Weiting Jeanne and Josh negotiating a relationship in Gaia’s Hands is harder than I thought. I’m getting hung up on the age difference, although it intrigued me years ago when I was in the middle of a hypomanic episode.
May-December marriages happen all the time when the man is older than the woman. Although a minority thinks it’s unnatural, society in general accepts it. If the woman is younger, has less education, is just getting settled in life, we have some questions but leave well-enough alone if they look happily married.
Older women/younger men pairings, especially when there’s that much distance between the two (30 years) tend to be dismissed as “gross”. Sociobiologists say this is only natural because men look for older women because of their fertility and women look for protectors — just look at chimps with their harems. The problem is that the primate closest to us, bonobos (miniature chimps) tend to have sex with pretty much everyone and don’t make a big deal of age. Sociobiology has its limits, which is that most practitioners are men and select for what they (as men) want to see that establishes the status quo.
And what if we’re evolving from that exchange of babies for protection? In the US, most women work in the marketplace. Childbearing is held off to later ages, and many choose not to have children. Jeanne is 50 years old and has a steady job and income — Why would he need to be a breadwinner immediately? Why couldn’t she help him through grad school?
But oh my God, what about sex? How could he possibly find her saggy body sexy? Art studios have enlisted the bodies of saggy women for ages, because they’re more interesting to draw. And Josh finds her fascinating because he’s had visions of her in a garden that looks like the Garden of Eden. And Josh, with his slender build and shorter stature, hardly looks like Hollywood material himself.
I have to find the realism and paint them as outsiders at the same time, and this is — well, difficult.
Wish me luck.
Tag: Garden of Eden
Gardens in my Dreams
It’s January, and time for planning my garden.
What does this have to do with writing? A writer writes what they know and what they love, and I love plants. Particularly plants I can eat, because I like food as well. And if they also smell good, that’s a bonus because I like things that smell good. As you might expect, my best friend is named Basil, and he grows in my garden every year.
One of my favorite characters in my books was a garden. Or a Garden, perhaps, because it had begun as a food forest, a planting of perennial edibles modeled after the layers of a forest. The picture below will be worth 1000 words:
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| from: Permaculture, a Beginner’s Guide, by Graham Burnett |
The Garden in question incorporated fifty of these units in a three-dimensional pattern: one canopy tree, surrounded by three dwarf trees, and clumps of the other units as needed. It had been commissioned by a eco-collective (a coop based on ecological principles and striving toward self-sufficiency). Little did the collective know that they had called on an acolyte of the earth-soul Gaia to design the project and direct the work crews. Overnight, the garden grew a foot, and in a few short weeks offered up its first crops. The residents felt unsettled for a long time, because it’s one thing to call something a “force of nature”, and another to meet it face-to-face.
There are other stories about the Garden, but I will not tell them here.
My Work-in-Progress has a collective with greenhouse domes in an ecologically efficient desert habitat. Below each greenhouse is an underground living unit with tunnels to the central unit, where the Great Room/kitchen and workrooms reside. The dome above the main unit holds a grafted tree bearing two different colored apples that came from the central trees of the original Garden. These two gardens, the original food forest and the desert domes, are connected by more than the scion from the mother Trees, but that truth is scattered across several books.
*****
I received another rejection today.
My novels don’t grab agents within a synopsis and three chapter (or less) form, and I have no idea why. I’ve edited, and I’ve polished, and I’ve improved my query letter and etc., but I don’t know if I can write what they want. My ideas are speculative, utopic, ecological, egalitarian, and not very dominant culture. The ideas themselves may not sell — pacifism instead of war? Ecologically sane utopias that struggle with prejudice and discord?
I seem to get better at dealing with rejections. I’m quite calmly considering whether my goal of getting published is worth the time investment. Writing itself is rewarding and enjoyable, but as a hobby it takes about 14 hours per week. The gardening, at least, yields food; the writing has not yielded readers or income. I know hobbies don’t yield income in most instances, but I don’t get the return in writing alone — I want to share ideas. I want to be read.
Writing is another garden I’ve been tending — and at moments like this, all I can think of is that my back aches and I’m weary, and as is true in all kinds of gardening, I will not know if the effort is worth it until it sets fruit.
The Two Trees
I have struggled with the symbolism of the Garden of Eden story my whole life. Seriously, I started questioning it at age seven, and none of the lovely young Jesuits who interned at my grandmother’s church gave me an explanation I could accept.
In the Garden of Eden segment in Genesis, God creates a paradise, and then he creates Adam and Eve, who he calls his children. And he tests them in a way that plays over and over again in creation: God says “Don’t eat the apple”. The serpent, representing peer pressure, says: “Hey, try the apple.” Eve says, “Hey, let’s eat the apple.” They eat the apple, and their eyes are opened, and they see their world and they make a big fuss of nudity.
I understand that this is an origin story that predates Christianity, and that its intention is to come up with an explanation about why there’s pain and suffering and menstrual cramps, but the problem is that the story has unintended consequences that cause more harm than pain, suffering, and menstrual cramps.
These are the reasons why I have trouble with this story (my viewpoint is probably biased by western culture and feminism. I do not apologize):
1. Adam and Eve, God’s children, have done only what generations of teens have done since: disobeyed their parents after having been given incomplete information on the consequences. God has, in effect, underestimated the intelligence and drive in his creation, and as a result, he exiles his children from the Garden with no remedy.
2. Questioning one’s parents is one of the hallmarks of growing up. Many an argument at the Thanksgiving dinner table has developed as a result of one’s values having changed by going off to college. In effect, then, God has punished his children with the nuclear option for growing up.
3. Although both ate the apple, Eve earns more than her share of scorn for eating first and then handing the apple to Adam. This casts Eve in a maternal role over Adam, rather than acknowledging Adam did it by his free choice. Therefore, Eve is put in the tricky position of being both Adam’s mother and his spouse. This continues as a myth in today’s relationships: women are put in the position of “taming” their partying bad-boy boyfriends into “real men”, and the men secretly blame them for destroying “the good old days”. Ironically, it also justifies the belief that women can’t make reliable decisions and that men must make them for their families. If you take this to its logical conclusion, women end up being made responsible for men who won’t actually listen to them.
4. As a professor, I tell my students that my job is to prepare them to reach beyond and accomplish things I haven’t accomplished. I’m told that parents want their children to have it better than they do. Why, then, is God such a bad parent in this tale? Why doesn’t he want Adam and Eve to possibly outreach him?
The Genesis tale appears to be about obedience. However, unrelieved servitude is not any more laudable than unrestrained freedom.
What about a balance?
I myself envision two trees, each representing an extreme — freedom and responsibility, rational and artistic, introverted and extroverted, individualistic and communalistic. We take a bite of each to understand the extremes, and pledge ourself to a balance of the two we can live with, because the extremes both have their damage.
Take a bite of each — the yellow apple tastes like the most perfect apple you’ve ever tasted, the one that tastes like a memory, like comfort, like nostalgia. The red apple tastes like impossible things, as if molecules of violets and woodsmoke and applejack from a mason jar and a taste of apple pie and tiny strawberries.
Of course, in my version of the Garden of Eden, Adam had to choose between Eve and Lilith. He chose Lilith, and ever since, people questioned the myths they were presented with.
Words Like Me 