Mabel Dodge Luhan House living room, photo from MDL House website.
One of my pleasures here is eating dinner alone in a good restaurant and drinking a glass of wine. It is my best opportunity to watch people and to jump to perhaps wrongheaded conclusions about them: does the young woman who shrinks away from the man’s arm on her shoulder have reason to fear him? Does the couple across from me who seem so relaxed and at ease with each other present a portrait of a good marriage?
On this second observation, the answer is yes. I know because when I came back to Mabel’s to spend the night, this couple was sitting in the living room and invited me to join them and it turned out we have a good deal in common.
I’ve probably complained too much about the omnipresence of cell phones—and they seem to be a little less omnipresent now than they were a few years ago. Toys get old, after all. In fact, last night at dinner in the restaurant I didn’t see a single device. So “my” couple as they now have become—I hope to see them again one day—were in the majority as being engaged in conversation and not in their devices.
We writers have to stock our visual memory with the images of people we don’t know on which we build all kinds of stories; the people we know supply us with tidbits too, but reality in that case constrains our imaginations. Strangers provide an open field—if we observe them. In this case, my initial story about “my” couple, based on watching them for a while, was borne out by what I learned later from them. Another reason to trust my imagination, honed from years of use.
There are many stories hovering around Mabel and her house, and sometimes it’s possible to hear more than one version. For example, people often blame her for interfering between Robinson Jeffers, the poet, who visited here with his wife years ago; Mabel is thought to have introduced a divorcee to Robinson (of course it had to be a divorcee) and as a result his wife tried to kill herself in the bathtub I use here… But my new friend shed a different light on this incident when he told me that Robison’s poetry took a leap forward after the encounter—and after all his wife didn’t die.
This may sound a little harsh, but I am learning a lot here about the flexible interpretation of events that are narrowed to a specific point by our puritanism.
Thank you, Mabel!
Thank you for getting me interested in Robinson Jeffers. Wikipedia mentions that he “encountered D.H. Lawrence in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s circle at Taos.” But there are other mentions in that source that interest me more. He was on the cover of Time magazine and on a US postage stamp, despite his strong opposition to WWII. But my highest interest was evoked by this paragraph:
// In “The Double Axe” Jeffers explicitly described “inhumanism” as “…a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to ‘notman’; the rejection of human solipsism, and recognition of the trans-human magnificence…This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist…It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy…it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.” //
My sticking point here has to do with Susan Sontag saying in my Hum 5 section that most philosophers end up as solipsists. Rupert Spira calls solipsism “silly,” but I have to consider it a possible glimpse of truth, to be balanced by Robert Heinlein saying that a combination of solipsism and pantheism explain everything. My very insignificant and miniscule intelligence insists that solipsism, as suggested by The Truman Show, can very well be half the whole reality. Hence my three prayers: “Help me love the mystery of oneness; Help me love the grand illusion of twoness; Help me love the centering wisdom of threeness.”