Sometimes things are so out of sync it's impossibly sad. It can quell any impulse you have to fight it or fix it or flee or even to numb yourself somehow. All you can do is look at it and feel the sadness. When I first saw the movie Grey Gardens, in the 1970s, I felt that.
The Beales of Grey Gardens, Big Edie and Little Edie, mother and daughter, were at best impractical. Did they have to live in such squalor? Was it a choice? Probably, more rightly, it was an external expression of an internal state, removed from the norm, though Little Edie alluded once, if I remember, to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. And they had family. There were sons and brothers somewhere. How could they let them live in such a mess?
And what did I do?
Not about the Beales, I mean, but about my sister. She died in New York City, in 2010, in squalor. She was brilliant but difficult: hugely intelligent and talented and impossible to live with. She coped with the tough, improbable life she had made for herself, again an external expression of an off-beat, disconnected internal state, with resiliency but it seemed so unnecessary. People don't have to live like that.
Oh, but they do.
I think that there was unwarranted optimism once, that there would be the equivalent of a Salk vaccine for everything.
We would be able to fix everything. It's an attitude that dies hard and is characteristic of a kind of American optimism compounded by innocence. We are still dealing with the fallout of that false optimism. There's a resistant strain of it around, that you can still fix anything if you have enough money, but even that is failing as so many aging people live in pain and lose more function than they thought possible.
The scientists and medical people now know that, with so many things, there are statistical distributions, often normal curves, and that there will always be people out in the tails. The crazy will always be with us, and so on. People will always have problems, many unfixable, or new problems arise as others fade. But what does it mean? I was taught, when I was a child, that people who suffer somehow suffer for all of us.
They bear a burden for all of us. How is this not true? It means that it is true. We are a people, a common entity of sorts. When we care for other people we care for ourselves. When we neglect them we neglect ourselves. And I neglected my sister. Was she crazy? It doesn't matter. Who are we to judge. I didn't know how bad her life was. Would I have helped her if I'd known? Yes, but only if it was really necessary and with conditions.
My brother and I had never known how she made a living. She was guarded about it, but she was an intermediary in the sex industry. This immediately impressed us as an honest thing in the context and as characteristically defiant. In Summer, 2007, I had visited New York and hadn't contacted her. It may have been better. As it happens, I saw the stage version of Grey Gardens while there, with Christine Ebersole as Little Edie.
And I was at Marie's Crisis, a piano bar with ties to Broadway, when Ebersole won a Tony for her performance. I had wondered what it would be like to take my sister there. She was a singer. Would either of us have gotten anything out of it? I will never know. The Beales may have been happier than I am. My sister probably wasn't but this is the thing, with these strange worlds people create, some more invented than others.
There's always a qualitative cast to it. The Beales' world was in some ways beautiful. My sister's probably wasn't. But all of this makes me think of the disconnect in the way we Americans now view ourselves, in a romantic way even in relation to past standards, as we abandon any sense of who we are and what we stand for. And it's becoming more delusional by the day, more reflexive and a reflection of something lost.
Our national sense of self is a crumbling mansion. We are increasingly out of touch with reality, unable to step back and see the mess in the trappings of past successes, and there's increasingly less connection between our view of ourselves and what we are. The longer it goes on the more defensive we are and resistant to the truth. It's also less likely that we can recover and again be more of what we claim to be. That's impossibly sad.
In honor of my sister, a sample of her singing:
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