Two major "methods" or contexts for understanding what to do in life have developed for me. The two complement each other and neither is moral, but both mix technical science with the management of "feeling". Both come from education, so to keep track of them I'll attach them to the two classes I essentially "flunked" in my undergrad years at Northwestern. I don't mean I was graded "F" but "C" which is the equivalent in elite places. The grades stung, but in some ways I deserved them because I was too busy deeply assimilating the material to pass a test. Such situations discredit the German military/factory lockstep of our education system.
One was Alvina Krause's "Method" acting and the other was Paul Schilpp's philosophy of religion. "Method" teaches personal discipline and awareness in a memory-based use of experience to create a character. The re-experience of some moment of the past puts the actor's body into subconscious demonstration.
The philosophy of religion is about systems of meaning and Schilpp was a a Methodist heretic, a humanist. I learned that leaving Christianity did not mean leaving holiness, because it can be found many ways, and that religion is only institutions.
I'm a lousy actor but I used the Method to strive for deep empathy, which I connect to Porges' ideas about the near-entry into the being of another person through the use of what might be called the "frame of expression" held in the brain connection direct to the face and chest (breathing and heartbeat). These are the support for the liminal virtual "space/time" first created between a mother and child, a phenomenon entirely abstract and creative in content but shared. This becomes the ground of shared being, the ability to understand each other. This is what empathy was supposed to mean before Hallmark and humane societies got hold of it.
In lieu of religious systems I have relied on "third force" psychology, theories that are maps of the interface between individual and society, including economics and ecosystems. These two methods mesh nicely except that in life one sometimes must switch between one or the other and they both have dangerous sides. One can sacrifice identity or at least struggle to keep it functioning.
I do see identity as a function now, though for most of my life it was a battle station, a claimed stance that I thought was the point of life. Three ways I tried to persist were through teaching, the ministry and marriage. They seemed to me -- until I left -- as deceptions that the culture pushed onto me in a gender-controlled world. I was sometimes praised.
I was such a "nice" girl, funny and talented, obedient and intelligent. Until -- as the form goes -- I wasn't. Inside me were old black-and-white newsreels of people being bombed, mixed with the surreal swirl of a movie something like "The Red Shoes" -- obsession. That is, pedaling through a rainy night on a ghost-ridden path with a message clenched in my teeth. People said, "Why do you do hard things? Why can't you just take it easy? You're far too idealistic. Get your feet on the ground. Stay safe."
Now and then I'd meet someone like myself but not usually face-to-face, more likely in a book, a class, or a movie. Not pop dreck or political screeds, but more likely something accessed through natural history about animals or geology, the long threads about life weaving in and out of itself. There's a good bit of horror in it. I'm not sentimental.
Both of these methods expose one to high stress that demands resignation as well as a need to make things better or at least understand how to do that. A subsidiary strategy has been to use a remarkable human being as an anchor point and sometimes let them make the same use of me. They were rarely, if ever, female. Men of our times assume that all woman want to attach to them and exploit them and have no worries about using that want.
I had standards, a kind of morality maybe, about what male was involved. I don't mean sexually, but more as friends, companions in adventure. They had to be "worth" my efforts and sacrifices. I don't mean in terms of money but in some kind of aesthetic or skill or field of knowledge. And that's where the morality begins to operate: is this person who preoccupies me doing "good in the world?" It was hard on some guys to realize I just didn't consider them good enough.
I have not personally done good in the world. I come up short. I don't follow the prescriptions for teachers and clergy, but at least I haven't stolen money or scapegoated people or taken on unworthy causes. Not so much because I consciously failed to act as that I was too busy thinking about it to do anything. I try not to attract attention because people try to interfere. But sometimes the moment is so compelling that I do at least speak out. Sometimes it worked.
A certain kind of person who observes guiding stereotypes imagines that I am what they expect, like Facebook trying to trap me in a marketing category. Those most in danger of this are people who knew me in a different role. People who knew me as the compliant enthusiast who rode shotgun for Bob Scriver will make contact, invite me for lunch, and end up staring at me across the table, baffled by my failure to be impressed by them. People who knew me when I still believed in big shots will expect me to contribute to their memorials, all unaware of how contemptuous of their lives I have become. Very awkward. But not as much as those who thought I was a loser, successfully drove me off, and expected to dominate me again. Now I just go around them.
All this is systems, social allegiance, dynamics of relationship, the plots of stories. They shape the person, and this is where my focus is most immediately right now. I've stopped the bike to unfold the paper and add notes to the message, though the whole thing blurs in the cold rain. I don't know exactly where I'm going, only trying to get as far as I can before the thunder from the horizon becomes apocalypse. I do know that no matter what happens to me, the world will persist.
