Trouble in Paradise

What’s a paradise without a little trouble?

Just as Paris seems to be our kind of heaven, so the trouble we've been experiencing over the last year seems to be our idea of hell, we who value silence so highly.

These nineteenth century buildings are gorgeous, but sometimes living in one feels like being inside a drum. Music next door? You hear it. Laughing? That too. All of which is fine, the sounds of life around you.

But what if you have a neighbor who likes to make noise early in the morning or past midnight, just to wake you, just for the hell of it? Sudden, sharp noise, like shoes being thrown against the wall. And who must listen to her radio at full volume, disturbing us and her neighbors upstairs.

You have to take measures.

And we did: wrote her courteous letters. Brought her flowers. Wrote the owners of the apartment. Spoke to the gardienne. Spoke with our neighbor in the street.

Why she was so noisy?, we asked.

Because she felt like it, she said. And then came a litany of resentment, against Americans, against artists, against the owner of her apartment, and other vague resentments.

Resentment. I thought of Friedrich Nietzsche’s words about Buddhism, that “there is nothing to which [the Buddha's] doctrine is more opposed than the feeling of revenge, antipathy, ressentiment (“it is not by enmity that enmity is ended”—that is the stirring refrain of all Buddhism).”

We wrestled with how to handle this.

We spoke with friends, French and American. We talked to a lawyer, a doctor, a property manager, and others.

The advice was varied:

Get very tough, don't let them walk on you; that posture is all the French understand.

Women said, She needs some flowers.

Men said, She needs a good ----.

French people of all genders said, She’s crazy (déséquilibré, as the French so delicately put it).

She’s miserable, lonely.

She’s both.

Quelle bêtise!, said a French woman about the anti-American, anti-artist bias.  What nonsense.

Monster-Baby-Tyrant is what we call this kind of behavior.

If you’re miserable, one way to handle it is to take it out on others. Scapegoating, it’s called.

If you want peace and compassion from others, you have to give it, we decided. Maybe over time this would have an effect. Maybe by setting an example of consideration towards her, she would follow suit. 

We vowed we wouldn’t descend to her level and play our music or TV loud. We bought earphones, and watch our French films and news programs (one of the ways we study the language) without making noise to bother our neighbors.

We bought a fan, to create white noise between our bed and the wall adjoining our two apartments.

That inspired the first communication initiated by her, after six months of none. She left a note outside our door. There was a sound, she said, that disturbed her sleep. Perhaps we had heard it too?

Yes, we replied. We needed a way to block out your noise in the morning (and sometimes during the day and night too).

She handled this as any mature human being would and hired a lawyer. A lawyer? No dialogue at all? Why not just offer to be quieter, and come to some agreement with us so that we all could sleep peacefully, without the need for a fan?

We replied with a letter (through our lawyer) that described our mutual history, including the soundproofing we’d put in on our side, at the request of the owners of the apartment. If that didn’t work, they had promised, they’d soundproof their side, too.

We had asked our excellent contractor about his experience soundproofing Paris apartments. He’d done it, he said, but hadn’t found a really good method yet. He’d heard that there were better methods in the U.S.

We spent months researching American soundproofing. It didn’t seem like such a big challenge to me, since my father was a contractor, and so is my brother. Easy enough.

The material was shipped to France while we were still in the U.S. Our contractor did a beautiful job of lifting it by crane through a fifth floor window, installing it, and finishing off the walls so that the beauty of the crown molding stayed intact. All for a reasonable price.

It didn’t work. It helped. It would have worked if our neighbor were making a reasonable amount of noise.

But she wasn't. From the day we moved here one year ago (and even before that, we’d heard from previous occupants), she had begun her campaign of banging on the wall to express some chronic misery in her soul.

And then the owners of the apartment decided they didn’t want to spend the money, or risk losing the beautiful ceiling line by soundproofing on their side, or—who knows, maybe they knew it would do no good with a tenant on a rampage.

They also decided they no longer wanted her as a tenant, and asked her to leave.

But she hired a lawyer, and has stayed. French law is heavily on the side of the tenant; it is almost impossible to evict one.

After a while, we protected our sleep with not just a fan, but sleeping pills as well.

Several months later, I read an article about the harm that these pharmaceuticals do. We decided to kick them together, to get “moraline-free,” a word that Nietzsche coined. “… not virtue but fitness (Renaissance virtue, virtú, virtue that is moraline-free).” His ideal, ours too, is to live a healthy life.

To make it easier, I rented a studio for a few weeks where I could catch three birds—fish with one net:

Go down into depth and find my fiction voice again.

Get off the sleeping pill.

And give Richard the solitude to do the same.

It worked! We are both “moraline-free.” We both were able to shift gears and go into deeper artistic focus.

Now that the studio rental is over, and I’m back home, how will this drama unfold? Stay tuned.

How to Live: A Vision Quest, Part Two

There were twelve voices. 

I listened to each, and I named them.

Each had his or her desires and concerns. All were important, but some were more important than others. They took the shape of sea creatures:

Sea horse, Whale, Hermit crab,

Flying fish, Electric eel, Octopus,

Sea turtle, Mermaid, Starfish,

Shark, Dolphin, Swordfish.

I recorded my dialogues with them in my journals for about ten years. By that time, their natures were distinct and I had heard very clearly what each one represented and what each wanted. Each seemed to represent one of the twelve realms of life.     

I began to draw a mandala every day, twelve petals around a circle, and colored each petal the color that I felt corresponded to the sea creature.

I wasn’t eager to discuss this process with anyone else, not after mentioning it to one boyfriend: “You talk to twelve fish? Maybe you should talk to a shrink.”

This work was eccentric, but I knew it wasn’t crazy. I knew because it was helping me find a sense of harmony and purpose.

After ten years I began to read mythology. All of C. G. Jung, Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, and Joseph Campbell’s work. 

What irony. Campbell had taught at, was still teaching at Sarah Lawrence, the very college I’d dropped out of. But I hadn’t been ready for his work then. If I’d encountered his books ten years earlier, I might have approached myth from the outside, rather than, as I was doing, from the inside, from my own subconscious.

 

The electrifying thing I discovered was that these twelve inner creatures to whom I’d been talking for ten years, almost perfectly (with some minor variations) corresponded to the twelve gods and goddesses of ancient Greece. The only difference was that the Greeks saw these divinities as outside the human realm (though powerfully interacting with it and affecting it), and the modern variation I was discovering was a vision of them as twelve inner archetypes of the unconscious. (Because in symbolic terms, what else does the realm of water, and sea creatures, mean?)

Now, here in Paris, I still create my daily mandala, listening to the voices of each god and goddess, following their leads, and noting each day what I accomplish in each realm. That other Greek term that intrigued Montaigne, prosoche, means mindfulness, attending to the inner world, and in that way to the outer world as well, since uncontrolled emotion, chaos, warps one’s view of reality. My continuing dialogue with the gods and goddesses, and the creation of a daily mandala, is my method of prosoche.

The major four effects of this vision quest were:

* The sense of the sacred had been restored to me, not in the form of religion, somebody else’s rules, but in an individual vision of meaning. With a sense of the sacredness of daily life, comes imperturbability, freedom from anxiety, what the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics called ataraxia.

* I discovered my purpose as a writer: the god Daedalus, the craftsman, was at the center of my personal mandala.

* I felt a growing sense of harmony in daily life. When you are clear about your central purpose, and have control over your emotions, you are free to live in the present, and that brings joy, what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia.

* My compulsive eating completely disappeared.

Any compulsive addiction: alcoholism, drug addiction, sex addiction, addiction to eating or not eating, is a sickness of the soul, a symptom of chaos, confusion, lack of clarity at the core. A spiritual symptom. And “symptom” is the key word: you cannot cure the behavior unless you cure the underlying sickness, which is always spiritual.

Okay, Kaaren, what do you mean by “spiritual,” anyway?

I answer, Invisible forces or archetypes or “spirits” inside you. And what is inside you is inside everyone, therefore, all around you. And these spirits are within birds, mammals, fish, plants, the earth itself, even her weather.

After thousands of years of a patriarchal vision that imagines the divine as a Single Dominant Male with a Human-like Visage, we’re returning to the vision of a more balanced force animating the world. Anima mundi, the ancients called it. Animism, as most so-called “primitive” peoples see the world.

 

I grew up in the desert of Arizona, galloping around on a donkey among mountains and saguaro and abundant desert creatures, pygmy owls and jackrabbits, roadrunners and rattlesnakes, in a state where Papago, Hopi and Navajo lived.

Many of the kids in my elementary school were Native American. My Navajo friend, Nellie, lived in a hogan, one school bus stop beyond ours in Paradise Valley, before it was as populated as it is now. I encountered kachinas, carved and painted wooden dolls that represented the various spirits the Hopi saw all around them.

That the world was alive with spirits seemed obvious to me. Cat spirits had a particular hold on me. I remember (after our cat gave birth on my stomach in the middle of the night) cradling the newborn kittens and feeling such intense love I was afraid I’d squeeze them to death.

Animism: a world alive, animated everywhere by spirit.

Every spiritual vision leads to a way of treating other people, and of treating the world.

How differently would we choose to treat a world that we see as wholly alive, rather than the world viewed by our late industrial society as dead matter, as “resources” to be plundered?

It seems to me that there are really four essential spiritual approaches: 

* atheism

* agnosticism

* religion

* individual vision quest

The first two, atheism and agnosticism, were never a possibility for me. The third, religion, was compelling to me as a child, but then I grew up. An effective moral police force for much of the world, it relies on an image of external authority; 3.6 billion people who live under Christianity or Islam subscribe to a monotheistic, dominating male God who passes down laws that we humans, like children with their parents, must obey.

All along, traditional cultures that much of the ‘modernized” world treats condescendingly, like arrogant parents with naïve children, have had an animistic vision that I think may be the only one that can save our planet. Because if we do not return to en-souling all living things, if we continue to behave as if only man is alive (and more deserving than woman, animals, the earth) and as if all else is dead, we will realize that vision across the planet, the natural systems that support the planet will die, and we will, too.