Susannah B. Mintz - Love Affair in the Garden of Milton

LOVE AFFAIR

IN THE

GARDEN

OF

MILTON

Loss, Poetry, and
the Meaning of Unbelief

SUSANNAH B. MINTZ

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

BATON ROUGE

Published by Louisiana State University Press

www.lsupress.org

Copyright 2021 by Louisiana State University Press

All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations used in articles or reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any format or by any means without written permission of Louisiana State University Press.

LSU Press Paperback Original

Designer: Michelle A. Neustrom

Typeface: MillerText

Fullness of Time appeared, slightly revised, in Sonora Review (Fall 2018). Into the World before Us was a semifinalist for the 2019 River Teeth nonfiction prize. Paper Cranes appeared, in different form, in Cagibi (October 2019) and was shortlisted for the 2019 Cagibi Macaron Prize. Wild Work is reproduced from Prairie Schooner 94, no. 4 (Winter 2020), copyright 2020 by the University of Nebraska Press.

Cover photo by Omar Alejandro on Unsplash

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mintz, Susannah B., author.

Title: Love affair in the garden of Milton : loss, poetry, and the meaning of unbelief / Susannah B. Mintz.

Description: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021001335 (print) | LCCN 2021001336 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7581-1 (paperback) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7639-9 (pdf) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7640-5 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Mintz, Susannah B. | College teachersUnited StatesBiography. | Milton, John, 16081674Influence. | AdulteryPsychological aspects.

Classification: LCC LA2317.M527 L68 2021 (print) | LCC LA2317.M527 (ebook) | DDC 378.1/2092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001335

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001336

PREFACE

T HE SQUARE YELLOW clock on my desk is chugging along the minutes. At each rotation of the golden second hand, it makes a gurgling sound like its clearing its throat, then theres a click and a brief pause as second and minute hands cross. Im about to turn fifty-five, and Ive had this clock since before I was ten. Its practically a relic. Its top is cracked, the alarm is bust, and it long ago lost the clear plastic insert that protected its face. But its never stopped telling me the time, and it never runs slow. I learned how to meditate using this clock, back when it was new, and I refer to it now, pulling it away from the wall and turning it toward the chair where I sit across the room. Im trying to revive my practice, quiet the noise in my head, find some space of stillness.

Last month, at the start of December, I went to a five-day silent meditation retreat, the longest stretch of intensive meditating Id ever done. The irony of marking my experience with meditation by my ancient timepiece, whether across the years or in any given session, isnt just that mindfulness trains us to attend only to the present as a way of fostering composure for lifes challenges. Its that I cant get away from the past. One of the fundamental principles of mindfulnessmaybe the hardest for me to grasp, obsessed as I am with time and inclined by temperament and education to analyze anything to within an inch of survivalis that getting caught up in the stories we tell about ourselves, comforting as they feel, can trap us in a ferocious repetitiveness. I like opening my eyes to that little yellow cube of my own continuity, but Im also trying to let her go, the girl whose fears and shames Ive been rehearsing for a lifetime. Especially now, heading toward the last third of a life, unexpectedly single. Except, not quite.

At the retreat, one of the instructors described her devotion to mindfulness as a love affair. She was speaking of the refuge of meditation. I had gotten myself to this retreat after many years of longing to achieve a profound calm, and in that moment I wanted to trust that I, too, could cultivate an equanimity so dependable that it would feel as good as love. But later, writing secretly in my journal (we were encouraged to avoid journaling as a distracting entanglement with our habits of mind), I considered that love affairs are always fraught. Wasnt it a love affair, after all, that had ruined my marriage? Isnt any love affair, if not an actual fiction, wildly complicated, built on fantasy, subject to the fluctuations of desire, and practically guaranteed to end? The very words connote the illicit, the short-lived, even the sordidcertainly not a forty-year relationship with Buddhism.

Then I wondered if such contradictions were the point. Some affairs do last a long time. They arent inevitably forbidden. No relationship can sustain a high pitch of excitement, just as mindfulness teaches us to abide neutrality without restlessness. Any involvement will eventually grow mundane. Something will invariably go wrong. Loved ones get on our nerves, demand our patience and our forgiveness. Love is work, but paradoxically, it tends to go best when we stop trying so hard to make it right. In mindfulness, too, we try to witness rather than strive, to accept what is instead of obsessing over perfection. Maybe it goes without saying that I knew about mindfulness more than I was practicing it around the time my husband started his own affair.

Its impressive to declare youre in love with anything other than another human being, since it implies an unexpected intensity of emotion, and such pleasure, such joy. When we remember all the rest of what love really is, the humdrum everyday quality of most of our experience, a love affair with mindfulness makes sense. I spent my first day at the retreat catapulting between craving and agony. Every part of my body screamed in pain, and my mind pinged scattershot in a hundred directions. I could not get quiet. Then I could not forgive myself for failing at the thing Id been wanting to do for such a long time. Then I could not relieve myself of disappointment that I was berating myself (again) for not living up to my own expectations. A thudding and all-too-familiar troika of critique. It wasnt until the third day (or more accurately, something like the thirtieth session of meditation in thirty-six hours) that I discovered the tranquility I was hoping for, an expanse of it opening before me. Then I had to remember that hoping for it to recur would defeat the very state of nonreactive witnessing that meditation hones in us. I had to remember not to beat myself up for falling into that particularly Western, goal-oriented trap, and then to be kinder to the part of myself that isnt kind to myself. Stillness was available beneath all that spiraling self-talk once I calmed the whole system down. I dont yet get the feeling of a love affair with neutrality, but thats the idea of mindfulness as refuge: a whole plain of neutral experience thats quite rejuvenating, once we stop oscillating between elation and gloom.

The love affair that rent my marriage apart didnt precisely end my marriage. Were legally separated, have lived apart for years, but were not divorced. Grappling with that ambiguity is one endeavor of this book: what it means to be stuck, to carry on in conditions that defy category. At the same time, why does anyonewhy do Icare, as long as its working? Just the other day a neighbor asked what happens to my dog when I go on vacation, and I told an unnecessary lie (He stays with a friend ... ) because I couldnt get my mouth around ex-husbandnot because he is and Im ashamed of that, but because he isnt, and in my literal way I want the proper nomenclature. Ive had to adjust to the ongoingness of a limbo its in my power to end, except that I cant decide that I want to. And limbo, toothat liminal holding space for the spiritually unassignedis entirely the wrong term to describe a couple of atheists orbiting their failed marriage with gravitational pull. Behind the daily vacillations, the screeds against his wrongdoing I sometimes orate aloud and the defensive insistence that loving relationships can take all forms, lies a deeper motivation, to set the heartbreak of separation in the context of mindfulness. Trauma had initiated a frantic search for meaning, for restoration, but experience is never that neat. We might feel encouraged to wander more freely if we truly believed we were tough enough to handle whatever arose.