By Lee Cullum, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX –
"What I want is Martha Stewart's life."
So said Carol Reed, one of Dallas' foremost political consultants, and she wasn't kidding.
"I'd love to spend five months reading, exercising, taking long walks," she explained. "You could write your book." No doubt many agree with her, especially now, with the holidays bearing down, making demands many of which flowed from Martha Stewart herself, before she found repose at the federal pen in West Virginia.
It's odd that her prison looks to some like newfound freedom - freedom from relentless competition, from punishing obligation, from the driving ego of the driven personality, from the pressure to keep up, to pull ahead, no matter what.
Can there be any surcease from this kind of incarceration without the drastic departure of Martha Stewart? I doubt it, though some try in wildly varied ways.
Michelle, the heroine in Kate Lehrer's novel, "Confessions of a Bigamist," made a career of time - how to manage it, to conserve it, to redirect it toward one's self. As an efficiency consultant, she advised women to choose clothes that can move through the day, from office to luncheon to dinner party without wrinkles or the need to change. What you're wearing may not be perfect for any one thing, she noted, but it can be adequate for everything.
Does Michelle live by her own program? In terms of clothes, yes, but in love, no. So desperate does she grow under the harness of her own discipline that she tumbles not only into an affair, but into a second marriage, concurrent with her first. It's hardly efficient, but it does introduce her to her buried sensuality.
Another book, called "The Uses of Ineptitude" by Nicholas Samstag, favored the pleasure of incompetence for omni-competent people. "Must all of life's activities be measured by skill?" he asked. Why not play the piano even though you're not very good? He dedicated this work to a friend who "imposed order on chaos and lived as if it were true."
Isn't that what many of us are struggling to do-impose order on chaos, control on the uncontrollable? Can relief be found in a new fatalism, a letting go not of the will to strive, or even to seek and find and not to yield, but of the illusion that we can master events if we never drop our diligence, our surveillance, our deadly determination?
A view from Robertson Davies might help. He wrote this: "Keep calm. Don't want to win, or the gods or whoever controls the cards will laugh at you and take everything you have. A watchful, intelligent indifference will see you through."
Along with a watchful, intelligent indifference must come also a realistic notion of "balance." Is there any such thing? I don't think so. I don't see much "balance" going around. The truth is there are different times of our lives for different things - a time for submerging ourselves in work, in children, in family, in friendship, in travel; a time to break down and a time to build up, a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together, a time, in fact, for everything foreseen by the sage of Ecclesiastes - but these cannot all be pursued simultaneously. There is neither world enough nor time, nor stamina.
So let's go on with our lives without balance, submitting to all the seasons under the sun, surrendering ourselves to fate, seeking the occasional consolation of ineptitude, cultivating the paradox of passionate indifference, resisting the tyranny of time, fighting battles we were born, eventually, to lose. Let's toast Martha Stewart and enjoy the holidays in ways, until now, she never ever contemplated.
Lee Cullum is contributor to the Dallas Morning News and to KERA.