The Divine Pulse

photo by Doug

photo by Doug

From Brian Doyle’s The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart, which I found on the coffee table:

“[The heart] begins when a fetus is three weeks old and a cluster of cells begins to pulse with the cadence of that particular person, a music and rhythm and pace that will endure a whole lifetime.  No one knows why the cluster of cells begins to pulse at that time or with that beat.”

My mom likes to tell the story of how when I was born -- the doctor thought I was a boy due to my fast heartbeat. With two bros already in the house, naturally my mom was hoping for a girl – she needed someone to help civilize the hombres, someone who could clear the Christmas Spode without breaking it, someone to inherit the trunk of Vogue dolls and their vast wardrobes.

I was born in the ‘70s in Portland, Oregon to parents who wouldn’t have painted my room pink even

if they had known my gender prior to my extraction from the womb. I say extraction because I was two weeks late (some things never change).  There were several student nurses around my mom’s room at St. Vincent’s, ostensibly to learn something about inducement of labor from a woman who had already experienced childbirth a couple times.  When I emerged, the student nurses applauded – at once heralding my arrival and prophesizing what promised to be my luminous future as an entertainer.   

My first (official) performances date back to 1980 or so, when my best friend Nicky Ferran and I staged dance recitals on her front lawn and invited the neighbors.  Our fee was small but, we felt, helped legitimize our status as local talent on the rise.  Sometimes we also handed out free slices of baloney to sweeten the deal.  Nicky’s house was wonderfully unsupervised and almost always well-stocked with junk food never found in our Chex-centric kitchen across the street.  From my beginnings on 58^th Drive, I continued on in my aspirations to entertain -- living through some humbling failures while attempting to win lead roles in various musical theater productions. My most notable defeats (don’t worry – I’m totally over them) were to Simone Swink (teacher’s pet) and Nicole Leston (a teen model – damn her! -- with no singing, dancing or acting skills, as far as I could tell), who was idealized by the rotund Ms. Dempsey, mistress of the high school drama department.  I auditioned, I was called back, I studied Seventeen Magazine with gusto, I was offered smaller parts – but ultimately I knew I wouldn’t be happy with anything less than the lead -- one of what would be innumerable manifestations of a rather polarized way of thinking (the old me, of course).

‘What does all this random Hilary trivia have to do with Tunisia?’ you might wonder.  Well, doesn’t everything have to do with everything?  Doesn’t the universe exist in a grain of sand?  I believe we established this truth in some previous installations of my travel blog so I will spare any further elucidation on that theme for now.  But actually there is a connection to Tunisia, and I’ll tell you what it is.  Lean in, now. . . One thing I’ve learned is that there’s nothing you can’t do while also smoking a cigarette – playing soccer, gardening, riding a donkey and directing traffic: all entirely possible, and probable.  But perhaps of more significance, I’ve been thinking about women and womanhood, and about men and manhood.  After five days of observing what it means to be a woman in the Arab world -- in a country where what has come to be known as the Arab Spring began, in a country with a supposedly democratically elected government that happens to be comprised of Islamic fundamentalists, -- Doug and I have been kicking around a few ideas.  We watched Ryan Gosling in “Drive” the other night, which spurred a conversation about modern Neanderthals.  Book and song titles have been catalogued.  But getting back to women. . . we’ve seen women in full coverage bathing in the azure sea (and a few in bikinis), and a distinct absence of women in any sort of public place of business – cafes and shops in the village near our beautiful guest house perched above the Mediterranean appear to be exclusively run by men, they employ men, and men are their patrons.  Granted, for all but one day we have been in this seaside summer hamlet, just over an hour north of Tunis -- the country’s capital and main urban center.  Who’s to say that downtown Tunis isn’t a hotbed of what we might consider ‘progressive’ thought and women’s liberation?  What is women’s liberation, anyway?  Ultimately we all want to belong to someone – we just want it to be someone who is worthy, someone who could honor that role and not be a douche about it.  So it doesn’t necessarily mean not being ‘possessed;’ it just means being possessed like a layer of one’s being rather than like a piece of furniture in the chamber of someone’s ego.  I think one relates to each of these types of possession differently.

 

While outrageously beautiful – and this is indeed an oasis of peace and comfort and natural beauty, largely owing to our hosts, – being in this environment has made me want to smoke cigarettes (if only I could buy them!).  I think it’s just the fact that the landscape is speckled with eight year-old boys riding donkeys and puffing away like the Marlboro man, while grown women scurry through the narrow alleyways holding shrouds around their downcast faces. I don’t mean to paint an unpleasant portrait; every Tunisian we’ve had contact with – and most of our contacts have been men -- has been remarkably friendly and helpful, despite our foreign appearance and minimal (emphasis on ‘mal’) French, and our complete lack of Arabic (although I did learn/remember how to say ‘friend’ before disembarking, first introduced to me by Mohammed, my Saudi neighbor from childhood).  It’s hard to know what to conclude, or whether to conclude anything.

 Our hosts are a German expatriate who arrived here by way of Paris about 17 years ago, and her Tunisian husband (an interpreter) and a young family from the village of Sounine who works for them (complete with an adorable five year-old boy who appears magically in the mornings with fresh bread and bats his luxuriant eyelashes like a coquette).  They have schooled us on what our outdated ‘latest editions’ of Tunisian travel guides were unable to illuminate about the political situation – these things seem to change faster than Lonely Planet or Eyewitness Travel can publish, and the truth is more nuanced than what The New York Times might detail.  It seems to be a common theme that countries where basic freedom is denied have a long messy transition toward understanding how to handle it, and how to keep it from simply falling into the hands of the greediest and most power hungry.  They are distraught about the state of things -- the general state of disarray, the rise of the fundamentalists, the lack of functional infrastructure, even for things like trash collection and electricity.  Of course history reminds us that this land has changed hands innumerable times throughout history and will probably continue to exist in a state of relative flux for some time, given its location and the various factors at play.

Getting back to Brian Doyle and the wet engine that keeps the story going: each of us is worth about two billion pulses, more or less – Muslims, Christians, Jew-Bus (JEW-boos), Atheists, saints and sinners alike -- smoking Marlboros, entertaining the masses or kneeling down before the almighty.  Like the plumbing of the heart, our lives curve and spool and wrap around a million corners, carrying nourishment to various organs along the way.  We’re not sure why it begins and ends and carries on with its particular rhythm – but it’s worth the trip.