10:10 a.m. - 2007-01-27
Happiness is . . . Yeah, I Got Nothin'
Although I always was, and likely always will be, a fan of Sex and the City, I will also admit that I was ready to deck Carrie by Season Four. Not only was this the point when she tried to get Aidan back by, and I am not making this up, people who haven't seen the show, standing at his door and yelling "You HAVE to forgive me!" over and over and over again, it was also around the time when I first marathoned a season with some friends of mine on DVD, which made us fully aware that, even in the first season, Carrie was annoying and pathetic enough that this moment should have come at no surprise. You wonder how her friends didn't slip some arsenic into her cosmopolitan as a mercy to her and the men of New York.
Even in episodes where she wasn't a big part of the action, she could always be counted on to grate on the viewers' nerves like we were a freshly cut block of parmesan in her "I couldn't help but wonder . . . " moment, the point where the various narratives were made to gel into a meditation on a question. The sheer repetitiveness of this moment, which was always accompanied by her typing it on her screen, nine times out of ten on her bed, made it maddening, but the thing that took it to a whole other lever was that the questions were usually pointless, and, when interesting, the answers were relatively heteronormative, much as the show eventually proved itself to be the in series finale from below Hell. The various women may question whether their genders or sexualities are stable, whether they are capable of loving someone outside their range of expectations about class, education, and even race, whether and how being single is a viable life option, etc, but ultimately they all found love and monogamy with successful, upper middle class white men, although Charlotte made the DARING choice of marrying outside her faith. Edgy.
I bring this up because, I am afraid, there is something that I can't help but wonder about these days. Like most of the questions asked on the show, the answer is either extremely simple or unfathomably complicated, depending on what track you want to go with. The question is this: to what extent is happiness contingent on situation? In other words, how much is happiness something that is external, derived from the work that you're doing, the place where you live, the people you have in your life, and how much is it something internal, dependent either on philosophy or biochemistry.
Now, I want to point out that I am not saying it is one or the other. I nearly phrased it that way, but that's how you get the simple answer, which is that happiness is both internal and external. The complications arise when you try to think about it as somewhat quantifiable, or at the very least try to imagine what the limits are to each aspect of happiness. How miserable do you have to be before philosophy breaks down? Is there a chemical means of being so happy that you can survive nearly any setback?
I say this because I've noticed that, since I've been back in Austin, the littlest thing can set off a shift in mood. Last night, for example. I headed over to my friend Ginger's to see her perform, something I hadn't done since I'd been back in Austin. I was worn out from working out, and I was depressed because, while a number of women were interested in working on my Emma Goldman project, none of them have committed yet, and some of them have disappeared. I got the start time of the performance wrong and was quite early when I thought I would be fashionably late, so I went to go get a sandwich. As I was eating my nadachicken sub, I read some essays in an anthology called To Be Real, edited by the extremely sexy Rebecca Walker, about how various individuals came to understand theselves as feminists after having felt that they were denied access to feminism because of another aspect of themselves. In other words, these essays were written by individuals who worried, at some point, that they couldn't call themselves feminists because they enjoyed being femme, or because they were unapologetically violent, or because they had sadomasochistic sexual fantasies, all of which, at some point, had been labeled as "unfeminist" by certain parties, although not necessarily by feminists themselves, and never by all feminists. When I saw Rebecca Walker talk about this collection back when she visited my college in 1999, she said that she wanted every essay to begin at the point of "Grrrr!" and end with "Hah!" I loved that. As I read, I began to weep, I was so moved by the stories of women seeking liberation. I was in a sandwich shop, reading feminist theory and crying. I mean, on the one hand, yes, I should be exalted by feminist theory, and I'm glad I am exalted by feminist theory, but I feel like I don't need to have a moment in public about it.
Earlier in the day I had been reading queer theory, which had also served to depress me, but I will wait to talk about that until I do my first orals write-up. Let's just say that Lee Edelman didn't leave me exalted as much as leaning against the wall of the shower in a very Naomi Watts in a Inarritu film sort of way.
So I went back to Ginger's, and hung out by my car for a bit, feeling tired. Then I went and watched the show, still somewhat blue. During intermission, though, Ginger came up to me and mentioned that she had been wanting to revive the idea of a Cabaret type show derived from the routines of Bette Midler, and that she wanted me to help her create it and to direct it. This would require us sitting together and watching a number of Bette Midler concerts and films, then writing our own comedy routines, and then staging them. This got me even more depressed. I mean, it's not like I love directing. It's not like I love cabaret and would love to write some salacious, campy routines for a woman to perform. It's not like Bette Midler hasn't been one of my favorite actresses for as long as I can remember. It's not like Outrageous Fortune and Big Business were two of my favorite movies before I had even kissed a boy, which, I totally didn't start doing at the age of nine.
Oh, wait, I TOTALLY DO and I TOTALLY DID. I should call her.
After hearing about her idea and that she wanted me to do this for her, everything was wonderful. I poured myself a cocktail and toasted the night away with Ginger's cohort of badass lesbians, one of whom, a new addition to the gang, I couldn't take my eyes off of because she looked almost exactly like Uma Thurman, only with red hair and a smaller nose (her girlfriend is a very, very, very lucky woman). I danced around and sung along and had a blast, and when I went to go to another show and the band I had been planning on seeing hadn't shown yet, I didn't even care. I went home, only to discover, from a syllabus left on my roommate's desk, a list of books related to the subject of affect in the public sphere. My dissertation topic is affect in the public sphere. It was like my orals prep work had just been done for me.
Even just writing that makes me feel good, but I'm worried. What happens if Ginger decides she doesn't want to do the show? What happens if I can't find even one Emma Goldman? What about the next setback that I don't see coming? I don't like the thought of my feeling positive about life being determined by whatever happens on a given day. I want to have enough drive to get myelf through the setbacks. I want to have enough joy to sail through the rougher waters, not to mention the doldrums where nothing is happening.
This is better, of course, than where I was last semester, where nothing was making me happy, where my feelings were consistent but they were consistently crappy. It isn't as good, though, as the times when I saw myself as an exuberant person. Exuberance is actually a psychological term for the quality of being happy as a rule, of being cheerful and bright spirited. I've been exuberant before, someone capable of weathering most of what life through at me with a smile, and I want to be exuberant again.
I was reading Still Life with Woodpecker the other day, when I should have been reading The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In the novel, a typewriter insists that the only serious question is, "Who knows how to make love stay?" It says, or perhaps the narrator says, "Answer me that and I will tell you whether or not to kill yourself. Answer me that and I will ease your mind about the beginning and end of time. Answer me that and I will tell you the true purpose of the moon." I really loved that, although for me the question is, of course, slightly different. "Who knows how to make joy stay?"
I certainly don't. If you do, please let me know.
I actually do need to go back to Lee Edelman. In his book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, he argues that queerness should stand against futurism, against the idealized Child that so many say will be destroyed if exposed to queerness, against the idea that some day things will make sense, against putting aside what we need now so that we can work towards needs being realized by the next generation. I can see some of the reasons why he is arguing this. I can understand how the idea of the future can screw things up, that people who really have no intention of cleaning up the environment or ending poverty or granting equal rights to racial or sexual minorities or women will convince people those demanding all those things that they need to go slow, to be patient, in order to keep from feeling a backlash, one that the conservatives had already begun engineering the moment we said we weren't going to take it anymore. I get that.
His writing still left me depressed, not to mention pissed off. I hate when anyone tells me that I should be or do something, and when someone tells me that I should consider that the religious right is correct in saying that being queer is ultimately disruptive of the social order, that being queer should mean disrupting the social order, that being queer should mean rejecting the future and the idealized child, I get furious, because I love the future, particularly when aliens are involved, and love children, and think that both can be goals without being idealized. And when I fight for queer rights, I fight for the queer child, the kid who I don't want to grow up hating himself. And I don't want to automatically be outside the social order. I don't want to automatically be inside the social order, as well. Like the feminists of To Be Real, I want to be able to be queer, to disrupt the gender binary, to claim that I stand for the rights of everyone to be able to choose how to make their life livable without having to follow some sort of dogma or formula about what it means to be queer, to be queer while still entering into a marriage, and adopting and raising children, and making a good enough living that I can get them piano lessons and take them on trips to other countries and all that stuff. I am not being heteronormative, because I don't intend to look down on anyone else for their choices, and I will fight for the right for people who have made other choices. I am being me, you fuck.
So maybe I don't need happiness. Maybe what I need is rage, depression's livelier cousin. Maybe I need to fight rather than sit around. I don't guarantee that I won't feel the need to sit around, but I hope that I can find a better alternative. I may not have joy, but I have choices that I didn't think I had before. That's something.
I also have an excuse to watch a lot of Bette Midler. That's something, too.
