I may have fainted dead away with happy shock. A writer whose work and outlook I admire so, so tremendously much! Thank you so very much and I hope the week closes so very kindly for you 💕
very interesting. I'd not heard of attachment styles. A quiz tells me that I'm avoidant. The labels don't leave much doubt about what's best: who would want to be disorganized or anxious when they could be secure? (It brings to my mind a review by Brian Barry of Steven Lukes's book on power. 'The conceptual core of this essay', Barry writes, 'is the contrast between three views of power, which are called the one-dimensional, the two-dimensional, and the three-dimensional view. (The terms, it need hardly be said, are not neutral. Who would willingly accept a one-dimensional or two- dimensional view of something if a three-dimensional view were also available?)')
I wonder whether these quizzes push people into the attachment styles other than secure (just as, as you note, perhaps psychoanalysts over-diagnose childhood trauma). For why pay for anything the websites might sell if you've got it made already? In that way they would be functioning in the opposite direction to how the Political Compass (as Oliver notes) does, being biased away from the option conceived of as good.
First, on the political compass. I find fascinating a couple of things. Notoriously, the test was designed to be very biased towards the liberal-left quadrant. It was intended to convince people they were being misrepresented by their politicians and that they should instead vote for very left-wing politicians. This is mostly because it often phrases "conservative" questions (that is, questions whose affirmation would show you to be conservative) in their most extreme ways, while phrasing "left-wing" or "liberal" questions in very moderate ways.
I mean, who could possibly disagree with the rather wishy-washy sentiment which opens the test, that "If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations."? I mean, everything should benefit humanity in some broad sense or another, but what does that mean in any concrete sense? Compare this to "Our race has many superior qualities, compared with other races.". Only the most hardened, self-identified Nazi types would agree with this at all. Yet these two questions are weighted equally! While it seems to be throwing back a neutral average of your opinions, it's really trying to get you to identify a certain way. The (ridiculous) regular charts of "where politicians in X election stand" show this much.
Second, continuing on the Political Compass, I do find absolutely fascinating that people have found ways to identify with even this very "abstract" thing which, as you say, just throws your identity back at you. Indeed, people have become very creative with ascribing specific meanings to sub-quadrants, and just the terms "libleft", "authright", "authleft", and "libright" themselves. Check out, if you're curious, the communities r/PoliticalCompass and r/PoliticalCompassMemes on Reddit; they show this tendency very well. People don't take well to being deprived of a clear identity!
Third, I wonder what to make of the male lover here. You refer to the category of the lover, or the loved at the very least, as passive and therefore feminine. Yet love is in its fullness a dyadic relationship. I love and am loved. This isn't to say that unreciprocated love isn't real or worth anything, but I will ask the generous reader to stay with me without diversion for the sake of clarity. This being so, that in the loving relationship the lover is the loved and the loved the lover, the man is always in both positions. So is the woman. I think gendering and disentangling these things is very difficult in practice; when is the act of allowing yourself to be loved an active act of love, and when is it passive? I leave the question as an exercise for the reader.
I have been given a permission slip to enter Reddit!!!!! Thank you kindly. Let's hope I don't emerge a femcel.
Hahahah that's priceless about the PC and its skewerings of bias. Esp. with the example of how people respond when having their hard-won identity yanked away from them. Well, fidgeting around with language when we have been denied the ability to use labels isn't great for making large groups understand what you mean when you describe yourself (if you can't resort to accepted labels), but it most definitely is good for broadening our own personal perceptions.
Also yes, you're so right. The question wording relies entirely on stoking up a view of the nefarious (right-wing-ish) Other and what he might believe/be plotting. Definitely another example of the greatest shortcoming of the left (IMHO) which is its inability to see any sort of function, utility, or even dare I say it - virtue - in any sort of traditional conservative thought.
As for what you say about love, I mostly agree. Tbc, I wasn't (trying to, though it might've come across that way - mea culpa totally) alleging that the lover category was passive and feminine always and in every scenario. Indeed even if one looks at the sonneteering tradition with which I know you're familiar, the position of the person who loves even without it being requited, is invariably male - always the woman spurning the man; full of disdain - but this sample must be unrepresentative. There must have been a horse-faced woman at court eyeing up one of the bright-eyed knights who was entirely out of her league. Re. gendering love, do not try to approach my points reasonably I beg, for I was arriving at an ILLOGICAL association: that where the woman is the weaker vessel, SUSCEPTIBLE to annoying things like love, especially when it goes wrong. It's definitely 'difficult in practice' to gender love, and absolutely spurious! It's a feeling of artistic, impressionistic, solipsistic, and personal, instinct only. The kind of opinion which can only exist in an essay like this or in conversation; it is not a cited or justifiable stance. Also a similar level of arbitrariness as to the fact that in Spanish, 'table' is feminine (as an immediate example) - and so on and so forth with all the romance languages! Yes I agree about, in dyadic love, there being more harmony of sexing things. It's a more healthful state generally. But as you acknowledge, love is not always dyadic. Enter your keening maidens.
I certainly didn't mean to deny by my comments your very interesting meditations on the feminine loved subject! I think they're very interesting. I think these kinds of "poetical truths" can very easily coexist even when they seem to contradict one another, or at least to clang on the ears. That's part of what's so shocking and useful about poetry.
Really, for me, this is what makes non-dyadic love particularly interesting. You refer to the sonnet tradition. I think of Spenser's Amoretti - of what else am I to think, who am so new to this tradition? - and how often he switches his voice between subject and object. While he is generally agentic in some way, and has agency if nothing else through the act of adopting a poetical voice, he is not always the agent of any given poem. Sometimes he writes of himself as a sailor on a storm-beset ship (XXXIII), or as a servant of her whims (XXI). He even becomes a sickly patient, much like Britomart, in L. This alternates with images of himself as besieging (but unsuccessful) general in XIIII, a huntsman in LXVII, and dramatist performing for her - the most ambiguous of roles! - in LIIII.
In a sense, Spenser's inability to stick with one role, and use of poetry to glue the two halves of the persona together, is illustrative. Perhaps his fictive poetic self as dramatist in LIIII is an instructive model of tying the active and passive roles together in the figure of the monadic lover. The act of loving without being loved (in the same way) back makes the lover feel helpless; Spenser himself says 'My loue lyke the Spectator ydly sits/beholding me that all the pageants play,'. He is unambiguously the object here, beheld by the silently sitting spectator, even though he is the one acting. Just as he is poet for her in the real world, he is actor-dramatist for her in the poem.
Yet it *is* he who is acting. He moves, she 'sits'; by the second stanza, he can talk of his emotional and dramaturgical activity as he performs a version of himself he thinks is like to impress her. He can 'mask in myrth lyke to a Comedy:' and he can 'waile and make [his] woes a Tragedy.'. All the while, the object of his love remains supremely passive and yet in total command, enjoying pure subjecthood. She is almost unmoved: her eye is 'constant', and she 'delights not in my mirth nor rues my smart'. If anything, she reacts inversely to him; 'when I laugh she mocks, and when I cry/she laughes'.
I think that puts the monadic lover in an odd position. Because the subject in love is always trying to be in the dyadic active-passive, lover-loved position I described, he is constantly moving around a bit uncomfortably - feeling constantly observed and subject to foreign, hostile, or even arbitrary whims, but also in full knowledge of the necessity to act. After all, he can't get what he wants just by wishing it to be so! His anxiety comes from the uncertainty of whether he is too passive or too active - whether he is failing because he is not doing enough, or failing because of something wholly out of his control (which would mean he is wasting his time). There's something of this in the 'forces late dismayd' in XIIII. He doesn't know whether he is soon to be both-and or neither-nor.
Anyway - pardon my idle musings! Once more, I loved the essay.
Thank you very, very much. But I am kicking myself. How ill-educated of me---I've only ever encountered the quote through Woolf! But of course, it's Whitman through and through.. fantastic. But yes, it would have been most fitting. Although quoting always opens so many cans of worms. Once you dunk Whitman in it, it's only too tempting to reach out to his pals and perhaps get Emerson in there too, and then once you've dropped him in it, why stop there? and race on through all the other nineteenth-century giants. Too much forethought needed methinks, when writing scattergun essays!
this is a wonderful text, so much to dwell upon and interrogate within oneself 🤍
I may have fainted dead away with happy shock. A writer whose work and outlook I admire so, so tremendously much! Thank you so very much and I hope the week closes so very kindly for you 💕
very interesting. I'd not heard of attachment styles. A quiz tells me that I'm avoidant. The labels don't leave much doubt about what's best: who would want to be disorganized or anxious when they could be secure? (It brings to my mind a review by Brian Barry of Steven Lukes's book on power. 'The conceptual core of this essay', Barry writes, 'is the contrast between three views of power, which are called the one-dimensional, the two-dimensional, and the three-dimensional view. (The terms, it need hardly be said, are not neutral. Who would willingly accept a one-dimensional or two- dimensional view of something if a three-dimensional view were also available?)')
I wonder whether these quizzes push people into the attachment styles other than secure (just as, as you note, perhaps psychoanalysts over-diagnose childhood trauma). For why pay for anything the websites might sell if you've got it made already? In that way they would be functioning in the opposite direction to how the Political Compass (as Oliver notes) does, being biased away from the option conceived of as good.
Ciao
I have quite a few thoughts. Wonderful piece.
First, on the political compass. I find fascinating a couple of things. Notoriously, the test was designed to be very biased towards the liberal-left quadrant. It was intended to convince people they were being misrepresented by their politicians and that they should instead vote for very left-wing politicians. This is mostly because it often phrases "conservative" questions (that is, questions whose affirmation would show you to be conservative) in their most extreme ways, while phrasing "left-wing" or "liberal" questions in very moderate ways.
I mean, who could possibly disagree with the rather wishy-washy sentiment which opens the test, that "If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations."? I mean, everything should benefit humanity in some broad sense or another, but what does that mean in any concrete sense? Compare this to "Our race has many superior qualities, compared with other races.". Only the most hardened, self-identified Nazi types would agree with this at all. Yet these two questions are weighted equally! While it seems to be throwing back a neutral average of your opinions, it's really trying to get you to identify a certain way. The (ridiculous) regular charts of "where politicians in X election stand" show this much.
Second, continuing on the Political Compass, I do find absolutely fascinating that people have found ways to identify with even this very "abstract" thing which, as you say, just throws your identity back at you. Indeed, people have become very creative with ascribing specific meanings to sub-quadrants, and just the terms "libleft", "authright", "authleft", and "libright" themselves. Check out, if you're curious, the communities r/PoliticalCompass and r/PoliticalCompassMemes on Reddit; they show this tendency very well. People don't take well to being deprived of a clear identity!
Third, I wonder what to make of the male lover here. You refer to the category of the lover, or the loved at the very least, as passive and therefore feminine. Yet love is in its fullness a dyadic relationship. I love and am loved. This isn't to say that unreciprocated love isn't real or worth anything, but I will ask the generous reader to stay with me without diversion for the sake of clarity. This being so, that in the loving relationship the lover is the loved and the loved the lover, the man is always in both positions. So is the woman. I think gendering and disentangling these things is very difficult in practice; when is the act of allowing yourself to be loved an active act of love, and when is it passive? I leave the question as an exercise for the reader.
I have been given a permission slip to enter Reddit!!!!! Thank you kindly. Let's hope I don't emerge a femcel.
Hahahah that's priceless about the PC and its skewerings of bias. Esp. with the example of how people respond when having their hard-won identity yanked away from them. Well, fidgeting around with language when we have been denied the ability to use labels isn't great for making large groups understand what you mean when you describe yourself (if you can't resort to accepted labels), but it most definitely is good for broadening our own personal perceptions.
Also yes, you're so right. The question wording relies entirely on stoking up a view of the nefarious (right-wing-ish) Other and what he might believe/be plotting. Definitely another example of the greatest shortcoming of the left (IMHO) which is its inability to see any sort of function, utility, or even dare I say it - virtue - in any sort of traditional conservative thought.
As for what you say about love, I mostly agree. Tbc, I wasn't (trying to, though it might've come across that way - mea culpa totally) alleging that the lover category was passive and feminine always and in every scenario. Indeed even if one looks at the sonneteering tradition with which I know you're familiar, the position of the person who loves even without it being requited, is invariably male - always the woman spurning the man; full of disdain - but this sample must be unrepresentative. There must have been a horse-faced woman at court eyeing up one of the bright-eyed knights who was entirely out of her league. Re. gendering love, do not try to approach my points reasonably I beg, for I was arriving at an ILLOGICAL association: that where the woman is the weaker vessel, SUSCEPTIBLE to annoying things like love, especially when it goes wrong. It's definitely 'difficult in practice' to gender love, and absolutely spurious! It's a feeling of artistic, impressionistic, solipsistic, and personal, instinct only. The kind of opinion which can only exist in an essay like this or in conversation; it is not a cited or justifiable stance. Also a similar level of arbitrariness as to the fact that in Spanish, 'table' is feminine (as an immediate example) - and so on and so forth with all the romance languages! Yes I agree about, in dyadic love, there being more harmony of sexing things. It's a more healthful state generally. But as you acknowledge, love is not always dyadic. Enter your keening maidens.
I certainly didn't mean to deny by my comments your very interesting meditations on the feminine loved subject! I think they're very interesting. I think these kinds of "poetical truths" can very easily coexist even when they seem to contradict one another, or at least to clang on the ears. That's part of what's so shocking and useful about poetry.
Really, for me, this is what makes non-dyadic love particularly interesting. You refer to the sonnet tradition. I think of Spenser's Amoretti - of what else am I to think, who am so new to this tradition? - and how often he switches his voice between subject and object. While he is generally agentic in some way, and has agency if nothing else through the act of adopting a poetical voice, he is not always the agent of any given poem. Sometimes he writes of himself as a sailor on a storm-beset ship (XXXIII), or as a servant of her whims (XXI). He even becomes a sickly patient, much like Britomart, in L. This alternates with images of himself as besieging (but unsuccessful) general in XIIII, a huntsman in LXVII, and dramatist performing for her - the most ambiguous of roles! - in LIIII.
In a sense, Spenser's inability to stick with one role, and use of poetry to glue the two halves of the persona together, is illustrative. Perhaps his fictive poetic self as dramatist in LIIII is an instructive model of tying the active and passive roles together in the figure of the monadic lover. The act of loving without being loved (in the same way) back makes the lover feel helpless; Spenser himself says 'My loue lyke the Spectator ydly sits/beholding me that all the pageants play,'. He is unambiguously the object here, beheld by the silently sitting spectator, even though he is the one acting. Just as he is poet for her in the real world, he is actor-dramatist for her in the poem.
Yet it *is* he who is acting. He moves, she 'sits'; by the second stanza, he can talk of his emotional and dramaturgical activity as he performs a version of himself he thinks is like to impress her. He can 'mask in myrth lyke to a Comedy:' and he can 'waile and make [his] woes a Tragedy.'. All the while, the object of his love remains supremely passive and yet in total command, enjoying pure subjecthood. She is almost unmoved: her eye is 'constant', and she 'delights not in my mirth nor rues my smart'. If anything, she reacts inversely to him; 'when I laugh she mocks, and when I cry/she laughes'.
I think that puts the monadic lover in an odd position. Because the subject in love is always trying to be in the dyadic active-passive, lover-loved position I described, he is constantly moving around a bit uncomfortably - feeling constantly observed and subject to foreign, hostile, or even arbitrary whims, but also in full knowledge of the necessity to act. After all, he can't get what he wants just by wishing it to be so! His anxiety comes from the uncertainty of whether he is too passive or too active - whether he is failing because he is not doing enough, or failing because of something wholly out of his control (which would mean he is wasting his time). There's something of this in the 'forces late dismayd' in XIIII. He doesn't know whether he is soon to be both-and or neither-nor.
Anyway - pardon my idle musings! Once more, I loved the essay.
Thank you very, very much. But I am kicking myself. How ill-educated of me---I've only ever encountered the quote through Woolf! But of course, it's Whitman through and through.. fantastic. But yes, it would have been most fitting. Although quoting always opens so many cans of worms. Once you dunk Whitman in it, it's only too tempting to reach out to his pals and perhaps get Emerson in there too, and then once you've dropped him in it, why stop there? and race on through all the other nineteenth-century giants. Too much forethought needed methinks, when writing scattergun essays!