This afternoon I participated in a rare thing in Regina: a walking art event, sponsored by New Dance Horizons. Gary Varro, a local artist, led a group of about 20 people on a silent walk in Wascana Centre, on and around the Goose Island Overlook, one of the few hills in this city. It’s artificial, of course, made of material dug out of Wascana Lake when it was deepened during a Depression-era make-work project, but that’s true of almost every hill on these flat plains.
It rained lightly for ten or fifteen minutes as we were gathering–never a good thing in February, since the rain freezes when it hits the ground, even when the temperature is above zero, as it was today–and the sky was cloudy more or less throughout the event. The sun did break through, briefly, which was lovely. Originally the walk was scheduled for last weekend, but because the temperature was close to minus 30, it was postponed. I’m happy it was, not because I don’t like the cold, but because I was out of town last weekend and wouldn’t have been able to be part of it.
When we finished, Robin Poitras, the artistic and managing director of New Dance Horizons, met us with two thermoses of tea. A cup of hot tea warming one’s hands on a cold, damp day–that was wonderful.
Most of my walking these days is utilitarian: walking to work, usually, quickly and alone. This walking was very different. We walked together, as a collective, silently, slowly, with a deliberate intention. I was surprised at how different it was from my everyday experience, how powerful it was, how sober and contemplative it was, and yet also how strangely joyful. It was the fourth time Gary has led a February walk like this one, and I wish I had participated in the other three. I have no idea how I missed them, but if he does this again, I will be there.
The slow pace of our walk got me thinking about walking artist Hamish Fulton’s Slowalks. I wonder if we could organize something like that locally, as an homage to Fulton’s work. In the spring, perhaps–nobody wants to move that slowly here in the winter, because it’s too cold, and you need to move a little more quickly if you’re going to keep warm.
Here’s a link to some video documentation about a Slowalk in support of Ai Weiwei that Fulton organized in London in 2011. If you’re interested in something like this, let me know. We could do it outside, perhaps in a parking lot, the kind of location Fulton often uses for these projects, and perhaps in support of some timely purpose. So many things are happening in the world today, and by walking together, we could express a response to one of them. Right now this is just a notion, but if there’s any interest, it could become more than that.
This tiny volume–three essays, 69 short pages–hardly counts as a book. Sometimes, though, that’s all the time someone might have available. The authorship of Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person is credited to a collective, The School of Life, which is the brainchild of British philosopher Alain de Botton. De Botton has a M.Phil. from King’s College, London, and started a Ph.D. at Harvard, but he quit to write books for the general public, or so his Wikipedia profile tells me. The School of Life is his vehicle for reaching that broader audience; it’s an entrepreneurial venture that provides articles that discuss various issues to subscribers. Writers are trying to find ways to earn a living, and maybe de Botton’s method is more profitable than a Substack or relying on revenue from books. He has published a lot of books, some of which seem to be short ones like Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person, and others longer and more thorough. The School of Life seems to be a collective venture, with anonymous co-writers following de Botton’s direction. I say “seems” because it’s hard to tell who wrote this book. The title essay, or at least a shorter version of it, was published in the New York Times in 2016, and became that newspaper’s most-downloaded article of that year; I ran across a mention of it somewhere and, curious, decided to get a copy.
Of the three essays, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person” is the most successful. It’s a funny and poignant look at long-term relationships. Half of marriages end in divorce, and who knows how many other forms of coupling fall apart. De Botton sets out to explain why that is. The first reason is that we don’t know ourselves. In particular, we don’t understand our own particular craziness. “A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet),” he writes, “it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening accommodation between their relative insanities.” Nor do we understand other people. We enter into marriage without knowing the attitudes of our potential mates towards things like introspection, sexual intimacy, money, fidelity, and “a hundred things besides.” Without that knowledge, we go by physical attractiveness, and that’s not enough for two people to build a life together. We aren’t used to being happy, either. What we learned about love in our families of origin might’ve been tainted by abandonment and humiliation, and since that’s what we believe love to be, we end up choosing people who will cause us more suffering. “We marry the wrong people because the right ones feel wrong–undeserved,” de Botton argues. “We marry wrongly because we have no experience of health and because we don’t–whatever we may say–ultimately associate being loved with being satisfied.” We also marry because being single is awful, and being tired of being alone causes us to choose the wrong person out of desperation.
All three essays argue that, historically, when the Marriage of Reason–marriage as a kind of business contract rather than a love match–was replaced by the Marriage of Instinct or Feeling, the Romantic marriage based on love, we merely changed one source of misery for another. Instead of either of those forms of coupling, we ought to develop a Marriage of Psychology, in which aspiring partners would submit to a process of examination, learn about “the daunting complexities of our respective psyches,” discovering how our potential partners are mad, how we can remain friends, how we can “accommodate our competing needs for extracurricular sex on the one hand and loyalty on the other.”
We also need to understand that happiness is fleeting and inconstant, and accept its impermanence. We need to realize that we’re not special–that most marriages are unhappy, at least sometimes, and ours will almost certainly be, too. Marriage can’t “end love’s painful rule over our lives”: “there is as much doubt, hope, fear, rejection and betrayal inside a marriage as there is outside of one.” A psychological marriage, one that accepts this bleak picture, is the only solution to the conundrum of long-term relationships.
The second essay, “When Is One Ready to Get Married?,” continues the rejection of Romantic marriage we see in the first essay, but instead of proposing the psychological marriage as the solution, it suggests that a marriage based on Classical principles would make more sense. So, we are ready for marriage when we give up on perfection; when we realize we won’t ever be perfectly understood; when we realize we’re crazy and in what way; when we’re ready to love rather than be loved; when we’re ready to take on administrative tasks, since running a household with someone is similar to running a business; when we understand that sex and love both belong and don’t belong together, a paradox that must be mastered, since over our lives we may “be called upon to demonstrate both capacities”; when we are happy to be taught and are also calm about teaching; and, finally, when we realize that we’re not that compatible with our partners. Marriage is not intuitive; it is a skill, and it requires practice and instruction.
The last essay, “How Love Stories Ruin Our Love Lives,” argues that while fiction can teach us important lessons about love, the wrong kinds of stories–Romantic rather than Classical–mislead us. The Romantic plot is about finding a partner, for instance; the Classical plot is about tolerating a partner, and being tolerated by them, over a long period of time. The Romantic story ignores the overwhelming importance of work; the Classical story does not. The Romantic story forgets about children; the Classical story understands that children can create “unbearable strains” between a couple, and those strains are also love. The Romantic story doesn’t consider practicalities; the Classical story emphasizes things like laundry and other household tasks. The Romantic story teaches that love and sex belong together; the Classical story “knows that long-term love may not set up the best preconditions for sex,” and that sexual problems don’t necessarily indicate that a relationship is failing. The Romantic story thinks that harmony between the protagonists is fundamental to a successful relationship; the Classical story accepts that relationships include misunderstandings, secrets, loneliness, and compromises. Again, love is a skill we need to learn, not an instinct. “The Romantic novel is deeply unhelpful,” the essay concludes. “By its standards, our own relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory.” We would be better off if we told ourselves “more accurate stories about the progress of relationships, stories that normalise troubles and show us an intelligent, helpful path through them.”
You might think all of this feels rather bloodless and overly rational, as if Spock had become a couple’s counsellor (when he’s not experiencing pon farr, that is). Or you might think about your relationship(s) and realize that the arguments this little book makes contain a lot of sense. I think there’s a lot of sense here, but I also think it might be almost impossible to put much of what’s advocated here into practice. That’s okay. I’m curious about de Botton’s other writing–he’s published dozens of books, translated into dozens of languages, according to Goodreads–and I might dip into them in the future. I’m curious about How Proust Can Change Your Life, for instance. Maybe it would encourage me to take the shrink wrap off my multivolume edition of In Search of Lost Time (I think I have the one with the new title, not the one called Remembrance of Things Past). That would fill a gaping hole in my education.
My colleague, Medrie Purdham, suggested Kayla Czaga’s work to me some time ago, and last night I finally got around to reading Midway. I want to call it a delightful book, although I’m afraid that the subject matter–most of the poems focus on the death of Czaga’s father and her grief–doesn’t lend itself to the word “delightful.” The poems are wonderful, though–full of surprises and comedy. The book’s first poem, “The Hairbrush,” neatly sets the tone: her late father’s hairbrush, “Matted with hair,” is described in a series of inventive metaphors before its concluding stanza: “Here, she said, handing it to me, / Go grow yourself a new dad.” The notion of a hairbrush as a packet of seeds, of individual hairs as potential replacements for the lost parent, made me chuckle-grunt in surprise. I made the same sound as I read the rest of this book. I have another of Czaga’s books at home, and I’m looking forward to reading it, too. In the meantime, though, thanks, Medrie, for introducing me to a writer I hadn’t known about before.
I’m teaching the Canadian Indigenous literature survey class again this semester. One of the students in that course lent me her copy of Ella Cara Deloria’s Waterlily. She’s Dakota, from Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation in Fort Qu’Appelle, about an hour east of Regina, and Waterlily is one of her favourite books. I can see why. Deloria was Dakota; she was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota and grew up at the Standing Rock Reservation. She was also an ethnographer and linguist who worked with Franz Boas and published three books in her lifetime: Dakota Texts, a bilingual (Dakota and English) collection of stories (1932); Dakota Grammar (1941), which she wrote together with Boas; and Speaking of Indians (1944). I have a copy of Dakota Texts, and in my forthcoming book (warning: shameless plug coming), Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, which is currently available for preorder, I briefly talk about one of the stories Deloria tells. She worked as a teacher, museum director, and anthropologist. She also wrote fiction. Along with Waterlily, which she completed in 1948 but which was not published until 40 years later, nearly two decades after Deloria’s death, she wrote Iron Hawk, a novel (I think–I haven’t read it), and The Buffalo People, a collection of stories. Both of those were published posthumously as well.
During my PhD research, I read about various creative forms of presenting social science research. One of those was the ethnographic novel: conveying the results of, say, ethnographic or autoethnographic research by telling a story in which the characters are fictional but their context is based on research data. Waterlily is an example of an ethnographic novel. It tells the story of the life of the title character, a young woman in a Dakota community, from her childhood to marriage and motherhood, during the nineteenth century. At first, I thought the historical context might’ve been older than that, because for almost the first half of the book, there’s no sign that settlers exist in any way. Then we find out that’s not the case. We see the destructive effects of contact with those outsiders, including the dwindling herds of buffalo and the scourge of smallpox. But those intruders are not the novel’s focus. Instead, we learn, in detail, what life was like for the Dakota in (I’m guessing) the 1840s or 1850s. It’s a fascinating portrait of what is, for me, a completely different way of living, of looking at the world. Waterlily herself might be a little flat as a character, but it’s the world of which she’s a part that makes this book worth reading.
I had questions as I read, particularly about the way Deloria depicts sexuality and gender roles; I wondered if those aspects of the text might reflect the 1940s and Deloria’s Christianized environment a little more than the 1840s. There’s no sense in which anyone might be two-spirit, for instance, although perhaps that wasn’t something the Dakota practiced. But the book conveys a detailed portrait of social roles and obligations, ways of making a living, sacred rituals, and the absolute importance of generosity. There’s also a clear sense of how much Dakota people practiced self-control, and how information in a high-context culture is communicated in careful, subtle ways.
I found Waterlily fascinating. It provides a glimpse into a way of life that settlers did not value, and in fact did their best to destroy. They–or rather we–were unsuccessful in that attempt, partly due to the work of people like Deloria, but also through other forms of resistance to colonization. We all ought to be grateful for that. There are so many ways to think about the world, and the one that the ancestors of people like me brought from Europe is not the only one that has value. It’s important for we settlers to remember that. So thanks, Naomi, for the loan of the book. I’ll return it to you at our first class after reading week.
