Practicing Scales

Pretty Lady just can't seem to stick to the Topic at Hand. Morgan's round-table gay marriage debate is utterly enthralling, except that the issue doesn't concern Pretty Lady in the slightest. Her opinions on gay marriage were decided on the day she discovered that gay people were, in fact, people. QED.

No, Pretty Lady had to go careening off on a tangent, central to her personal concerns, on the Nature of Commitment. She is passionately, vehemently strident in her opinion that you cannot Park a Person. Nay, this is not an opinion at all--it is Fact. It is a Fact, however, that narcissistic klunkheads persist in denying, to the tragedy of all.

Now, let me explain. Pretty Lady is all for Biblical Law. She considers the Ten Commandments to be basic, obvious practical advice. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment; the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."

(Father Worrell, bless his soul, used to intone this phrase with the emphasis on "HANG all the Law and the Prophets," which gave Pretty Lady a vivid mental picture of the Law and the Prophets twisting by the neck on a scaffold, which might not be such a bad idea. But never mind.)

At any rate, though, Pretty Lady has found, through a life of spiritual practice and study, that these Commandments are merely the beginning. If any one of you has ever listened to a child learn to play the violin via the Suzuki method, you may understand what she means.

The Suzuki method is based upon the rote instillation of principles. One shows the student how to perform a C major scale, and the student saws out C major until her fingers and your eardrums are raw. Then you move on to G. Via the Suzuki method, six-year-olds have become modest violin prodigies.

However, even the most prodigious six-year-old, learning via the Suzuki method, has yet to become a musician. This Suzuki-trained violinist is still the aesthetic equivalent of a monkey playing a wind-up organ. Artistry upon the violin is based upon far more than scales, note-reading, and technique. It is only when these techniques have become second nature that the violinist becomes capable of truly making her instrument sing, with a deeply personal yet universal interpretation of the notes played upon it.

It is Pretty Lady's observation that the Ten Commandments, in terms of spiritual practice, are the C major scale. They are a required starting point in the practice of Divine Love. You are not loving someone, generally, while you are murdering them. Ditto envy, theft, casual sexual betrayal of one's spouse or partner, etc. The Ten Commandments are just good manners.

However, if one limits oneself to the literal, plodding adherence to the Ten Commandments, while steadfastly ignoring signs of subtle distress, or not-so-subtle nervous breakdowns, on the part of one's nearest and dearest, this is the spiritual equivalent of playing a rusty tape of a C major scale loudly enough to drown out the symphony next door. You are then missing the Whole Damn Point.

You see, commitments between individuals are not merely a dry contract between static entities. Human beings, by their very nature, grow, learn, and change. If one marries a person expecting them not to do so, one is a jerk and an asshole and a fool. A person who gets married, expecting that the spouse will continue to cook and clean and bear children, or work and bring home money like a robot, no matter whether or not you listen, consider their needs, support their growth as a person, or communicate with them in a meaningful manner, this marriage is doomed to misery and stagnation. Persons who stay in a marriage of this nature may be adhering to the letter of God's commandments, but the spirit is utterly absent.

No, friends, a true 'commitment' is not a fetter; it is a tool. It is an agreement that at best, gives two persons an incentive to discover more about the nature of love, with the mutual assurance that the partner will not decamp as soon as a prettier bottom marches by. To continue the musical analogy--it is the understanding that if G major proves to be difficult on the violin, the student will not throw it down and take up drums instead.

You cannot, generally, avoid your issues by switching partners. Since the root of most personal problems is in the self, trading partners, or taking extra ones, is usually an avoidance tactic. At best, one is simply stalling for another few years, until one fetches up against precisely the same problem that ended the former relationship.

But then there are those occasions when it becomes obvious that 1) your spouse has Parked you; he does not share, he does not communicate, he stares at a glowing screen all day while you tear at your face with your fingernails and throw breakables against the wall; or 2) you selected a partner in your youth, with more of an eye toward pulchritude and malleability than intellect or character, and, ten years out, find that her endless repetition of bland platitudes makes you want to push her face mercilessly into a banana cream pie; or 3) the two of you simply have no interests, goals, or conversational topics in common any more. You have come to the end of the marital line.

What do the Ten Commandments have to say about that?

Well, principally, they say to Love thy Neighbor as Thyself. Love, in these circumstances, could be a lot of things. It could include things like couples counselling, antidepressants, separate dwellings, night classes, or a screaming tantrum. If there are children involved, it definitely includes a great many more considerations. As a last resort, it might even include divorce. But only after all other options have been sincerely exhausted.

What Love does not include, in Pretty Lady's opinion, is locking a miserable person in a cage and throwing away the key; then telling them that this is God's Will, that they are going to Heaven as a reward for their misery, and turning back toward the flickering screen.