Committed (book rant)

summer has officially begun, and my yin and i have settled into a spare bedroom in North Carolina that is larger than our entire apartment back in Florida. but this is beside the point.

the point is that i have finished the first book of my summer reading list. as promised, i am offering a brief rant. and so...

the astute reader (of this blog, not the book) is probably already asking the question: "wasn't this book supposed to be week 4,
not week 1?"

yes, it was.

but the strict adherence to self-made dictums is one of my many (although less colorful) faults. with this glaring oversight duly noted,
on to the rant.

Committed is quick, easy, and full of the sort of lay anthropology that one would expect from Gilbert. this is not an insult, but neither is a compliment (except maybe back-handed one), and i generally have difficulty trusting authors who throw out loosely researched information for their own self-serving comedic purposes.

(i am one of these authors.)

otherwise the book was quite pleasurable, although i must confess to abandoning it about fifty pages from the end. while this decision was influenced largely by the fact that i wanted to cut down on my packing for the trip, anyone that knows me also knows that i have a propensity for hoarding tendencies (just ask my brother). this being the case, my unwillingness to bring it leads me to conclude that it wasn't all that engaging.

on the other hand, i am engaged, which would seem to make me the ideal reader for this book. so did it change my own thought on marriage?

not really.

Gilbert's take on marriage seems to be primarily contractual –
a well-historied, ever-changing, culturally-determined, much-
contested, under-hyphenated social institution. the story she tells is alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) cautionary, apologetic, and cloaked in a sort of clever sentimentality that allows her to be ironic on the one hand, and profess love and affection for her mate on the other.

there are plenty of anecdotes about Laotians and love and umbrellas and obligations, but ultimately none of these go any deeper than the most superficial of levels. Gilbert does not even break the skin of a grape, much less delve into what the implications of matrimony really mean.

in my estimation, marriage is not just the contractual joining of man and woman, but the symbolic union of masculine and feminine energies of the universe, the dance of Shiva and Shakti by which creation springs forth into existence. granted, this conception falls outside both our our society's present and historical norms, but why limit ourselves to re-creating the same ideas as our ancestors? why lock ourselves into the customs we are born into? or, on the other end of the spectrum, why reject them without seeing what they have to offer? what are the meanings of the vows we speak?

an example:

"til death do you part"

one must interrogate the terms:

"til"

(what is the nature of time?
what does it mean to change?)

"death"

(corporal death?
emotional death?
spiritual death?
what does it mean to die?)

"do"

(what is doing whom?
can one merely be?)

"you"

(who are you?
who am i?
are we not one?)

"part"

(is this a departure?
or a fracture?)

my yin and i have spent (and continue to spend) time with these questions, and we do not pretend to know the answers. but through the act of writing our vows, of interrogating ourselves, of interrogating our beliefs and fears and assumptions and presumptions, we have found ourselves growing closer, learning more about the parts of our beings that lie hidden not only from one another, but even from ourselves.

these types of questions are the very nature of commitment, and although Gilbert offers some admirable insights on codependency, she seems oblivious to the esoteric potentialities of marriage as union. this being the case, Committed receives the following grade:

C-

look for more book rants in the following weeks, and i will post a grading key sometime during the coming days. until then, as ever...