On "losing the name of action"

I have gone to post several times since I spewed about Santa Claus and his corrupting influence, now more than one month ago. Each time, my efforts at personal blogging have sputtered before they could get anywhere.

One time I tried to post last month, I had started to write an essay about my fascination with disparate, historic cultural layers that make up old, continuously inhabited human settlements. This fascination determined my choice of Greece as a trip destination years ago, because I was energized by the notion of present-day physical traces of Minoan and Classical civilizations "under" our contemporary one--coifed professionals on cell-phones, tromping heedlessly over cobblestones laid 3,000 years before. We don't see so much of that kind of layered history--the artifacts of one complex civilization, "sandwiched" under another, wholly different one--here in the U.S.. Particularly, we don't see much of it in California.

My abandoned essay was to focus on East Oakland, an inner-city neighborhood about ten miles from where I live. It's a slum today, but in the early decades of the last century East Oakland was a middle-class-to-affluent area, featuring sumptuous views of the San Francisco Bay. The juxtaposition of architectural and cultural remnants of a more culturally homogenous, more gracious and more monied time, with the contemporary grafitti and boarded-up buildings, for complex personal reasons, transfixes me. It's hard not to crash my car when I drive east of 73rd Avenue on MacArthur Boulevard. My essay was going to be about why urban exploring in East Oakland, in crucial respects, is as satisfying as sight-seeing in Greece.

I abandoned the essay in mid-January after I went to see Byron Hurt's superb documentary, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, at the Oakland Museum of California. In the film, Hurt tackles the cultural origins of rap and hip-hop music in the blighted South Bronx after World War II. He traces the inner-city despair and alienation that informed the music's development during the 70s, 80s, and 90s. He shows hip-hop's co-option by major, white-owned record labels during the last decade.

Hurt argues that the latter development, as much as any, has fostered the rampant glorification of violence, machismo, misogyny, and homophobia we associate with rap music on the radio today. Hurt builds the case that violent commercial rap is music of an oppressed, demoralized people. Memorably, he interviews well-to-do rap entertainers who insist that their work "mirrors violence and discrimination, but does not promote it."

All art is more- or less-refined propaganda. Any art that treats the subject of poverty, has to reckon with the drive of the poor and oppressed to improve their own lot, or else it's exploitative.

I worried that I did not have the skill to write an essay, comparing East Oakland to Greece, from the perspective of tourism, that wasn't simply glib. That worry still holds me back from finishing the piece, though I believe there is certainly a comparison, as socially conscientious as it is rich and ingenious, to be made.

I have put the fragment away. Perhaps I will look at it again, when I have time and feel ambitious.

Santa Claus is a Pedophile

You read it here first.

As if it weren't enough that he preys on innocent children, there's his methamphetamine abuse, his foul mouth, his legendary temper, and the fact that the North Pole compound is a sweatshop. "Jolly Old Saint Nicholas," indeed.

Yes, I am sour because I hate the "naughty" and "nice" dichotomization of human behavior that is Santa's purview--I suppose, as sort of a failed goody-two-shoes, myself. I think of the untold human costs of our penchant to idealize impossible standards of "goodness," which the Santa-myth epitomizes, and I want to scream out loud.

When our human, supposed paragons of virtue fail, when we sooner or later find them guilty--as they always turn out to be--of appalling ethical lapses, we're the ones left to pick up the pieces. We not only have to reckon with the harm the fallen "great one's" violation has caused those personally affected--but also with the warping of our worldviews: Perfection has been betrayed.

"There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life," the evangelical Christian Pastor Ted Haggard famously revealed last month, after his drug use and trysts with a male prostitute were exposed.

"Repulsive"? "Dark"? Your sexual longing for men is so "naughty," it's "evil"? Just look at the ungodly mess you made with your "virtue," Ted!

Whether we're talking about Reverend Ted Haggard's hypocrisy, or the anorexic's self-denying pursuit of a "perfect" body, the human longing that underlies the "virtuous" scruples, betraying them, isn't bad--but idealized standards of "perfection" are warped. They need to go.

I read somewhere that if you go to an unfamiliar city, you can always find the red light district. It sits smack in the shadow of the cathedral. There's always a "dark side," when you're trying to subdue a "bad," but vital, part of human nature. Sometimes, its expression is institutionalized in the culture, as the row of brothels near the Blessed Virgin's shrine.

Virtue's "dark side" also shows up in individual consciousnesses, as in guilt, bottomless self-reproach, a sense of having "failed," a vague sense of "living a lie," of "never being good enough," despite apparently perfect conformity to idealized standards of "niceness," of which Santa would fully approve. The star employee. The hostess with the most-ess. The perfect mom, with the radiant smile and the beautiful figure.

What does it get you, the self-denying contortions to be perfectly "nice," according to the standards of one supposedly all-seeing and all-knowing? The quest of perfection is supposed to keep at bay chronic, irrational feelings of inferiority. But I don't think that's the half of it, and here is where Santa comes in: If you're "nice," you get presents and goodies at Christmas-time. If you fail expectations, you get coal and a switch in your stocking. Oh, you think adults don't believe this?

Years ago, after I'd been fired from some job, I recall having a lot of trouble holding my head up and looking people in the eye. My work hadn't pleased the man who fired me, whose stern voice I kept hearing in my ears. For weeks, I was eaten by a sense of having "failed"--never mind that I'd disliked the job, and was relieved it had ended. Remarkably, though I was fully adult at the time, I was seized by an image of a great celestial score-card, with "successes" and "failures" assigned numeric values, rounded to the hundredths place, and tallied into neat columns--sort of like a cosmic grade-point average.

Real grade-point averages are kept for a reason. So, I believed, were standardized numeric appraisals of human worth; they determined who went to heaven.

Santa rewards "niceness," thoughtfulness, good manners, conformity, self-denial. He punishes rebellion--the supposed "opposite" of niceness--which might include messiness, "laziness," open displays of anger, truancy, self-indulgence, "sexual deviance," and the like. For the longest time, I tried so hard to be "good," not seeing an alternative. I obsessed about that great score-card. But my heart wasn't in living up to "niceness," I had a vague sense that it was a betrayal of my true nature. So I never did quite get there, if you know what I mean. I never did quite "succeed," or make the honor role all the time, or be popular and pretty, or industrious and invaluable--or whatever you're supposed to do, to "fit in."

I wasted so much time, trying to be "good," according to someone else's standards--not seeing alternatives. I thought if I wasn't "nice," then I was "naughty"--not acceptable, deserving coal and a switch--not fit for the human race.

Santa was hardly the first to posit a universal system of rewards and punishments, for "naughty" and "nice" behavior, of which he alone is arbiter. But the Santa-myth has been one of the more enduring of its kind in our culture. It's an early shaping force that's unquestioned in too many psyches, including my own.

I probably still buy the "naughty" or "nice" myth. It probably still compromises me, unconsciously shaping my behavior. But I'm more critical. Today I believe that Santa Claus is a bastard, for lying about human nature and human worth. As a myth himself, he must die.

There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life.

What about that "niceness," Santa? Your repressed nature is so at odds with your public persona. You "jolly old soul," indeed.

My extra-"Diaspora" blogging

I've had something of a dust-up on DailyKos, regarding overwhelmingly negative reader response to a posting, or "diary," I published about 10 days ago. Here is the comment I've written in response.

I suppose I should be grateful that writing one infamous diary hasn't cost me my "trusted user" status. It's small comfort.

I knew my defense of American voters--including followers of Ralph Nader--in what I see as an untenable electoral setup, would be somewhat controversial. But I've been surprised at the number, and fervor, of comments that oppose my views. It troubles me that virtually no reader has chimed up in defense of what I still see as a reasonable position, not so very different from one Kos himself has articulated.

I've stayed away from this discussion for more than a week, in part because I have been unsettled by the aggressive nastiness of at least one commenter. Seeing my diary vandalized, and reading this individual's spewings, brought me back to the eighth grade, when I took off my clothes one evening after school, to make an awful discovery. "Heather" and "Michelle"--two shitty popular girls I barely knew, who had sat behind me on the gym floor during a student assembly that day--had stuck a wad of chewed gum in the waistband of my pants.

"Act Two" of the eighth-grade story, which has some bearing here, has me walking to class about a month after the gum incident, and turning the corner into a cluster of kids surrounding Heather and Michelle. The girls had been inseparable conspirators, but today they were having a ferocious cat-fight. As long as I live, I won't forget the glob of Heather's spittle gleaming on Michelle's face, as both stood stiffly facing each other, panting. I won't ever forget Michelle's yowl:

"Don't SPIT on me, you fucking SCUM!"

I can't let "shitty popular girls" I meet in adulthood determine my life in any way. I can't let them limit my self-expression--even when they try to intimidate me with odd claims about DailyKos being officially a "Democratic," as opposed to a "progressive" venue. Hmmm. If that was in the guidelines, I sure didn't find it. Anyway, I'm a registered Democrat :-)

Bullies come and go. Based on my previous experience, they'll do themselves in sooner or later. My latest diary stays online, every word of it. It still represents the best of my thinking on the subject of the fairness of American elections, in light of every obnoxious, egotistical Ralph Nader ploy, and every single criminal thing the Republicans and the Bush administration have done. I stand by what I've written.

Most of the people who dissented in comments following my diary, could not be described as bullies. They disagreed with me mostly civilly. A couple even sounded hurt, as if my seemingly heretical opinions about Nader's role in the 2000 election amounted to a personal betrayal of some kind.

I'm in a really difficult position, then. If you don't agree with me about what's really wrong with American elections, please try to understand me there. I am definitely not a person who thrives on controversy, per se. Yet I continue to consider myself a part of the online community which, if comments and the pointed lack of tips following my latest diary are any indication, takes serious exception to my views in one critical area. What do I do? I can only hold my ground, still believing this community is better with me than without me, and vice versa. I reason with people who strike me as unfairly biased--and I'm pretty handily able to dismantle all arguments for third-party villainy in American democracy that I can think of, in truth. I tell those who persist in blaming third-party voters, and non-voters, for Gore's defeat that they are wrong. So wrong.

Blaming progressive and would-be progressive voters, and even third-party candidates, for the sins of a corrupt Democratic party and a corrupt electoral system that hasn't elected progressives, amounts to a timid, demoralized blindness to context that is the hallmark of defeated people. It's like the horses of Orwell's Animal Farm blaming "stupid sheep" for the animals' misery, sheep who are in fact powerless over awful social conditions the pigs have created. It's like calling the delinquent child of a dysfunctional alcoholic (but socially respectable) parent a "bad seed." It's like the white people in the deep south up until the civil rights era, who hated African-Americans, or "niggers," as they were called then. Because white southerners resented their own poverty, they had tent meetings about their hatred of "niggers," and every-day expressions of this hatred were considered socially acceptable. As in these examples, if you don't appreciate the overarching forces that have created an undesirable situation, and to the degree that you persist in blaming victims for that situation, you're co-opted by powerful interests that want to maintain a hurtful status quo. Your position lacks courage. It's really that simple.

I lack for megalomaniac tendencies, as I've noted. I also don't fancy myself a saint. Most of my diaries and comments, if you care to look, are squarely in the middle of the progressive discourse as it plays out on DailyKos, i.e., not at all controversial to this community. Prejudices are prejudices, and I carry around my share. Blaming the American electorate for the problems of our elections just isn't one of mine.

I believe the rest of the community will one day catch up to where I am on this, that my views will inexorably start to look more "centrist" in the DailyKos community. Meanwhile, with the two-party bigotry raging out there, I guess I can only be grateful I'm writing under a pseudonym, and that people don't know what I look like, where I live, or where I park my car:-)

Immediately below this entry, posted also today, is an update about my Thanksgiving, and an ensuing, chance conversation. Names and identifying details have been (slightly) changed.

I try to look at the up-side of any "down" situation.

If I hadn't had an irritating little run-in at Thanksgiving with my relative, "Penelope," the incident that unfolded the following week wouldn't sparkle in my mind half as brightly.

I've felt more compassion for my relative, Penelope, over the years than she is probably due. I've thought the fact that Penelope is mocked and deplored in my extended family is as much a testament to the clique-ishness of my kin, with their in-groups and out-groups, as it is reflection on Penelope's own, often abominable behavior. No more. That woman deserves everything that comes her way, and I don't care that our clan has me pegged as a fellow "problem person," or misfit.

Penelope is very smart, probably in her 60s by now, a grandmother. She is a physically imposing woman with a big, commanding voice you don't ignore. She's foreign-born, and has had an excellent education. She hasn't done much paid work, to my knowledge--she's married well, and hasn't needed to--but she has volunteered, widely and capably. She's shrewd--oh, that describes Penelope--she's also often tactless, with a competitive nature she makes no bones about, and a mean streak.

The wisdom in therapy circles is that "you see what you are," and one of my mother's many issues with Penelope is her "consumerism" and "constant need to acquire more possessions." My mother, be it known, has crammed her small home way too full of furniture, and when you visit her, often as not, there's a TV blaring in every room.

Back to Penelope, and Penelope's latest gaffe; it has indirectly to do with consumerism. Over Thanksgiving, Penelope asked me, pointedly, "what I was doing." I mentioned my nascent teaching career and my political work for single-payer healthcare. She asked if I was personally "getting anything" out of the healthcare work--namely, healthcare.

The very most important work to be done in our society, and Penelope has to point it out that it affords no tangible, personal benefits. OK.

Then there were jibes about my being in my 40s and still living in a rented apartment, not owning a place.

"Oh, I just love your line about renting being like 'flushing money down the toilet,'" she chirped. "I've used it many times."

I didn't have a big, mortgaged house in the hills--or whatever someone my age is supposed to have. I didn't make 200K a year. Penelope, thanks for reminding me I'm a "failure."

That was the yucky part of the story. Now, the sweet part--sort of a poetic counterpoint to my family Thanksgiving, which occurred exactly one week later. Penelope, meet Ann.

After work I bumped into "Ann," a casual friend I see every so often, at a local Happy Hour. Ann, for the record, is Penelope's age, and looks an incredible twenty years younger. She's been married a few times and has one grown child. She is a sometime union organizer, and has waged many an ill-funded political campaign of her own. Ann is an old hippy in Birkenstocks, who does nothing special to promote her preternaturally youthful looks--no botox, no liposuction, no makeup, no gym membership, no special diet, no hair dye.

Ann doesn't buy much of anything new, and somehow or other, she does great.

"Even the age I am, I don't have my own place. I share a house with several people," she told me, over watery happy-hour drinks and free chips and salsa, "I don't have a car, I ride a bike. I travel frequently, I have a family, I can hold big parties at this big house where I live. And you know," she added thoughtfully, "I don't feel that I lack for an-y-thing."

You don't read Ann's lifestyle wisdom in the pages of Vogue, or People. It's not bandied about by the media. Yet, what an inspiration it is.

You don't need a plasma TV, or a new car--even a Prius. You don't have to take fancy vacations, drink bottled water, or brush your teeth with Tom's of Maine (though I do :-). All you need is good, satisfying work and good relationships. That's really it.

People with seriously bad attitudes about money never do absorb this. Other people, like me, assimilate it slowly and have to be reminded of it often.

Progressives and Horizontal Contempt

Here's something much closer to a final draft than what I posted yesterday. It's much shorter, and much tighter. I will probably post over at DailyKos today.

At the neighborhood pizza joint the other evening, I shared a table with an acquaintance I'll call Mike. I can't remember what led up to it, but Mike cued up the butt-kicked Democrats' trusty old canard:

"If it weren't for that bastard Nader, Gore would be president today!"

I find the scapegoating of Nader for Gore's presidential defeat as distressingly common these days as it is cheap. Gore did not lose the 2000 election "because of Nader." Particularly, Gore didn't lose because of the people who voted for Nader. Go ahead, if it makes you feel better, hate Ralph Nader. At least he's a professional politician, he's braced for your invective. Call him a delusional egomaniac, and everything else. Just don't dare malign progressives and would-be progressives who acted their consciences, in tragic circumstances, and didn't elect Democrats.

Mike and many others may curse Nader and everyone who voted for him, but progressives lost the 2000 and 2004 federal elections because of a sick American electoral system, where the interests of big money vie with humanitarian goals, and the moneyed interests keep winning. Blame that, don't blame every-day voters of conscience, in a tragic, untenable situation, who ended up electing Republicans. Also, if you're going to hate Nader, hate him thoughtfully. Remember, the comparatively ill-funded third-party progressive candidate articulated daring progressive reforms the grassroots takes seriously, but the big pols don't.

We should have a liberal president today. We don't. We look at the militarism and corruption and the pure incompetence, and we're sick at heart. What happened, why has democracy failed us?

Gore had enough money. He should have won, Bush should not be president today. But instead of running the 2000 race to beat Bush, Gore ran a "Republican Lite" campaign, in thrall to the big money, the lobbies that funded him. Gore lost, because he was out-of-touch with his constituents--the progressives and would-be progressives who cared about their retirements and their healthcare and their kids' schools. This bloc needed to be inspired to elect Gore in a clear landslide. The efforts of dedicated volunteers notwithstanding, progressives and would-be progressives were not inspired to do any such thing. Democracy, by definition, is about voting your conscience, and those voters who could have buoyed Gore's tragically shoddy campaign, couldn't really be blamed for letting it founder. Nader and the people who voted for him, also couldn't be blamed for Gore's failure.

The question of why American democracy so often doesn't work, why it often isn't about the best interests of the people, voting their consciences, needs to be right up there with why we don't have healthcare for everyone who needs it. It needs to be drummed insistently, right along with why we have to keep sending kids to Iraq to get killed. Instant-runoff voting would probably be a start in enfranchising all voters and their best interests, so would real campaign-finance reform. For any of that to happen, though, we need a big tent, with a noisy, diverse throng inside, to ask the hard questions of the establishment, about our elections, to demand reform.

Phil Angelides, the recent Democratic gubernatorial candidate in my home state of California, like Gore, ran a "Republican Lite" campaign. He lost big, I knew he would. The Democrats' loss wasn't my fault, though I'm a registered Democrat and I didn't vote for Angelides. Angelides' loss also wasn't the fault of other Californians who didn't vote for him, out of conscience, who instead voted for another candidate, or who stayed home, because Angelides promised voters so little that the more-charismatic Republican incumbent Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't also promising.

All else being equal, I suppose I would've backed Angelides, if the race with Schwarzenegger had looked close. In Florida, in 2000, I probably would have voted for Gore, without enthusiasm. In the tragic, untenable circumstances, though, I sure can't blame progressives who made the difficult choice not to vote for Democrats in close races. I defend them. I plead with other liberal Democrats to understand and defend them, too. We need them enfranchised, for the progressive movement to work in any big way.

After I revealed that I'd voted for Camejo, one Kossack blamed me explicitly for Angelides' loss. She implied I was responsible for Schwarzenegger's disastrous continued incumbency. Whooo-weee. What child of yours did I kill, lady? Your mean jab at me, and the fact nobody troll-rated you over it, speaks only to the injured nastiness we carry in our hearts.

We should have a liberal president today. California should have a liberal governor. We don't, and we're beside ourselves. We're furious, and we're grieving.

When the Green Party does something really stupid, like taking money from the Republicans, criticize them. OK, criticize Ralph Nader. But never, ever say that the Green Party shouldn't exist; don't dare imply that it shouldn't raise issues or field candidates, or that those candidates shouldn't get votes.

Maybe it's just human nature that's driving me crazy. Maybe I'm expecting too much of the progressive movement, wanting it to unify. The Republicans, after all, have cynically built an empire on divisiveness: dear public, your problem isn't your small paycheck, your lack of healthcare, your kids dying overseas, your isolation, or the crime in your streets. Don't come together; don't try to bring the corporations to heel, don't muzzle the lobbyists. Dear voters: your real problem is single welfare mothers, it's gays who want to get married, it's the brown-skinned immigrants, it's uppity women who want abortions--it's them.

Dear Democrats--and there are no other "true" progressives--third parties cause democracy to malfunction. Not.

Democratic, Green, or whatever, many of us wouldn't have chosen to be political progressives. The going is hard. It can feel lonely and discouraging, coming up against these vast impersonal forces that shape every life. Many of us liberals got here the hard way, for a personal reason, or reasons. Maybe somebody we love was injured in Iraq, maybe we lack for healthcare. Maybe we have children, or want them. We'd as soon be comfortable and privileged, but life makes demands. We dissent, we beg to differ. We feel we have to. "Here I stand, I can do no other. God help me," said Martin Luther.

The going is hard, it's often discouraging. But as Luther implied, we can choose dignity.

I've written before that the penchant of liberals, at our best, for free discussion and inquiry, our appreciation of nuance and "shades of gray" in any point-of-view, is the progressive movement's crown jewel. Our essential open-mindedness is a basic way we trump the neoconservatives, who are essentially authoritarian, whose movement lends itself to divisive tactics and cynical "easy answers." That's why I want to see the question of why democracy fails honestly faced, reckoned-with. We need a big, vibrant popular movement to advance our aims, and scapegoating demoralizes. It hurts all around. It benefits only the establishment that doesn't want to be challenged, that wants to keep things what they are.

Come on, we're better than the Republicans. We have to be.

On Happiness

From my previous blog, here's a succinct inquiry into mood.

To find myself happy without explanation is a remarkable enough thing that I seek to understand it.

I had not been working on myself to arrive here. I was not awarded anything. I did not fall in love. Apocalypse was not revealed to me in any new doctrine. I have had a difficult history and I have many cares. To outward appearances, it's just a regular day, and probably, I was not even fantasizing about pleasant events, as I took out the trash or locked the car. Yet here I am, happy.

The feeling is like white light in the mind or the flutter of drums in some beloved music. I realize, to my wonderment, it's been sneaking up on me a while. To finally acknowledge it is to let it overtake me. I stop what I'm doing a moment and put a hand to my face.

I am out-of-step with my surroundings, endogenously happy. That every-day phrase "the human condition" refers to the shades of misery presumed to characterize the mortal state in the affluent West. There are pills to keep people less miserable; they are best-sellers.

I once heard a Zen Buddhist monk explain the Buddhist concept of the Great Question as follows:

"To keep alive awe as I meditate, I ask myself, why is there something, instead of nothing at all?"

The monk would tell me I am perfect beauty. Once confusion and doubt are stripped away, mine is the "face of joy." My personal happiness, when I don't expect it, is a symptom of the primal something-from-nothing paradox he spoke of.

Happiness for its own sake is easily misunderstood. I might not even notice that I am feeling unreasonably good or the feeling may be crushed under the weight of my elaborate rationalization. Perhaps it isn't surprising that some who detect my radiance find it troubling.

"You should consult a psychiatrist to find out if you might be having a manic episode."

But this isn't pathology, and it isn't delusion. I respect my state and I ask that others do the same.

My happiness is mundane. Yet it reveals a transcendence as limitless as the blue sky behind the clouds. I smile at children and at dogs. I forget to think ill of a fellow driver who pulls out in front of me without signaling. My chest warms unusually when I laugh. I hear my voice lilt as I return a business phone call. Unable to sit at my computer, I want to walk out into the park at midday, and I do.

On Pleasing

I first wrote this piece for my old blog, in Spring '05. Looking it over recently, I decided I really liked it. It had things to say to me after almost 2 years--a good sign. I've cleaned it up a bit, and here it is.

It being the season of Easter and Passover, memoir like Judith Moore's Fat Girl makes me think of ways I've personally been delivered from the need for sacrifice. I lift my head and admire the green shoots on the trees. I take a deep breath and recognize, with the attendant mixed emotions, that I've been spared the terrible fate of bodily self-hatred and food obsession.

I can't wait to get my hands on Moore's book. According to the reviews, Moore uses bold, irreverent language to describe her life-long fat body and others' responses to it. Through her, we glimpse a personal reality anorexics will die to avoid: "...when I walk, my buttocks grind like the turbines I once saw move water over the top of the Grand Coulee Dam." I wonder if Moore plays these descriptions consciously, to neutralize the social dread of fat, much as Lenny Bruce repeated taboo words during his famous routine, to "claim" the terms, to take away their power.

I can't imagine Judith Moore publishing anything that's less than superb. But, too, I've always been drawn to women's writing about body image, particularly women's "fat" memoir.

Thin-fat-thin-fat-thin. Fat.

It's a pendulum I've personally stayed off of, so far, only observing. I was always slim. My body has maintained itself at an un-troublesome weight with little or no effort on my part. Overall, I regard my physical appetite as a trusted friend.

How different it is for so many others. I read of tedious, lonely struggles with food, I observe them first-hand, and I am sobered by the destruction, even as I myself have been spared.

There are fine examples of "fat" and "anorexic" memoir, though it's the "fat" memoir, the quality being equal, that compels me more.

"Fatso," in our culture, is synonymous with "loser." Writing graphically about fat, as Judith Moore does, takes a peculiar courage. It means the willingness to look "failure," as society defines it, squarely in the eye.

To be fat, for a woman, is to fall short of ironclad cultural expectations: be attractive; please those that matter; be disciplined and successful; "have it all together"; "tow the line." Above all, "look good"; look like it's easy.

I've never struggled with food. The Angel of Death missed me on that pass through. But I am not off free. I have been as out-of-touch with my real needs as any food-obsessed person. Many a "successful" woman will tell you you can "make it" in the world without hearing your insides. Except that I've lacked the instinctive feminine knack of pleasing. This gift is supposed to be unquestioned in females--forever looking outward, as we're expected to do, for approval. Lacking the knack of pleasing, on the one hand, and on the other, being deaf to my intuition, I've been unable to buoy myself to the point where the consequences of failing to please don't hurt.

I've never been fat. But I haven't lacked for opportunity to fail, as grandly as any fat woman.

One of my more spectacular adulthood failures--it was to jinx my self-confidence for years afterward--unfolded during the course of an unpaid internship I took at a major nonprofit organization back when I was fresh out of college. "Nadine" was my immediate supervisor. I should have quit after a week, or she should have let me go that early. Not heeding what my insides were clearly telling me from the moment I walked in the door, I was going to stick it out at the internship, come hell or high water, because I thought I "needed" it for my career. I thought I "should."

This was before computer word-processing; I'm an abominable typist and a worse proofreader, and the position at the nonprofit demanded a lot of both tasks. Somebody else who decided to stick it out would have practiced their typing and improved it. As much as I wanted to "fit in" at this nonprofit, I hated typing keenly, proofreading, too, and I still do. Since Nadine was a stickler for clean copy, our relationship was anything but smooth. That relationship also came to be anything but simple.

Nadine, in her thirties at the time, had talked to me about the drive and perfectionism with which she'd succeeded at work up to that point, to overcome her very difficult personal history. I'd confided my own early hurts. I looked at Nadine as a sort of friend, and both of us wanted our working relationship to succeed. We both attached lots of personal stigma to the prospect of it not succeeding--Nadine, because she'd identified with me.

"I am giving you every chance," she implored once, flinging a sheaf of my typo-laden pages on the desk in front of me one day, her eyes wide with incredulity. "Can you see that I'm giving you every chance, that others in my position would be much less understanding? You aren't mentally retarded! You have to stop making these mistakes!"

Nadine saw me showing up every day, for months and months, apparently trying my damnedest. She saw me inexplicably failing. Nadine herself was absolutely terrified of failure.

As the months wore on, Nadine increasingly soothed her terror by lecturing me about my supposedly damaged character. I was "addicted to failure," she proclaimed; it was my "drug of choice."

As I've said, it breaks my heart to this day that I did not stand up and walk out. Instead, I looked at the floor during Nadine's rantings, praying my chin wouldn't wobble. If I just try harder, I thought. I have to try harder.

During these dark days, for some reason, the topic of food and eating disorders once came up between Nadine and me. I told her I was glad to have been spared.

Nadine told me darkly, without missing a beat, "Your serious problems don't concern food."

At the time, I experienced Nadine--in that context, one terrified, befuddled little human--as godlike. More precisely, I weighted Nadine's assessment heavily in the scheme of my life. It has taken me years and years to heal the pain her words caused.

Memoir about body image appeals to me because the personal struggles described are as epic as mine have felt. The stories about food obsession inspire my empathy. Yet, I experience them at a remove, as I would watch a play or diorama, where I already have a crucial piece of knowledge the main character is still braving torments of the damned to acquire: I know being effortlessly slim will not fix your life! It will not remove self-doubt! I want to trumpet it at the fat people, the anorexics, and the bulimics from the rooftops, in my puny, solo voice: "Give it up! It is a losing battle! LISTEN TO YOUR OWN WISDOM! ACCEPT YOURSELF!"

Anorexics and food-obsessed people scorn their bodies as a sacrifice to keep at bay the biblical Angel of Death, whose ruthlessness is commemorated each spring, at Passover. "If I can just control my appetite, everything will be all right. I'll be safe." But, who is the Angel of Death that the Israelites had to propitiate to flee Egypt safely? Is the "danger" external to the human psyche?

I see the Angel of Death as a rapist. I mean that, less in the sense of perpetrating sexual violation, more in the sense of the original meaning of "rape": "to seize, to carry off." Before you know it, the dark angel will carry you off and drop you in a dark place where the clamor of your fears drowns out your own sacred gut wisdom. If you get out and find your way home again, it will be through your own trials and your own labor.

In a sense, I have been spared. The fearsome angel of bodily self-hatred seems not even to have seen me. Whew. I have a bit of additional perspective a food-obsessed person might need, if I could impart it. From their camp, if I can hear it, might come wisdom I lack.

Annie

I'll call her Annie. She was from Queens, New York. She was Irish and Puerto Rican and Greek--some kind of combination like that. She had coarse brown hair she parted to one side. She had big dark eyes and a buxom nondescript build and wore glasses with old-lady frames. She dressed indifferently in a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. Sometimes she wore jeans and cheap tennis shoes. My clothes were not a lot nicer than hers, unfortunately--and I thought a lot about my wardrobe then.

It was the summer of 1982. I was 16, and enrolled in a five-week summer program for high school students at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. I lived in California. I'd thought the program, in Evanston, Illinois, would be an adventure and my parents agreed it sounded like a good idea. It was my first time ever away from home alone. I did not relax the whole five weeks.

I found living in a dorm with a roommate weird, and I found the pace of the program alienating. I was terribly distracted by social matters. My tomboy roommate hated my guts; I worried that I "wasn't making friends."

The summer staff at Medill were working journalists, all on the young side. They tried to create a life-like "newsroom" atmosphere for the budding teenaged reporters, which in those days meant we slaved over our assignments at jewel-toned IBM Selectrics. The staffers would burst into the room where we were working and give us "updates" about the "breaking news" we were supposed to be chronicling.

I hated typing and I could not abide the clamor. I was irritated by the staffers, who cooked up subjects for practice news stories with horrendously difficult personal names, so we reporters-in-training would have to listen carefully and get the spelling just right, honing our newsroom acumen.

My dumpy and childlike clothes were a source of mortification, if not agony, that summer. I remember one polyester-blend sleeveless blouse, packed because it was suitable for very warm weather. Its silly wide neckline ruff made me feel like a clown. Then there were the elastic sandals with the soft wedge soles. No matter how quietly I tried to walk, they made a humiliating noise, a ffftt-thunk, with my every step. My tomboy roommate and her girlfriend, radiant with mutual adoration, smirked at each other as I passed by.

In hindsight, it may well be that my parents provided an inadequate allowance for my attire--not understanding such things. Or perhaps I would not have selected a wardrobe that pleased me any more if I'd had unlimited money, because my terminal lack of confidence was the real issue.

How I envied those girls from Manhattan and Connecticut, who were stunning in their lustrous gold earrings and their ironed designer jeans, or their impeccable silken blouses and their sandals of buttery leather. How I soaked up their broad gestures and their resonant voices of entitlement, when they spoke up in the seminars, asking questions and raising issues.

Those comely girls worked like fiends. I remember the creases between their eyebrows and they way their lips whitened as they drummed their Selectrics. I remember how the instructors read their pieces aloud in the group, as "fine examples."

As from a lower plane of reality, I'd peer into the dorm lounge in the evenings, where the Manhattan girls lolled in unselfconscious beauty, like Degas' dancers. They talked on the pay phone, or chatted with each other, or with boys, or they massaged each others' backs. I felt so different, freakish, and lost.

One evening, I was struggling with an assignment which I realized I might not be able to finish in time because I was still missing quotations from crucial sources. I walked dejectedly into the dorm lounge and there sat Annie, alone, watching television.

"Did you finish the big project for tomorrow?" I asked.

Annie turned down the volume.

"Huh? Oh, no. I'm not gonna turn mine in till later in the week."

"But they said the deadline was tomorrow morning," I said.

Annie looked at me, and asked, "What are they gonna do if you don't finish it tomorrow, string ya' up?"

"They give you some kind of evaluation at the end of this program," I said, "Some kind of grade."

"Yeah, well, fortunately I'm here for my own benefit, not theirs."

It's important that I not give the impression Annie was the resentful type. It did not appear she had been marched off to the Northwestern program by overly ambitious parents; I really believe she had chosen to be there. She was low-key and earthy and gentle. She was somewhat of a loner, like me. And she was ruthlessly matter-of-fact about whose terms she did anything on.

The room seemed creepy to me, dimly lit, with battered old couches, a floor of filthy vinyl tile, and a vending machine. The surroundings had the air of an underworld, some seedy crash-pad for losers who could not dress and who blew deadlines. I fought the urge to bolt.

Annie's insouciance about the assignment touched a deep ambivalence in me, an ignored-but-raw nerve. Her example illuminated possibilities I was both scared of, and thrilled by.

I'd always had an ambivalent relationship to achievement. Unlike Annie, I typically jumped when directives were given, even when they were implied. But my "jumps" seemed to me to miss as often as they hit. I failed algebra a couple of years running, and driver education; I got ignored at prom-time. Yet I was concerned with outcomes. Part of me really wanted to please, really cared what elders thought, and peers.

As early as young adulthood, I had a hunch that my ambivalence about pleasing was actually a refusal of our culture's hypocritical conflation of others' approval with basic human worth. In fact, I believe now that my "saboteur," if it existed, was the part of my being I badly needed to heed and develop: the one that did not mistake "towing the line" for acquiring self-discipline and living a good life.

For years, it was hard for me to heed my best hunches about achievement, unsupported, as they were, in the surrounding culture.

I recall a particular personal nadir from my twenties. I'd been fired from some job. It was difficult to walk with my head held up, to look people in the eye. By then, I'm afraid dumpy clothes didn't figure much in my low self-image: the bad job experience convinced me for a few weeks there that I was, oh, failing at life.

I obsessed over a mental image of a great heavenly score card, with my "successes" and "failures," each assigned a value, all tallied into a sum, and rounded neatly to the hundredths place--sort of like a cosmic grade-point average.

Just who kept this score, and what the alleged, cosmic consequences of "succeeding" and "failing" were, I did not address in that miserable fantasy. If it was determined at some finite point that I had "succeeded" at life, according to my overall score, maybe I was going to get presents in my stocking at Christmas. If I "failed," I suppose I'd get coal and a switch.

I bring up the story because it shows just how blinded I was, even into adult life--how late I still believed in Santa Claus.

I've been remembering Annie recently, though I hadn't thought about her in years. Perhaps it has to do with hitting middle age, and finding my life not quite where I thought it would be. Or 'should' be.

It was the evening in the lounge with Annie, receiving her unlikely wisdom, which has turned out to be the most lasting gift of the Northwestern experience for me. That memory, time and again, torpedoes any tendency of mine to try to master the limbo-dance through bars held by others, as a condition for my own self-respect.

Annie identified a space in my mind, away from others' expectations. It's a stillness, a bedrock self-trust, in which passion can arise, in an entirely personal direction, and at one's own pace. Not where I 'should' be? According to exactly whom? It's the freedom to do what's important, without worrying so much about what matters less--even if it's expected.