Monday Reads: The Heart is Still a Lonely Hunter
Posted: August 19, 2013 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Bill Kristol is an idiot, Mandatory Drug sentences, Princess Diana 41 Comments
Good Morning!
I am in one of those becoming states. It’s heartening in some way, I suppose, to think that one can be so firmly planted in adulthood and smug only to realize they still have so much work to do on issues that seem to crop up out of no where. I remember clearly where I was when Princess Diana died in Paris in that tragic auto crash 16 years ago. I was in my French Quarter apartment with the man who brought me to New Orleans. I thought he would be the love for and of the rest of my life. I have never known such passion right up and beyond the day it ended. It did not end well.
It is sixteen years later and life and love remain ephemeral as they are by design. Those days gave birth to my intense Buddhist practice. These days I do not feel like I can find the pure wisdom of dakinimind. The day of Diana’s death was a turning point for me because I was about to be left for a woman half my age and everything would fall apart by the end of the year. I had a creeping feeling that summer when he spoke of a certain student but felt that taboos where too big to cross. They were not.
“We” fell apart. I fell apart. My job disappeared. The ink on my divorce decree dried well. This man actually wrote to me right before my daughter’s wedding last year to reconnect. He congratulated me on the doctorate because he knew that it was a central pursuit of my life and he knew what it was like to get one. He found me again or had been watching me evidently. The e-missive was ignored because I have grown in many ways and I have no desire to revisit that relationship. At that point, nearly 15 years after, it seemed impossible for me to believe I would ever mutter the words “I love you” again to another man and I haven’t until last month. Too much had been lost even though much had been gained like the kathouse, the mighty mustang, the doctorate, and the wonders of New Orleans and my tangential career in music. My life has been an adventure that would have been unknown in Nebraska. You know that I have had a rich life here and met many of my goals. But, I tossed the love thing and men in general in the dustbin of expendable items by the time Diana’s death was a year old. Hence, I have earned the nickname “Cold Pizza” because that’s about how I’ve treated men for the last 16 years of my life. It never tastes good reheated so might as well toss it out. I actually sustained several simultaneous relationships for a number of years. One for nearly 7 years. Still, no mention of the goal of the lonely hunter. So now, on this nearing anniversary of Diana and her tragic death and her endless search to just be loved by one person without reservation and without boundary, I am drawn back to the hunt of her lonely heart. This path is one I know well no matter how overgrown or recently cleared it may be.
Hers is one of those stories that still draws others in too but for many different reasons. For me, it is because I so desperately understand her need to be loved unequivocally. You’d have to know the troubled story of my mother to really understand that statement but you are not my psychologist and this post is not directly about the bonds of early attachment. It is about the result of attachment gone unresolved. It is why I try to let all the people in my life know they are loved without condition. This includes you. I have Bodhisattva vows even though I fall sadly short of them and I try to expand love to encompass every being out there. DIana appeared universally loved but yet that was not enough for her. There was something compelling her from childhood to find the one sort of love that she felt she had never experienced. I think she loved without bounds too because it was the one thing she felt she never was given in her most basic relationships. To me, she exists beyond the boundaries of time and history like a tragic Shakespeare heroine or a mythical being. Her central story is still her quest for unconditional love.
Conspiracy theories are back surrounding the deaths of Princess Diana and her companion Dodi al Fayed, after British media reported allegations that the couple may have been murdered by British special forces.
Despite a $7 million joint French and British police investigation that concluded that Diana, al Fayed and their driver Henri Paul’s deaths in 1997 were accidents, a report in The Mirror claims they were allegedly murdered and it was all covered up.
The allegation surfaced at a second court martial of Sgt. Danny Nightingale, who was found guilty of illegal gun possession, The Mirror reported. Among the evidence presented at the trial was a letter from a former soldier’s estranged in-laws that makes the claim that the SAS (Special Air Service) “was behind Princess Diana’s death,” the newspaper reported.
On Saturday, Scotland Yard said that British police were looking into new information that has surfaced in connection with the deaths of Diana and al Fayed, but police declined to say what that new information was.
“The Metropolitan Police Service is scoping information that has recently been received in relation to the deaths and assessing its relevance and credibility,” Scotland Yard officials said in a statement. “The assessment will be carried out by officers from the specialist crime and operations command.
“This is not a re-investigation and does not come under Operation Paget,” the statement said.
These new conspiracy theories are not what has driven me back to the Diana chronicles. It was her portrait once again shining from my issue of Vanity Fair. This story is about another love in Diana’s life. It makes me wonder what drove her on this endless search for love and acceptance when the world offered it up to her?
Diana’s closest confidants in her last years did not need an inquest to know the absurdity of Al Fayed’s claims. Not only was she not planning to marry Dodi Al Fayed, or pregnant with his child, they say, but she was in fact still “madly in love,” as one of them describes it, with another man, an unassuming Pakistani heart surgeon named Hasnat Khan.
Perhaps, her hunt for love will be better memorialized in yet another movie. My hope is that it will not be one more sophomoric soap opera filled with less complex people than you find at any mundane Republican convention. The royals are anything but simple folk.
With the birth of her first grandson she’ll never meet, Princess Diana is again in the headlines. Now she’s gazing out at us from the September cover of Vanity Fair, just as a new and controversial movie about her final love affair is preparing to open.
It is hard to imagine two more unparallel lives than me and my two daughters and the late Diana and her heir and spare. Yet, I continue to be drawn by her story because her search and mine seem inexorably linked by more than the timing of her death and a betrayal that made me such an Ice Queen for so long. Her post-betrayal life was seriously different. I am still here in New Orleans and trying to deal once again with outcroppings of our shared pursuit. Even after all these years of time on the mat and time in my mind, of trying to find a way to love without grasping, love without differentiating between my flesh and blood and the hungry dog on the street, and seeking the ability to understand that love should be beyond just two, I struggle again.
The endless pursuit of humans for all kinds of things seems to be all encompassing at times. Some of them are higher pursuits, some of them are the tasks and errands of fools.
The Weekly Standard‘s Bill Kristol was one of Sarah Palin’s earliest supporters to be picked as the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, and now he says she can “resurrect herself” by running to be a senator from Alaska.
In an interview on Sunday, ABC’s Benjamin Bell asked Kristol if Palin had disappointed him after he pushed so hard for her to be on the 2008 ticket.
“I was for taking the gamble of putting her on the ticket, I don’t think it hurt the ticket in 2008,” Kristol explained. “I think her stepping down as governor of Alaska was a big problem. People don’t like to see a candidate, a governor, an executive — absent some medical reason or whatever — just leave office early. And she had been a good governor — incidentally — of Alaska until then. So, I think that is something, I think, she has to recover from in terms of being a serious leader in the party. Still has a lot of loyalty, still can shape the debate, she still has a great political touch.”
“I think the way Palin would possibly resurrect herself — if that’s the right word or rehabilitate herself, I think is a better way of putting it — run for Senate in Alaska in 2014,” he continued. “I’m not urging that. I’m just saying, if I were her adviser, I would say, ‘Take on the incumbent, you have to win a primary, then you have to beat an incumbent Democrat, it’s not easy.’”
“But if she did that, suddenly — if you can imagine that,” Kristol added, smiling. “Sarah Palin, freshman senator, January 2015 in Washington having beaten an incumbent. That would be pretty interesting.”
Bell also asked Kristol about the presidential ambitions of billionaire mogul Donald Trump.
“I don’t think he’d be a particularly good one, and I don’t think he’s going to be one,” the conservative columnist quipped.
But Kristol did have some ideas about how Republicans nationwide could be in “good shape” by following the lead of conservative lawmakers in North Carolina.
I just have one thing to say to that interview. WTF?
Unfortunately, many start filling the days of an uneventful hunt with drugs. What has mandatory drug sentencing done to our society? Why not treat the disease instead of punishing the outcomes? The money appears to be in the punishment these days as the profit motive and the Reagan/Nixon Drug Wars creates more US Gulags than Stalin. This is from the keyboard of Adam Gropnik at The New Yorker.
As I wrote last year, there are more African-American men now incarcerated in America than were held in slavery in 1861, and more Americans under “judicial control” of one kind or another than Stalin held in his Gulag.
But even if this is the first decisive small stone pitched against a national shame, its specific effect on the imprisoned will still be minimal. Most
prosecutions are not federal, no one now in prison will be released, and the careful hedge of politic exceptions—no mercy for drug gangs, dealers, etc.—is bound to create many complications. As so often, though, the critics, I suspect, both underestimate the difficulty of big change and the geometric, multiplier effect of small ones. The mandatory-minimum movement was a way, typical of the fear-and-revenge cycle of the eighties, to prevent those damned liberal judges from letting drug offenders loose. It was a way to short-circuit permissiveness—not to mention decency, common sense, and simple mercy—by insisting that an offense that is no worse, really, than being caught with a Martini in a speakeasy should be met with enough prison time to ruin a life. It expressed an ideology. By expressing its opposite, the new rules discredit the old one. As with gay marriage, a signal from on high can often have as much value as a successful bit of comprehensive legislation. The clarity of the sign is plain even if the power of the signal is weak: the thirty years of irrational vengefulness expressed in those mandatory minimums that filled our prisons to no real social purpose is now robbed of its appearance of natural legitimacy, of social consensus. What should follow, surely, is its end.
Republicans are in search of something. Obama’s media guru David Plouffe says that they don’t have anything to sell. How does a party repackage and sell bupkis? Here’s what Plouffe has to say about Preibus saying that no media outlet that isn’t interested in Republicans gets a debate.
“They (Republicans) don’t have a product to sell.” He elaborated, while trying not to laugh too hard at the endless endurance of Republican delusion, that they could open all of the field offices in the world but without a product to sell, it would not translate to national electoral victory.
Plouffe said, “Chairman Priebus just talked about all of the field organizers — by the way 160 people in this big country isn’t very much — they don’t have a product to sell. You can hire 10,000 people to win the presidency in 2016, 2020 — these are facts, not opinions — but they have to grow their vote with Hispanics, suburban women, younger voters, the growing Asian communities.”
Plouffe added that the GOP is not rehabilitating; they are retrenching.
This is accurate. The media likes to portray Democrats as partisan and thus as blind and inaccurate as Republicans, but that is a lazy false equivalency. Plouffe is the author of The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory, in which he laid out the strategies and tactics that he used during Obama’s groundbreaking 2008 campaign. He didn’t do that by pretending that opening field offices in areas where minorities reside would sell them on policies that would harm them.
Obama opened field offices (largely manned by volunteers, I might add) in areas where his policies were a natural fit — that is, anywhere that the 98% and/or the morally responsible reside.
During the 2012 campaign, the Obama team kept telling the media that their polls told them something different than the polling companies. The media and the Romney campaign happily ignored these warnings. That was a mistake, because it turned out that the Obama team weren’t bluffing. It turned out that they actually dealt with reality in order to strategize a winning plan.
Republicans can’t win until they either face reality or come up with a new way to sell people on policies that are harmful for them. So far, Republicans are doubling down on their Southern Strategy, which is not new and is finally starting to backfire. And let’s face it, if they believed in their own press, they wouldn’t be working so hard to disenfranchise the very people they claim their field offices are going to appeal to. They know that they can’t sell bigotry and hate to minorities, but they must sell it to whatever is left of the whites-only contingency because it is all they have.
With that, I leave you to hunt some good links and blog threads to share with us. Have a great day!
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Wow Dak, what a personal post you have written here. It seems to me that part of what made so many people attached and sympathetic with the “people’s princess” is because they also saw something in her they could feel in themselves….like that connection you have with Diana. (Even if they don’t realize the level of emotion involved in it.)
I watched her death scene play out live that night too, while I was in the hospital pregnant with my son Jake…hooked up to monitors and machines that were keeping me from going into full fledged labor. I felt she was gone from the very first time they broke in with the live report…it was so sad.
I am happy you are finding something you’ve been looking for…seems like we all search for that feeling of love, but it doesn’t always stay constant…right?
I’ve loved my husband for the 20 years we have been married, but it has not always been the same kind of love. Sometimes it may have bordered on hate…but it never has been indifferent. It may not be healthy, it sure isn’t always fun…but I love him, and it is what it is. I guess we have been thru too much shit together, I don’t know.
Seems like this time around you have a lot of positive things going for you now…the book deal, your man…the girls are doing fabulous. It’s good…good.
It’s challenging on all fronts actually. So much distance, so little time, and I am aware of being alone now. .
Yes, the awareness of being alone is haunting. We hide from it in various ways during our lives but then at times it becomes all too clear.
My mother is dying; she is in the last stages now. For the most part, she is non-verbal, but the other day she asked me if she is all she has. I believe she was asking me if she was alone in the world. I tried to reassure her that she is not, but on some existential level, we are all “alone” in the world. That reality is not easy to accept.
Now I find myself asking if I am all I have.
You are in my thoughts Beata. I hope your mother finds peace soon.
A link to support your Republican “strategy” piece: http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/7-idiotic-and-dangerous-statements-right-wing-nut-jobs-just-last-week?page=0%2C2&paging=off It includes the usual suspects (Limbaugh & Santorum & King) plus a few new ones. Needless to say I appreciated Limbaugh’s “humble” opinion that you can’t believe in man-made climate change AND believe in god. Limbaugh wouldn’t recognize humble if it bit him in the a$$. He is after all more famous (his words recently) than any of the Republican primary candidates for prez, therefore he wouldn’t be a good debate moderator.
One more link for everyone, but particularly for you kat about the Gulf’s dead zone this year: http://grist.org/climate-energy/why-this-years-gulf-dead-zone-is-twice-as-big-as-last-years/ It is a great comprehensive piece, related to our agriculture practices, food choices and a relatively simple solution that would reduce the nutrients ending up in our bodies of water by a whopping 80%.
I think they’ve killed the Gulf.
They will if things don’t change. The article does say that Lake Erie was declared dead but it has come back. The problem with habitat destruction is that some or many native species are wiped out and new ones move in. These new or rarely observed species change the habitat and usually not for the better. Nature is an interconnected web after all, so when prey species or predators are wiped out, that allows some species to flourish and others, sometimes groups of species that are interdependent, to disappear completely. Humans are the only species who foul our living spaces and annihilate our fellow inhabitants. It is coming back to haunt us, and I fear it is only going to get worse, especially with the idiots we’ve elected who can but won’t do anything about it.
Great work this morning Dak. Yours is a story not unfamiliar. I was particularly drawn to this line about Diana which brings the problem of self-esteem into focus. ” It makes me wonder what drove her on this endless search for love and acceptance when the world offered it up to her?” From the outside looking in Diana was a woman who seemed to be universally loved but her pursuit of “love and acceptance” was relentless and was obvious to anyone paying attention.
Perhaps some of us simply cannot find the love within ourselves for ourselves without that single mirror that reflects it back to us flawlessly. It isn’t a problem easily resolved, perhaps it is even a problem without resolution.
I wish you peace.
Amen to all that!
Mouse, that is just so beautifully stated and very profound.
Kat – such a poignant, deeply personal post. May you have much joy and peace in this relationship.
Thank you. It looks like its going to be a lot more becoming before it reaches some kind of rest state.
The single mirror metaphor is brilliant, mouse.
Prince William interview: Future king talks fatherhood, baby George – CNN.com
CNN’s Prince William interview: The full transcript – CNN.com
And one more royal link: How Carole the live-in-granny followed Kate and baby to Wales: Duchess of Cambridge’s mother moves to Anglesey as Prince William returns to RAF duty | Mail Online
An analytical point first: Dak, there is a distinct change in your writing style since you have reconnected with your emotional side and I like it. You always wrote fascinating and readable posts, and I’ve been drawn to your ability to say so much using so few words but I am awed by your writing style now. It’s a lesson for us all to continue to explore ourselves and cultivate our souls. You have reaped a bountiful harvest from yours.
Yes, I agree. No “Cold Pizza” in this post.
I agree, Janicen.
Very astute observation, Janicen and I agree.
Thank you so much. This post was cathartic for me.
This post was helpful to many of us too. Every now and then we need to grab our soul and wring it out a bit.
We all search for love and acceptance from others. There is nothing innately wrong with that. But sometimes the wounds from childhood are too deep. Even worldwide adoration cannot heal them.
I think that was the case for Princess Diana, and also for Marilyn Monroe, who was someone I identified with very strongly at one time in my life.
Very powerful post, Dak, which gives us much to think about.
You said it perfectly Beata. I said something similar below but it took me a long time and a lot more words! 🙂
Yes, Marilyn has that too. I think Elton John saw that when he used Candle in the Wind and England’s Rose interchangeably and beautifully.
Now about Diana. There are some similarities between my first marriage and hers, and probably many women’s first marriages. Obviously I didn’t marry the next in line to the English throne, but I found myself what many would call a “good catch”. It’s only been just recently that I have begun to understand what in the hell I was thinking when, as a lovely young twenty-something I married a man 12 years my senior, twice divorced, with whom I had nothing in common but a love of hot, fast cars and who was really really smart. Wicked smart. And that has always been a thing for me. A really smart man can turn my head in a second.
And so with Diana, why would she give up her youth? That is what you are sacrificing when you partner with someone who is at least a generation older. Even for the chance to live in such luxury and be forever a part of history, why would she marry Charles? I think you have to look at her life before Charles to figure it out. Was she cherished and admired by her family and told that she could accomplish anything she set her mind to and that marriage and finding a man was secondary? I certainly wasn’t. I was told that nothing else mattered but marriage. That was the ultimate goal. Everything else was secondary. Any attempts I made to follow my passion or develop an interest that didn’t direct me toward the ultimate goal were quickly squelched and ridiculed. Marrying my first husband gave “them” (and my that I really mean my mother but she had her circle of influence in my family) what they wanted, to marry me off to a wealthy man, but it also provided me some legitimacy in their minds. Once I was married, they left me alone. They quit dominating and controlling me. That was his job now. I realize now why they reacted the way they did when I announced, after only a little over 3 years of marriage, that I was divorcing him. He had been cheating on my since shortly before our second wedding anniversary. He was a liar and a cheat and still my mother didn’t think I should let go of such a good catch. When I told her I was absolutely going to divorce him she pined “I just can’t help but feel that we’ve been cheated…” WE’VE been cheated. Not me. That’s the kind of weird influences I was struggling to get away from and maybe I used the marriage of my first husband as a way to break away from my family and all of their negative input. Once I was divorced, I was damaged goods and left to my own devices to cobble together a life for myself. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.
So I think we have to look at Diana’s life with her family and how she was made to feel about herself. I’m guessing that marriage to Charles involved love, certainly. She wasn’t the type of person who would marry someone she didn’t love, but also had a lot to do with establishing legitimacy with those who treated her as something less than the treasure she was.
What a story! If we could only go back and lecture our younger selves on these things!
We wouldn’t listen.
That’s so true Beata!!! When I was young and in most need of good advice the only advice I sought were those voices who I knew would second the emotional conclusion I’d already come to. It took me a long time to realize that.
Of course we can’t but we can make a conscious effort not to do the same thing to our daughters. I have and I’m pretty damned pleased with the results.
Janice, you and Dak have much to be proud of in raising your daughters. Bravo to you both!
I know my divorce and move to New Orleans damaged them. I just hope they can understand how deeply depressed I was at the time and that it was very much a life or death choice for me.
When one of my aunts died from brain cancer, I found among her personal items a letter from her grown daughter, whom she had given up in a divorce when her daughter was very young. After the divorce, my aunt was not part of her daughter’s life. She found out later through that letter that her daughter had experienced a very hard life. On the letter, my aunt had written “Forgive myself” and underlined it three times.
Most of us do the best we can in life, and if we fall short, forgiving ourselves and others is a very healing thing.
We all beat ourselves up over decisions we make/made that affect/affected our children. Even though we may have a little voice inside warning us that our decision is wrong, we have no way of comprehending the long term affects of our decisions on our children or other people in our lives. Even our bad decisions can, over time, produce good outcomes. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. 🙂
Thanks for sharing some of what you’re going through, Dak. I never really followed Diana’s story–maybe it’s because I’m a little older than others here. But I’m sure the reflections of early attachments are powerful in all our lives–event the richest and most powerful among us.
Dak, you need to write your memoir. The piece, this morning, was riveting.
Tysvm.
Glenn Greenwald vows revenge on UK government for detaining his partner.
More greymail.
He should have thought about the consequences of putting his partner in the position of transporting contraband.
fucking drama queen!
I have to take a deep breath, and looking back, I too recall that day that Diane died. I was racked full of back pain, and couldn’t move, was floating from the drugs, as I laid, my tv was on, and there she was, gone. I cried for her, and was crying for my own body that was slowly becoming lifeless. It is always good to wander into your thoughts of yesterdays. Many of my days since have been filled with shadows, too many shadows.
Beata you are right, we all must taste those moments of when we were but children, before the times of knowing, when we could just splash in the puddles of life. We all must have a reason for living, and for loving. When you reach out for it, you know your mind and your heart is alive…….and totally in need for your lover, for your husband/wife, for your mother. Beata I hope your mother doesn’t suffer so. I see a little bird, lonely and huddled, and ready to fly, that little bird is a sign, that you are ALL that love, that magic, and the pure joy of Momma’s life.
I’ve been married for near 40 years………..and at times, I wish I had married my big toe. Sometimes it has hurt, sometimes it has been submerged in frustrations, and I have all the grey hairs that should be there.
Cheers to you Dak, you have taken those bandages off the wound, so that now the air can heal, and your energy can focus, and on the good in your life, even to continue to take things as they have come, and being tough when you needed to be cold like a pizza.
Hyper Religious men are so insane.
Saudi Arabia’s War on Witchcraft
A special unit of the religious police pursues magical crime aggressively, and the convicted face death sentences.