Finding Time, as a Man Would Do
On a recent Sunday I turned on the TV, intending – for some reason -- to watch a political talk show. Surfing around I happened upon an interview with the perennially sexy members of Led Zeppelin. Listening to guitarist Jimmy Page I reflected on how few dishes he must have washed as a very young man, before the fame and wealth, how little if any laundry he schlepped to the washer and, in those days, maybe a dryer. Partly it was a matter of gender roles. Even the most helpful boys did not generally do domestic work, although they helped their fathers mow the lawn, repair the car and put up storm windows in the fall.
In larger part, a man’s achievement of distinction derives from something far removed not only from housework, but from the character of housework, which by nature is unhelpfully diverse and, except for cooking, not demanding of any real creativity. That something is focus.
Focus is a natural ability that appears to repose in men more strongly than it does in women. To the feminist mind, blame for the burden of everything women often singlehandedly manage – the home, children, paid work, elder care, writing the holiday cards -- can be laid at the door of the male focus gene. Of course they became great guitarists and inventors of the Salk vaccine. They didn’t have to do anything else.
Fairly or unfairly, this state of affairs has been demonstrably true everywhere throughout time. Rich or poor, young or old, healthy or sick, most men have never scrubbed the toilet. Women have grumbled about this with understandable resentment, but taking lessons from it might be more useful.
In my home I have no domestically clueless man to complain about but, more importantly, I have none to care for. I would not inflict a cluttered, filthy home on a husband on the ground that I was absorbed in writing the Great American Novel. Marital matters being as they are for me, there is no reason why I can’t let the dust pile up. My daughter religiously discharges laundry duty, the grocery shopping, trash and recycling, and microwave cleaning. I find it quite impressive that she has enshrined those tasks as Hers, and I don’t bother her about dusting, vacuuming, cooking, floor washing, table setting, dishwashing, clutter management and ironing (yes, I do it).
I forgot to mention the futile attempts to keep the closet tidy, but the point is obvious. You simply cannot do all those things with any frequency and become a great guitarist, or anything else great, in the same lifetime. You have to be willing to focus on the pursuit of say, your degree in graphic design, or even just the completion of a jigsaw puzzle, without jumping up and rushing to the kitchen upon remembering that the day-old broccoli festering in the sink disposal was not flushed down.
Focus sometimes requires a certain amount of selfishness, and there doubtless have been many instances of creative geniuses using wives or others as punching bags either figurative or literal. About some peerless musician or famous actor married several times, one is likely to think, "well, he was a great basson player, but....
Yet how inspiring and pleasure-giving the brilliant contributions of some individuals have been. I don't know what kind of husband Artie Shaw was, and I don't plan to look into it. I just know that, when I listen to his music, I am hearing the true greatness that countless humans would like to be able to achieve.
Focus is most usefully equated or associated with discipline and perseverance -- finishing what you start, not indulging the fatal "I don't feel like it." My own attention to domestic tasks has often eaten up a lot of time because of my unwillingness to take up a mental task and persevere with it. It has simply been easier to decide which blankets are dirtiest and then lug them down to the coin-op in the basement. A psychologist would have an explanation at the ready – fear of success, maybe. But the fact remains that electric light, modern plumbing, heating, cooling, semiconductors, automobiles, and the very houses we live in, were invented by men – and only partly because they didn’t have to learn to master the three-minute egg.
At an age I would rather not mention, I am finally finding time as a man would do. Every morning I write. Wanting to eat decently but not to be tethered to the kitchen, I cook enough potato, or rice, and vegetables to last a week. I’m cultivating the ability to spot grime on the bathroom woodwork without diving down to eradicate it. Foreign correspondent Martha Gellhorn was said to have described writing as the hardest work in existence. Anyone familiar with Gellhorn’s life story would doubt that she ever labored much in the grimier, truly hard jobs in life. But that’s the point. Achievers cannot be what many women, like myself, have been – underachievers who catered to their modest constitutional endowment of focus by welcoming the security of repetitive domestic tasks.
It’s not easy to keep the seat of my pants attached to the seat of the chair (some real glue would help) and write all morning. The build-up of dust on the venetian blinds beckons. It’s not easy to justify spending hours daily on creative work that may never be appreciated or even seen by anyone outside my family and a few friends. After all, a clean and tidy home inspires visitors, at least, and gives me the power to provide them with a pleasant experience. But there is nothing like coming home from walking the dog on a cold morning and seeing, laid out before me, the raw material for all the creative work that for decades has suffered confinement in the little black hole of my good intentions.
As for Led Zeppelin, well, they could probably still make me do things I decline to describe here. But in the extremely unlikely event that they ever read this, they should know that I would draw the line at folding their underwear. I can honestly say that although it has taken me a long time to get to this point, my lap is already occupied by my thesaurus.
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