Since all of this is in our heads, and we torment ourselves wondering about it, Brown Owl’s suggestion that we limit our negative remarks to one another, and not expect those who had the chance to experience and build a relationship the Tormented to back us up on our comparative lack of experience, makes a lot of sense. It’s wise, even.
The less wise part of me, the daughter who longs for her mother’s sympathy and support, still finds this a bitter pill to swallow. But I’m trying. I know when we get there, to our home, all these fantasies in my mind will just fall away, displaced by the realities of dealing with what’s in front of me. I am fifty years old, after all. Surely by now I can separate from those apron strings and stand on my own two feet?
The Spinoza Problem was an engaging read, but it left me feeling washed out. There is no reasoning with people who cling to their hate with such rigid passion. Rosenberg went to his death believing in his hatred. He was never able to shift his views that “the Jews of Europe” should simply go find someplace else to live, to answer the corresponding question of where they were supposed to go.
I am triggered, as usual, with the melancholy sense of having no home, no place to belong. This is particularly poignant in light of the asylum seekers imprisoned in quarantine hotels.
The characterization of Bento Spinoza as a being who kept himself so separate from Nature that he failed to maintain relationships with other human beings is simply sad. I’ve known people so inside their heads that they fail to spark any connection between their hearts and their gut.
If I think about Spinoza as a self-sacrificing victim, a man with too much integrity to pander to the demands of the Jewish community that rejected his views as they excommunicated the person, I neglect the respect I feel towards his insistence that religiosity gets too much in the way of human beings connecting and living as part of the world. It seems he is very much ahead of his time. I suppose the Chasidic ideal presented in other novels, where the joy and connection and music are depicted as the channels for connecting people with the Divine is more appealing. Maybe if Spinoza sang, or danced, he would feel more real to me; less robotic.
Spinoza’s idea of God as Nature, as everything that exists, is not far from my own ideas about God. Certainly, the idea of an individual having a personal connection with God has never made sense to me. I feel impatient at the expectation that my words, my feelings, my prayers will reach God in any specific way. For me, God is more the energy, the spirit, and the impulse towards life and connection with everything and certainly not just humankind.
In the marginalia of the novel, an earlier reader posited “ennui” as analogous to the word “anomie” which appeared in the text. To my way of thinking, these are two very different states, which lead to very different approaches to the world.
Ennui, world-weariness, boredom and apathy is something which one generates from within, whereas Anomie seems to me to be a response to something projected upon one from outside circumstances. It is possible to climb out or be pulled out of Ennui when something or someone external touches and transports us up and away from out limited inner world upon which we have focused our attention.
Anomie, and its associations to anonymity and annihilation, is the state a person reaches when feeling so utterly alienated and unable to make connections with one’s external world, that one takes a further step and dissociates from one’s inner life, as well. Someone who has decided they are not worthy of being considered with value by anyone else, becomes entrenched in bitter defensiveness, and walls themselves in with a ferocity that is almost impossible to resist. It characterises Rosenberg, the poor maligned, misunderstood, unloved and never belonging Hater, very well.
Wizard and I spend time with the Lego we were given. I build a castle, expecting him to help, but he just lets me do it on my own and then complains, because his Lego knight army is someplace inaccessible in a box or suitcase. I embark upon a new project – to build a grandstand for the Slug Terra slugs to sit in and view a bey blade tournament. Wizard and I then bey blade for what seems like a very long time.
I try to engage with the hotel staff in terms of regifting some of our things to other guests who have very little, but there’s no room to budge. We are hedged in between government regulation and safety protocols. I suggest we keep some of our stuff in quarantine for a few days, so it can then be passed on, but no. It’s just too hard. I feel disappointed.
Nevertheless I go through our excess and bag it up. I make 9 parcels, hoping to hear from 9 rooms in the hotel, to whom these might be distributed. Only that initial person from the day before has responded to my offer. Brown Owl comforts me by saying that even if we can’t give them to other quarantine guests, we can still donate the stuff to others who will benefit.
Brown Owl finds a third layer of coloured pencils in the box we’ve been using. Eureka! There are all the glorious purples and browns I’d been wanting. She is drawing a Manga character, using a guide from a book given to the boys. I am totally impressed by her drawing. Her next task is to draw the same character but give her a “chunkier” body. I continue to colour the pages of the Oy To the World colouring book.
We watch the final of the first season of The Ultimate Beastmaster. We viewed the second and third seasons whilst in Canada and reserved this one for our quarantine time.
I remember watching Big Brother and Master Chef and Simpsons with Guitar Hero and Labcat when they were in their teens. As a family activity these were fun and formed a basis for conversations, even though they weren’t shows I would have chosen to watch.
I am amazed by how Jack and Wizard remember the names of contestants from all of the seasons, earnestly discuss the various permutations of the obstacle course, and compare the results. Jack becomes particularly impassioned when Deutschland, the nation he’s decided to support, loses all its contestants in the finals. He follows the presenters and switches allegiance to Brazil. I speak to him sharply when his invective becomes too full on. It is only a tv show, after all!
Wizard finds a season of Australian Beastmaster which we will start tomorrow.
Too much watching.
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