The wisdom of donkeys

This is the first guest post on this blog, by my actual, not so mystical, wife. May this be way to a blog of her own someday.

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My husband and I met on the internet.

"From rural France," his dating profile boldly declared. I messaged him first and started rambling on about 'Au Hasard Balthazar', which I watched when I was 13 after I read 'The Wisdom of Donkeys'. (It was the best thing I could think of that could be connected to rural France; all the other literature I had been exposed to was overwhelmingly centered on Paris.) A 1966 film shot in black and white, it follows the tragic life of a donkey named Balthazar and the young girl Marie who pities him with affection. It's an extremely profound exploration of the pitfalls of human nature through the utterly ordinary lives of country folk. Having watched it at a young age when I was just beginning to explore cinema, it left a deep mark on me. Bresson's film is widely considered one of the greatest films of all time (says wiki, not just me).

He messaged back immediately and told me that he's never heard of it.

My first real fight with my husband happened when we were just two months into dating. If I want to be literal, it was about notebooks. But if I want to I get to the heart of things, it was about art.

I've always kept notebooks, and I definitely romanticize them. I think it has a lot to do with what I would call a rather lonely childhood – no siblings, both parents working so a lot of after school ‘programs’ where kids ran around guzzling junk food. Not much in the way of family 'activities' either – my mom was on the phone a lot with her friends, my dad definitely was not a talker. We watched a lot of documentaries and took frequent trips to the bookstore. I experienced a moderate amount of school bullying, went through periods where books were my only friends. I hid in my English teacher's classroom at lunch, nose buried in a book.

As I grew up, I grew out of not having friends, but I didn't grow out of loneliness. My notebooks carried the remnants of spirited adventures and dear conversations I'd had with friends who moved away; jottings of how I felt about writers who bared their souls in letters and essays and poems; things I'd like to say to the people I don't agree with, but don't manage to say aloud.

I never questioned my notebooks. I wasn't a writer, but I think I secretly liked that my notebooks lent me the air of being at least a writerly non-writer.

One day, I was in a good mood after work and wanted to show Nicolas something I had jotted down. It was a harmless passage, probably some thoughtless mix of stream of consciousness and a text I had read and an idea that related to one of our previous discussions on education. I passed him the notebook to read while I prepped dinner. It was the hulking black A4 Leuchttuurm I had been working on at the time in dense minuscule script, one that he'd glanced through before with modest amusement.

"This is... what is this supposed to be, exactly? It doesn't make much sense."

"Well, it's just a thought. A feeling on the moment, that I wanted to capture. I could expand on it, of course. I thought you might be able to relate."

"It turns out after all that you have some pretty ordinary thoughts. Nothing extraordinary or profound. So it doesn't make sense to me why you spend so much time writing them down."

"Yes, I am quite ordinary. I mean, we all have meaningless things we do that no one cares about, right?"

Heated words were thrown around after that. He became, in my view, rather belligerent, going on about "moral significance" and calling my regular time spent on notebooks to be "aggressively pretentious". Instead of writing it off as just him having had a long day at work, I leaned into the argument and tried to defend what exactly this 'non-writing writing' meant to me as a therapeutic, harmless practice.

And then he said, "I wonder if your notebooks are really doing much good for your mental health."

The rest of our long, drawn out dinner was eaten in silence. We were exhausted and more or less dropped it for the night, but that didn't stop me from mulling it over in my head, and even jotting down what had been said while he was in the shower.

I felt thoroughly confused. We were in our honeymoon phase at this time, and I had felt so close to him. I thought I could show him anything. The worst response I'd gotten out of past boyfriends with respect to my notebooks was a dismissive "that's boring". I wasn't prepared at all for this.

I also felt that this was an important fight, a crossroads. Would I be able to live with someone who regularly emitted such harsh critique, of himself and equally of others? Here was someone who woke up every day and faced the creative struggle with immense bravery. He couldn't afford to look in the rearview mirror all the time, or to be constantly perusing his bad early drafts with affection.

I, on the other hand, hid from making art. I scribbled ten minutes of nonsense before bed each night and considered it my due. I signed myself up for grueling exams that may or may not further a career I positively detested (finance) instead of working at something I could genuinely be proud of.

Two days after this fight, we met at a bench in Yerba Buena Gardens before the start of our movie date that night. He apologized, and I did too.

Today, we have two little tots who stumble around constantly reminding us of what living an ordinary feels like. The overflowing poopy diaper trash that needs to be taken out. The primal scream and whining that arises from the brothers refusing to share a toy fire truck in the middle of an unfinished meal. The lego that remains unbuilt because we ran out of time before we had to rush to make dinner, or else the kids won't nap the next day, again. All of it like clockwork.

And in the right moment, all of it feels like art. In my notebooks, at least.

The hope is that someday, when we manage to find the time, we'll sit down and watch 'Au Hausard Balthazar' together. And he will probably doze off, bored by the lack of explosions and dialogue and (god forbid) color, eye-rolling at all the excessive weeping.

And then I'll turn to him and say, "See? What you've been missing this whole time?"