Road trip to Alice

Some of you may be wondering what became of me during my two month absence from this blog. The most remarkable thing I did during that time was go on an impromptu road trip from Melbourne to Alice Springs. Here’s how it happened.

1. It all started with a massage. I felt I needed a bit of nurturing so I booked in for an hour’s massage with Kaylan Rha. She’s based in Leura, in the Blue Mountains. On the phone, she let me know that it might take a bit longer than an hour, because since I was a new client, she’d like to take some time to talk to me and explain her approach to healing. I was with her for three hours. No exaggeration. She only charged me for an hour, and gave me a discount because it was my first treatment with her. Not only this, but it was the most powerful massage experience I’ve ever had. Before she got me on the table, Kaylan asked me to set an intention. She suggested that I take three breaths and let something come up, rather than impose an idea. The thought that emerged was “opening.”

2. Before I had the massage, I had already decided to flee the rain and mist of Katoomba, and take a little trip to Melbourne. I texted my new Melbourne friend, Antonia (previously introduced to you as the yoga goddess/fashionista), to ask about the dates of a retreat she was going on around this time. I wanted to make sure that she wouldn’t be in meditative silence the whole time I was in the city. She texted back saying that there was one space left on the retreat and she’d booked it for me. It turned out that the retreat was a yoga retreat, and she was leading it. Post-massage, I was open to that.

3. I was hoping to catch up with Antonia before the retreat started, but she was busy. I remembered that last time I’d been in Melbourne, a similar situation had resulted in my going out to dinner with her flat-mate, a German doctor called Arne. I got in touch with him. This time he took me to a fancy tapas bar. It was very Melbourne - stylish and delicious. Particularly the oysters. I found out that Arne was about to move to Alice Springs, and would be driving there in about a week’s time.

4. After the yoga retreat, Arne sent me a text which included a memorable reference to ‘desert flowers.’

5. I had dinner at Lentil As Anything with some good friends of mine in Melbourne who happened to have been to Alice Springs last year. They strongly encouraged me to pursue an idea that had hatched, or budded, shall we say, in the by now very open field of my mind.

6. I met Arne for lunch, and asked him if he would let me come on the road trip with him. He looked astonished. He said he’d sleep on it.

7. He called the next day to ask when I was coming over. We left for Alice Springs that afternoon.

The trip was wonderful. We drove in an enormous land cruiser that Arne had purchased for his time in Alice. Before we left Melbourne, we stopped at a shop that sold stuff for enormous land cruisers and similar vehicles. It was an exclusively and seriously masculine environment. By the time we drove away with an extremely heavy car jack, I had come to see my role as a kind of fluffy accessory that came with the car. Arne had acquired about as alpha male a vehicle as a civilian man could, so it seemed no surprise that a girl (me) had turned up to hang out in it with him. I couldn’t stop laughing about this for several kilometers.

Pretty soon we were out of Melbourne, and the landscape distracted me from my role as land cruiser Barbie (well all right, not entirely, but there’s no need to go into that). Watching the country gradually change from rural land to desert as we made our way across Victoria to close to Adelaide, and then straight up the middle of Australia, was a wonderful experience. The colours were mesmerising – often subtle – and very varied and beautiful.

Once we got into the desert, there was a rhythm to the landscape, too, rising very gently and falling again, like long, slow waves. Often I had the impression that we were about to come over a rise and find the sea glittering in front of us. But of course, we were moving further and further from the ocean. Somewhere near Coober Pedy, I felt slightly panicked at the thought of this, and wondered if it would feel oppressive to stay in a place like Alice Springs, so far from the sea. But when we finally drove into Alice, we discovered a whole new landscape.

The town is ringed by beautiful ranges of ochre-coloured rock, and divided by a wide, pale yellow river bed full of magnificent gum trees. After a bit of rain, grass springs up in soft, unlikely abundance everywhere. The light is warm – and although the sea is far away, there are ridges like cresting waves in the rock formations. You could imagine that you’re bathing in an ocean of light in this place. (Honey-coloured light and oceanic feelings are not all there is to Alice Springs – there’s also an intensity of suffering, and a rawness here that can be very confronting. But that’s another blogpost.)

The fact that we’d driven here, to the centre of Australia, in just over three days, made this country seem much more intimate and accessible to me. I’d always thought of Australia as incredibly vast, a whole continent, practically impossible to traverse. Yet all it had taken to get me to the centre of this great land was an open heart and mind, a friend with a land cruiser (and a generous spirit of adventure to go with it), and a few wonderfully free days.

Esoteric utilitarianism

Peter Singer and an unidentified goat

Last week I went to a talk by Australian philosopher Peter Singer at the University of Melbourne that got me thinking (the lack of activity on this blog for the last couple of months might suggest that I needed the stimulus…). He spoke about an “esoteric” form of utilitarianism.

Utilitarians aim to bring about the greatest possible cumulative happiness or well-being. Some have argued that that in order to pursue this goal most effectively, it is necessary for committed utilitarians to keep quiet about their true beliefs about what morality requires. Rather than provoking resistance with ideas that would be likely to seem too demanding to non-utilitarians, they should publically proclaim a less demanding standard, suggesting that a person could fulfill their moral duties by donating 10% of their income to reputable international aid organisations, for instance, when they privately believe the figure should be closer to 50%, say.

The genuine utilitarian beliefs then become “esoteric,” that is, shared only among the initiated, while any public statements are carefully modulated to produce the best achievable outcome, taking into account the psychological traits and points of resistance in the people they aim to influence. Esoteric utilitarians will praise outsiders for actions that fall short of what utilitarian morality requires, and refrain from blaming them for their failure to meet utilitarian standards if this is shown to be counter-productive. Only a level of blame that actually causes the desired changes in behavior will be employed.

One member of the audience pointed out that this approach conflicts with the Kantian moral standard which holds that to tell the truth is a primary and universal duty, which should never be compromised in order to achieve desired ends, however laudable. Singer responded by saying that he is comfortable with this conflict. He doesn’t accept Kant’s view that one should never lie, even if a murderer is asking you about the whereabouts of his next victim. Sometimes you have good reasons, moral reasons, to lie. For a utilitarian, these reasons are tied to the consequences of the lie: the morality of any action is to be judged by examining its consequences, not by comparing it to any list of absolute (or deontological) duties.

Henry Sidgwick, 19th century
English philosopher,
defender of esoteric utilitarianism

I had a worry about Singer’s approach that was similar, but not tied to Kantian morality. My concern was that the tactics of esoteric utilitarianism seem manipulative, particularly in using praise and blame to attempt to influence people’s behavior. I asked Singer if there wasn’t a conflict here with the spirit of utilitarianism, which asks us to think through the consequences of our actions, and act accordingly, even if this means going against commonly held ideas about what is moral or in other ways socially endorsed (which typically requires resisting social pressure exerted in the form of praise and blame). When it emerged in the Nineteenth century, utilitarianism was designed precisely to challenge the power of esoteric elites like the aristocracy and the Church, and promote policies based on the idea that in the utilitarian moral calculus, everyone counts, and everyone counts equally. 

I also suggested that taking up praise and blame as tools to influence others seems a risky strategy for the utilitarian. If people are encouraged to allow such influences to determine their actions, this may reinforce their vulnerability to other "esoteric" sources of praise and blame which are likely to be much more powerful than anything utilitarians have at their disposal – for instance the forces of advertising in the service of consumerism, which urge you to give up to 50% of your income to your mobile phone company, say.

Again, Singer couldn’t see any problem. He repeated the basic argument that for the utilitarian the end justifies the means. He didn’t seem concerned that in this case the consequences of the strategy might include weakening people’s moral characters, or at least reinforcing a tendency to allow social approval and disapproval to override any more rational or independently thought-through motives for action. Singer is happy to adopt the strategies used in advertising – this is a powerful, effective way to influence behavior in contemporary society.

He gave an example: a television ad to promote work safety practices which (if I remember his description correctly) shows someone coming to a family home to break the news that the father of the family has been killed in an accident at work. The ad is highly emotive, depicting the distress of a young child at this news. Singer said that since it has been screening, work safety incidents have declined appreciably. The technique used to achieve this may be emotionally manipulative, but it works, and the outcome is good.

This reminded me of a similar ad I saw at the cinema in Paddington in Sydney, last year. It was about the consequences of speeding, posing questions like: what would you choose, to be late for a meeting, or to end up as a paraplegic? The audience laughed – the combination of the choose-your-own-adventure style with such obvious scare tactics was too much for us. This reaction suggests another problem with using emotionally manipulative means to pursue utilitarian ends – if people are not naively drawn in by the technique, they will see through it, and tend to resist or dismiss the message even if they might otherwise endorse the end it seeks to promote. No one likes to be patronized. Even if the end justifies the means, the use of manipulative means may end up discrediting the end, or the theory behind it.

The Skin I Live In: Almodóvar meets Seneca

Elena Anaya and a blurry Antonio Banderas in The Skin I Live In

This week, with my friend Selena, I went to see the latest film by Spanish director, Pedro Almodóvar, The Skin I Live In. On my way by ferry to the cinema, I read a short essay on the Stoic philosopher, politician and playwright Seneca, who served the emperor Nero as tutor and advisor, and was ordered by him to commit suicide in 65 CE. As chance would have it, this turned out to be the perfect prelude to viewing Almodóvar’s film.

Most critics have not known quite what to make of The Skin I Live In, admitting that they enjoyed it, but at the same time complaining that it seems cold, and lacks the compassion that usually characterizes Almodóvar’s work. It seems to me that this confusion clears if The Skin I Live In is read as a drama in the spirit of Stoic tragedy. It is not designed to elicit compassion, but rather to generate what the Stoics called apatheia. In doing so, it is a salutory alternative to mainstream cinema that stickily endorses revenge rather than letting us see it, clearly and even joyfully, for what it is.

The apatheia cultivated by the Stoic is an attitude of happy indifference toward external events, designed to free one from passions, particularly anger and grief, that might otherwise arise in the face of undesirable changes in fortune. Seneca tells us that the person who achieves this emotional control is rare; the Stoic sage is like a phoenix, appearing perhaps once every five hundred years. He gives us no portraits of such exemplary figures in his tragedies, but swings to the opposite extreme, depicting the extremes of human passion, cruelty and suffering, to the point where some readers, including Erasmus and Diderot, have (mistakenly) speculated that playwright and the philosopher must have been two different men.

A contemporary rewriting of Seneca’s drama, Thyestes is showing as part of the Sydney Festival – the story involves bitter sibling rivalry for power, sexual infidelity, murder, and, the pièce de résistance, cannibalism, with Thyestes lured by his brother, Atreus, to unwittingly consume the cooked flesh of his own children. This might be read as a heavy-handed moral warning about the dangers of giving in to the lust for power (or haute cuisine), but Seneca’s dramatic style is far from such earnest didacticism.

There are didactic Stoic voices in his plays: nurses and advisors counsel Stoic dispassion – but their message is typically distorted and thrown back in their faces by the passionate and the powerful. And the spectator can only feel grateful for this, since his gory tales of greed, deception and violent revenge are undeniably enjoyable. As we see outrages, betrayals and acts of violence piling upon another with the kind of flamboyant excess that was later imitated by the playwrights of the Elizabethan era in England, the mood in the audience typically becomes increasingly cheerful and serene.

Perhaps Seneca is training us in Stoic indifference, not by providing us with impossibly tranquil models to imitate, but by parading extreme fluctuations of human emotion at such a rate that we cannot sustain a passionate response ourselves, but let go of any personal distress and settle into an engaged, but calm and light-hearted mood. This, it seems to me, is close to the apatheia the Stoics sought, which is misunderstood if it is seen as involving cold detachment from worldly life.

by Louise Bourgeois

Almodóvar’s film achieves a similar effect. It tells a fantastical tale about a plastic surgeon who uses transgenesis to create living skin, and experiments with it, illegally, on an extremely beautiful and flexible young woman who is living as a prisoner in his house. The story proceeds, and turns back on itself, via narrative twists involving rape, madness and murder, and secretive, violent family relations. As in the Thyestes, a major motive for the characters’ actions is the desire for revenge, which is depicted without moralistic judgment or justification. This being Almodóvar, there are also fabulous clothes, beautiful people, quirky jokes, gender puzzles and many appreciative references to the work of other artists, particularly that of the French-American sculptor Louise Bourgeois.

In suggesting that Almodóvar’s film, like Seneca’s play, is likely to produce a response of apatheia, it should be clear that I’m not suggesting that it will put you in an ‘apathetic’ state – the connotations of the English word are quite different. It would be more apt to wonder whether the pleasure to be had from watching family members destroy one another isn’t uncomfortably close to the disreputable emotion of schadenfreude – malicious joy taken in the suffering of others.

A disturbing amount of contemporary film and literature seems to depend for its impact on stirring up nasty emotions, particularly that of morally justified vengefulness: we are encouraged to take pleasure in the suffering of certain characters because they “deserve” it, and to share in the vindictive joy of the ultimately triumphant hero, or often heroine, as she takes her revenge – I’d put Verhoeven’s film Black Book in this category, to take just one example. But such moralistic vindictiveness is not schadenfreude, and it is at the other end of the emotional spectrum from apatheia.

Schadenfreude is not moralistic. On the contrary, it is an amoral, even a guilty, or at least naughty pleasure. We know that morally, we’re not supposed to react to the suffering of others with delight; schadenfreude is never self-righteous, it is a joy that bubbles up, often in spite of efforts to appear more appropriately sober and sympathetically concerned. It can have a malicious, even sadistic edge, but it can also be quite innocent, the kind of spontaneous joy that makes us laugh at slapstick – or take pleasure in watching events driven by the worst elements of human nature unfold with relentless, unstoppable logic, on stage or on screen.

In part, such pleasure may come from feeling that we are safe on the shore, watching a shipwreck in the distance – most troubles of our own are mere soap-bubbles in comparison to the suffering of Thyestes. But if the Stoic playwright succeeds, then our enjoyment will extend to include our own suffering, regarded as part of a grand spectacle that can be watched with interest and calm delight.

After seeing The Skin I Live In, I left the cinema in high spirits. My book of Seneca’s essays remained unopened on the ferry ride that took me back across the harbour. Instead of reading, I sat outside and let the wind blow my hair about while I admired the delicate, luminous shades of lilac and purple produced in the evening sky by gleams of late, golden light between the clouds, and their undulating reflections in water stirred into wide ripples by the movement of the ferry. I felt a buoyant and expansive pleasure in the beauty of nature, an enjoyment that strangely enough – and Stoically enough - seemed connected to having just watched a stylish film about the hyperbolic suffering wreaked by the human desire for power and revenge. 

Louise Bourgeois 1911-2010

The Magic Mountain

Something odd is happening to me. I have started reading Thomas Mann’s great work, The Magic Mountain, or to give it its original title, Der Zauberberg. I’m told that the adjective “zauber” has slightly different connotations to the English “magic.” There are no cute, Disney-influenced overtones to the German word. Rather, it implies sorcery, possibly of a menacing kind.

Early after beginning the novel, I was overcome by sleepiness, and ended up dozing away most of an afternoon, waking flushed and groggy, feeling rather unwell. I forced myself out of the house for a short walk, did some meditation at a nearby Buddhist monastery, and took a longer walk through the bush to get home, enchanted by the magical sight of a fluffy baby lyrebird on the way. Feeling better after this excursion, I presumed I had just been exhausted after Christmas and New Years revels, and that the heat of the summer day had finished me off.

But the next day, when I took out the novel, something similar happened. I didn’t sleep so long this time, but woke with a strange pain in my left shoulder. This time, I thought some more strenuous exercise might be in order, so I went to the local swim centre and did my usual twenty laps in the outdoor pool. Towards the end of my swim, I started to feel congested. There was a sharp, prickling sensation in my chest. The sky clouded over and started to spit at me. I had to interrupt a lap to cough.

Having looked up the word “sputum” in the dictionary earlier in the day (it is of some importance in the novel) I wondered, while continuing to swim, if I was bringing up sputum, or merely phlegm. Would I soon need to carry around a flat bottle with me for the purpose of collecting samples for later examination by medical experts? It was a whimsical, if also disgusting thought – I was imagining myself as one of the consumptive patients living in the sanatorium described in Mann’s novel, set in the German Alps, a good deal higher than the Australian Blue Mountains where I live.

The routine of (largely horizontal) life in the fictional International Sanatorium Berghof is constructed around mealtimes, of which there are five daily: early breakfast, second breakfast, dinner, afternoon tea, and supper. The food is sumptuous and beautifully prepared. At the table where the main character of the novel, Hans Castorp is seated, the dishes are served by a dining attendant who also happens to be a dwarf.

Thomas Mann

I write this having first consumed my own “second breakfast” for the day, which consisted of an omelette with fresh sage and goats curd, à la Bill Granger, and a roast dandelion soy latte, with honey. I prepared and served this meal myself, which suggests that I am playing both the role of hero, or anti-hero (Castorp is defined by his mediocrity, supplemented with a penchant for philosophical musings – about time, mostly), and that of the dwarf who serves him. This confusion, or amalgamation of roles, can be put down to the fact that I am living in the early twenty-first century, under conditions of advanced capitalism and liberal democracy, whereas Mann’s characters belong to the period before the First World War.

In his novel, the appearance of a dwarf waitress is cause for a slight shock, and heightened politeness on Castorp’s part, quickly fading into simple acceptance of her presence as part of the peculiar status quo in the Berghof. This detail in the novel reminds me of stories I heard a few years ago about how a law firm in Sydney hired dwarves to serve the drinks at its staff Christmas party. I wonder if the organisers were aware that in light of Mann’s famous novel, this suggested that the partners of the firm were not only morally decadent, but likely to be ravaged by internal disease, beneath their flush, rosy-cheeked exteriors. Kim Kardashian might also like to take note.

At this point, I feel a certain obligation to come up with some incisive philosophical observations, supported by cogent historical examples, about the changing symbolism of illness, perhaps drawing on Susan Sontag’s contrast between the spiritualization of consumptives, who were seen to draw closer to God as their illness progressed, and the more recent attitude toward cancer patients, who are likely to feel blamed for their own illness, in line with what I would not hesitate to call the hyperbolic concept of personal responsibility that dominates contemporary Western culture. I might add to this analysis some consideration of AIDS and its interpretation via discourses of sin, messianic catastrophe and redemption (as illustrated in playwright Tony Kushner's Angels in America), and spare some thought for those forms of illness which remain unfigured in any major cultural tropes, negative or positive, and consequently fail to attract significant research funding leading to better treatment… 

But I find that lassitude is overtaking me, and realise that I have only a short time to wrap myself in a blanket (the weather here in the mountains having once again turned unseasonably cold) and take a quick kip on the couch before it will be time to meet my friend Nigel for lunch.

intelligent, angry elephant

An extended version of my blog post on anger from last week has just appeared in elephant, an online journal devoted to yoga, sustainability, politics and spirituality. Take a look.

elephant journal: Yoga, Sustainability, Politics, Spirituality

New Year's Wishes

On Wednesday, I went for a walk to find a wishing well. I’d heard about this place, and seen signs pointing to it in the Morton National Park, near Bundanoon. It seemed like a good place to visit in the few days remaining before the new year, an auspicious spot to contemplate the year to come. Resolutions seem all too likely to result in bad conscience later on — I prefer the idea of new year’s wishes (keeping in mind the old fairy tale warning, be careful what you wish for…)

On the way, I came across an echidna, snuffling in the bush. She put her sturdy front claws up on an old log and blinked in my direction, sniffing the air, before waddling away on her ancient looking legs, black and yellow spines smooth against her body. I took this as a good sign.

The account I’d heard of the wishing well led me to imagine it nestled in a glen. I expected that at some point I would leave the fire trail style track I was following through eucalypt forest near the edge of a cliff, and descend via a narrower track into rainforest, before reaching a shadowy and mysterious place, suitable for magical transactions. 

There’s a spot that fits this description called the Fairy Bower falls, which I visited last time I was in this park. I remembered being enchanted by a glistening curtain of water adorning the rock face, and tantalised by the sound of a large bird beating its powerful wings ahead of me as I climbed back out of the valley. At one point on that earlier walk, I noticed tufts of very soft grey hair on the track, and turned a steep corner to discover fresh entrails laid out in the middle of the path. There was nothing more of the animal that had been taken, probably a possum or glider. I gazed up the enormous trunks of the nearby gums, but never did see the bird of prey.

When I came to a neat sign reading “Wishing Well,” I was still on high ground, however, and there was no sign of a track leading downwards or anywhere, for that matter. Next to the sign was a spot for a car, and beyond that a rocky area stretching away. Slightly confused, I walked up onto a kind of rock platform and was surprised to see what appeared to be a large metal cage perched at one end of it. On closer inspection, I realized that I had found the “well,” a natural formation in the rock. It was remarkably round and quite small – less than a metre wide and deep, filled with rainwater and lichen. In the mud at the bottom, visitors had tossed a few coins. What had appeared to be a cage was actually a large, clumsy but solid fence, constructed around this small depression in the rock. Presumably it was designed to guarantee the safety of young children, who might be left unattended at the “well” by extremely careless parents.

Needless to say, the fence dispelled any sense of mystery or wonder that might have been evoked by the curiously symmetric hole in the rock. Instead, the unattractive, oversized barrier emanated a vaguely menacing sense of the reach of institutionalized paternalism all the way into this relatively remote spot in the wild. At the same time, this effort to guarantee the safety of tiny tourists seemed touchingly naïve and inadequate. A few steps from the fence, a child bent on self-harm could easily throw himself off the rock ledge into a small valley where with a bit of luck he could be bitten by a snake, or perhaps be taken by a bird of prey, his entrails to be discovered later by startled bushwalkers…

I sat down on the sun-warmed rock a short distance from the “wishing well” and pondered the strangely myopic and earnest attitude of the National Park rangers who, I supposed, had erected this ungainly looking safety structure.

Then it dawned on me: of course, the primary purpose of the fence was not to protect unsupervised toddlers from drowning, but to protect the relevant authorities from the possibility of being sued. That’s why there are similar barriers at every official lookout in the park, partially obscuring the view, right next to vast, unfenced stretches of cliff where there is nothing to interrupt the line of sight or of accidental flight.

These barriers don’t relate in any very practical or commonsensical way to the visible, material world, the landscape or the people hiking across it, looking at views and making wishes. But this makes perfect sense once you realise that they are there chiefly to protect an abstract legal identity. The objectionably solid fence in front of me unveiled itself as an oddly metaphysical entity, a creation of law, whose true purpose and meaning could only become fully apparent in the actual or merely anxiously anticipated context of a courtroom.

This was at once depressing and intriguing. Ever since Australia was colonized by the British, the powerful and sometimes violently fictional constructs of Western law have been getting in the way of any more graceful, sensitive, or simply sensible way of relating to the natural environment and its inhabitants, here. But the presence of this fence also demonstrated the potential of wishes. If an idea, shared by enough people, can cause a bloody big metal fence to appear on a rock in the middle of the wilderness, where it clearly doesn’t belong, then what other, more beautiful and apt creations (or disappearances) might result from well-formed wishes, the kind that an echnidna might lend a little of her spiny magic to support?

 

May all your new year’s wishes for 2012 be true, and come true.

The intelligence of anger

Mid-way through a peaceful ramble through the bush at Wentworth Falls a few weeks ago, my friends Maddy, Tess and I came to a standstill when our conversation got on to the topic of how much anger is expressed, in sometimes astonishingly vitriolic forms, when unpopular views are voiced in the media. Writers of opinion pieces regularly devote columns to expressing their shock and dismay at receiving floods of abusive and threatening messages after touching, sometimes quite innocently, on a topic that unleashes unrestrained fury in a large number of their readers. It’s a disturbing phenomenon –we found we weren’t capable of walking and talking about it at the same time. Maddy’s little son Zeke looked on quizzically from his vantage point in a pack on Maddy’s back while we gesticulated. At one point, attempting to move along the track while still conversing, I fell off the wooden walkway into the reeds on one side. What’s going on, here?

An obvious point is that it is difficult to do tango philosophy, bushwalk backwards, and maintain your dignity and physical safety all at the same time. I don’t suggest you try it at home. Another obvious point, which is more to the point, is that the possibility of instantaneous, electronic communication with strangers (as well as friends) means that anger can be expressed with fewer inhibitions than ever before. You can let yourself go when writing an email or contributing to an online discussion, and send the message while passion is still running high, in a way that you wouldn’t normally do in face to face communication, or if you had to wait until the next day to post a letter, and certainly not if you had to get the message past an editor in order for it to reach its audience. The restraints that operate to keep anger in check in other communicative situations aren’t readily available online.

Another, slightly less obvious point is that many people seem to contain a reservoir of anger, that has been filled drip by drip, day by day, until it’s ready to overflow, so that the next irritant that triggers it, however minor or impersonal it may be, can break the restraining wall and unleash a wave that comes crashing towards the person who provoked that final drop.

Jungle Yoga

I observed this phenomenon in my own response to a teacher on a ten-day meditation retreat at the beginning of this year. The retreat was held in Thailand, in an extraordinarily beautiful location. We stayed in floating bungalows on a lake surrounded by ancient rainforest, said to have greater biodiversity than the Amazon. The water was a perfect temperature for lazy swimming; there were kayaks readily available; there was even a masseuse on hand in case you developed some tension in your muscles from the hard work of daily yoga classes and meditation. And the quality of meditation instruction was very high – there were two teachers, an American man and an Australian woman, who had both trained extensively in Burma. On top of their skillful and engaging group instruction, they made themselves available for daily personal interviews with each member of our small group.

You might think that it would be practically impossible to get angry, or to sustain any anger that might somehow arise, in such a blissful and well-supported situation. But of course, you would be wrong.

After my first personal interview with the male teacher, I found myself crying tears of fury and frustration into the delicious green pawpaw salad I was eating for lunch. The retreat was held in silence, so no one asked me what was wrong, but the woman who was sitting closest to me later said that when she saw me crying she thought to herself, “Wow, that woman is really in touch with her feelings.” My own view was that I was way too much in touch with them. Who wants to spend ten days in an earthly paradise getting up close and personal with anger?

But this was a situation in which there was no easy outlet for aggressive emotion. I couldn’t send an abusive email, or even have a bitch to a third party about the way the teacher had spoken to me. I had no choice but to get still more deeply “in touch” with my anger. It was an interesting investigation. One thing I realized pretty quickly was that my reaction was out of all proportion to the apparent cause. It didn’t seem plausible that I was really this angry, purely over the condescending, dismissive attitude a man whom I didn’t even know had taken toward me. Why should I even care about what he thought of me, especially on first, superficial impression?

I recently told this story at a dinner, and a woman at the table jumped in at this point to tell me I was right to be angry, that intelligent women are constantly treated this way by men in positions of authority, especially in spiritual circles, and that too often we accept this demeaning behavior, or blame ourselves, feeling that we have somehow failed in the exchange, rather than recognizing that anger is an appropriate response: women shouldn’t have to put up with this kind of thing, and they shouldn’t support it by accepting it. Too often, you see a man playing the dubious role of guru in front of twenty women in leotards who treat him like a minor, or even major deity. Obviously the women involved get something out of the exchange, too, but respect for women’s intelligence, and for intelligent women, is a likely, early casualty.

She had a good point; I recognized the scenario she was describing (which can manifest with or without leotards, or even any kind of spiritually signifying fashion statement). At the same time, I knew it wouldn’t have been helpful or just for me to unleash my anger over this kind of thing on the teacher I met in Thailand. He was only the last in a series. Alone he wouldn’t have provoked more than mild frustration and surprise.

It turned out that “getting in touch” with my anger meant realizing this – seeing the structural causes, and the long chain of events that had contributed to the store of anger that I carried with me to Thailand. At this level, anger becomes understanding, even wisdom, an energy that can drive action rather than reaction. It takes restraint to resist reacting to anger while it’s raw, but it seems to me that if you manage to do this and stay “in touch” with the feeling rather than suppressing it, you can get to a point of understanding where it’s possible to let the anger move you in invigorating, positive ways that don’t do violence to anyone.

A few days after the dinner, I did a yoga class taught by the woman who’d intervened so passionately when I was talking about my experience in Thailand. I watched and followed as she demonstrated breathing exercises and yoga postures surrounded by a group of about twenty women wearing leotards, plus a couple of men in similar outfits. She herself was dressed in loose white dance top and shorts, of very thin, soft material, worn over black tights and a tight black top, and although she was sitting on the floor like the rest of us, she seemed somehow elevated. She had the rapt attention of the whole group, whether she was simply drawing her hand slowly toward her chest, exhaling, or executing an impossibly perfect upward dog (that last bit is not a abrupt departure into automatic writing, it makes quite ordinary sense in the language of yoga). Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to say that we were gazing at her as if in the presence of a goddess, but there was certainly an air of devotion in the room…

In this season, traditionally known for festivity and family tension, I won’t go so far as to wish you a cranky Christmas, an angry Hannukah, or a simply furious solstice (summer or winter) but may you recognise the divine in yourself and others, and give your anger time to reveal its deep and supple intelligence.