her own good. Openness can go wrong, and high-handed condescension can produce good results. But the latter is not how you deal with people whom you consider your equals.

In short: hated it, hated it, hated it. Hated her. Hated her perfect Brazilian boyfriend. Even hated her guru, and she doesn't even appear in the book except as a perfectly enlightened and compassionate gaze via a photograph. In conclusion: hated it. Buy my book instead!

Due to getting stuck for several hours in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, while the plane supposed to take me to Los Angeles was diverted to Oklahoma lest it be sucked up by a tornado, I was forced to hit the airport bookshop for additional reading material, which is how I obtained this. At the time I thought the author's name was familiar because I'd heard of the unusual premise. Several chapters in I realized that Vincent used to be a particularly annoying columnist for the "LA Times." Oops.

Vincent is a non-transgender lesbian who decided to disguise herself as a man for a year to find out how the other half lived. She also mentions her long-held fascination with gender and gender roles, but claimed that despite being a tomboy, she never ever ever, no really not ever not once, ever wanted to be a man, and hated almost every minute of pretending to be one. (Except for the times when she male-bonded and realized how wonderful male camaraderie is and how totally different it is from her "friendships" with shallow, back-stabbing women-- one thing that came up a lot is that Vincent's current social circles resemble the movie Mean Girls.)

I would be surprised it living a persona wasn't uncomfortable and disturbing, but there was a point when I wondered if she was protesting too much. Such a crazy-ambitious feat of role-playing and disguise may not be about her deep secret desire to be male, but it's got to be about some deep desire. That really ought to have been explored more.

Curiously, Vincent fails to explore the one group for which she has a genuine control: men of her own social class, race, and similar social circles. (White New York upper-crust intelligentsia, as far as I could tell.) Instead, she penetrates blue-collar bowling leagues, sleazy door-to-door sales companies, a monastery, cheap strip clubs, and an Iron John group. She also dates women, which comes closest to seeing her own life as if she were a straight man.

The reason I pick on this is that the book turns out to be at least as much about class as it is about gender, but Vincent consistently compares poor blue-collar men to rich professional women, and then makes conclusions about gender.

In perhaps the most ridiculous instance of this, she describes the physical state that blue collar men attain after a lifetime of hard labor, stress, and poverty (weather-beaten complexion, callouses, etc) and says that it proves that men and women are inherently and biologically totally different in a way that cannot at all be accounted for by social conditions. This makes no sense whatsoever, as everything she describes, except for the five o'clock shadow and several pounds of muscle, would also be true of women who work similar jobs.

The failure to account for class differences also undermined the conclusions she arrived at, which is that men are not really powerful and priveleged compared to women, because the desperate door-to-door salesmen (etc) she met had unhappy lives. I still do not understand how she reached that conclusion given that the only people more miserable and exploited than the male salesmen were the female salesmen, but there you have it.

Generally, she seemed to cherry-pick for blue-collar or middle-class white Christians in settings in which a certain set of stereotypical male traits are expected or selected for. If she'd broadened her horizons, she might have found large groups of men in cultures (for the broad meaning of the word) in which emotional expressiveness or conversation on subjects other than sports or friendly relationships with women are common and expected.

Many non-WASP cultures do not expect or require men to repress all shows of emotion, or to be painfully inarticulate. (Many if not most brands of Jewish culture, for instance, encourage men to talk, to each other or to women, on many subjects and at great length eloquently.) Cheap strip clubs are an excellent setting if you're looking for men who feel driven to engage in cheap sex. It is unsurprising to find gynophobia and repressed homosexuality in monasteries.

Some of the reportage was good, and the chapter on the bowling league was touching-- she really bonded with those men. I also enjoyed the chapter on iron John, as I've always been curious about what goes on in those groups. The chapter on dating exerted a horrifying, train-wreck fascination.

But again, her conclusions were both obvious and flawed: of course going on dates under false pretences is even more unlikely to give you a fun time than normal dating. Of course women will be pissed off if, after two dates, you inform them that you're not available for a relationship and never were. And of course men who are attending Iron John meetings will be unhappy with social constructions of masculinity. That's like going to AA meetings in the hope of drawing general conclusions about how Americans relate to alcohol.

I don't know what her lesbian dates were like, but getting rejected is not unique to men, and if I can manage to cope with men who cruelly and capriciously withold sex from me by refusing to date or have sex with me, without gaining a murderous hatred of men, I don't see why men can't do the same.

Though Vincent does not seem to be a feminist, reading her book put me in a radical mood. Especially the chapter where she discovers that men hate women because women hold the power to give or withhold sex, so they're constantly being rejected. And also women are bitchy. No wonder men are so angry! No wonder women get raped! It's all because every woman is not automatically available upon demand!

More general conclusions: It's really hard to be a man, much harder than it is to be a woman, and women fail to appreciate that. Women are back-stabbing, boring, bitchy, and have totally unreasonable expectations of men. The genders are so different, biologically and inherently, that they are basically two different species. There are no social advantages to being a man. Dating and marriage is scary and unpleasant for men, and that plus their uncontrollable sex drives means all men either go to nasty strip clubs or want to. Traditional male roles are stifling. (OK, I agree with the last one.)

Well, that was negative. Generally, I disagreed with her politics, and felt that though some of her reportage was good, she consistently drew overly sweeping, unwarranted, and/or obvious conclusions from it.

Johnston is a middle-aged, married journalist who jumps at the chance to go on an adventure tour rafting an unexplored section of the Boh river in the Borneo rain forest, even though her husband is afraid for her safety and her back had just gone out. A horrendous series of mishaps and unexpected unpleasantries follow, starting with the airport losing her luggage (she spends much of the rest of the trip envying and attempting to borrow the other rafters' air mattresses), continuing with the river being far more dangerous than its advertisement suggested, and culminating in her hitting menopause in the middle of the rain forest-- a place which, if her description of it is even slightly accurate, I would pay to not visit.

The rafters spend the entire trip being plagued by sweat bees, stinging bees, leeches, and various forms of jungle rot. Poor Johnston faces some of my very least favorite experiences-- being attacked by bugs, being sick, suffering from ailments she's embarassed to discuss, being the only person there without a boyfriend or companion and having to watch a gorgeous younger woman kissing a handsome tour guide in front of her, being underequipped and unable to pull her weight due to her back injury, and not even seeing any picturesque wildlife until the very end of the trip.

However, despite her understandable misery which may have affected her reactions, I still wanted to give Johnston a primer in feminism. She keeps moaning on and on about how she'll never be attractive again and can never again have physically taxing adventures now that she's hit menopause. WTF? Did the Menopause Fairy hit her over the head with the ugly stick? Does she think that just because she felt physically unfit to go on one of the most physically taxing adventure trips I've ever heard of, she must now spend the rest of her life knitting?

The descriptions of the rain forest are fascinating, but the characters (except for the gorgeous French woman, Sylvie, whom Johnston is completely obsessed with as the foil for her own descent into cronehood) are not developed well, to the point where I kept having to flip back to the beginning to see whether the guy who got dysentery was the conservative Australian, the conservative American, or the gorgeous tour guide. The whole trip-- to call it poorly planned is like saying Mount Everest is tall-- is clearly a recipe for disaster, and they were luckily no one was killed or seriously injured. But not much is made of that in the end: the rafts arrive safely, and Johnston goes home glad she had the experience and glad it's over. This is an interesting account if you want to read about Borneo, but it lacks the writerly or introspective or muckraking pizzazz that would have made it memorable.

This is about an Australian woman who visits India once, hates it, but moves to New Delhi years later to live with her boyfriend, who is also a journalist. While she's there she investigates what seems like every single one of India's religions.

Naturally, I had to read this. Boy, did it get up my nose.

I'm reluctant to criticize her book for being inaccurate, because people's experiences do differ a great deal depending on where they are, when they are, and who they are. So, to take just one example, I can't say that her depiction of all Indian men as leering, slobbering, sexist gropers is factually wrong, exactly; there's no denying that India is a very sexist society, and it's true that when I traveled India as an adult I did get a _lot_ of men making passes at me (though not in a disgusting or physical way) until I figured out that jeans come across as provocative in a way that cotton pants don't. But I also met a lot of men who were interesting and courteous and kind.

I'm sure I got a get-out-of-sexism-free pass on account of being a foreigner, but it was still notable to me that when I tell American men I study karate, they often make some obnoxious joke or step back in pretend fear and say, "Whoa! I better not mess with you!" (Unless they're quite old, that last annoys me so much that I say, and not in a kidding voice, "Why, were you thinking of doing something?" Then they look flustered, splutter, and run away. (This is why I'm never going to get married.)) Anyway, when I told Indians that, they never said anything of the kind, but either told me about their own or their cousin-brother's studies, or asked me if I'd looked into (local martial art).

Also, Macdonald has a particular attitude toward poverty that makes me crazy. It's all "Ooh, ick, how hideous and nauseating and sad, gee, I must be sheltered to be shocked by lepers/beggars/homeless people, how lucky I am to be a priveleged white person." I hate to to fault an emotional response, but I wish people could experience that one and then get past it in order to help the situation in some way rather than just gawking at it, or to consider that there are also desperately poor and sick people in their own homeland who could be helped-- there's enough resources to do so-- but aren't, or to look at what Indians are doing to change conditions. Instead, she's stuck in "ooh, ick" for the whole book.

At one point she sees a woman with burn scars and "retches in horror." Gee, that's really going to make the woman feel good. But more than that, it's an example of her patronizing and distanced view of Indians: Macdonald would never have that reaction to a scarred woman in Australia, but because the woman is a beggar and Macdonald assumes (with no evidence) that she's a victim of a dowry burning, it's okay to retch at the very sight of her, that inhuman object of horror.

Her approach to her chief and fascinating topic, that of Indian spirituality, is shallow, smug, and dull. Her writing style is overwrought and clunky, and her persona is unbearable.

Almost every chapter has the same repetitive structure: Macdonald hears about some aspect of Indian religion or culture and decides to investigate it. At first she thinks it's stupid and pointless. But by the end of the chapter she realizes that though it's not for her, it does have something to offer. If she asked for some blessing, she will have received it by the end of that chapter or the beginning of the next. As you can imagine, this structure gets very old very fast.

The author's attitude toward India and Indians combines the worst of both the old and the new West: sneers at a culture she doesn't understand mix uneasily with breast-beating over her own pain at seeing poor people and a greed for exotic eastern spirituality to fill her inner shallowness.

For a well-written, funny, informative, intelligent, and open-minded antidote to this irritating book, read William Dalrymple's CITY OF DJINNS. Like Mcdonald, he too writes about being a foreigner in Delhi, but unlike Mcdonald, his book is good.