Gawker’s Kaity Weaver calls it the most “unhinged” article
in the New York Times “Vows” section. I cannot help but agree.
For those who don’t read it—count me among them—“Vows” is
the Times version of wedding
announcements. It does not merely announce a wedding, but it celebrates the
couple’s love. It also tries to set cultural standards for good relationships.
If you’ve just eaten, this is something you want to read
later.
Weaver explains:
Over
the weekend, the New York Times "Vows"
section published a 1,765-word celebration of one couple’s love that was
so aggressively serene—so gratingly ethereal—it just may be the most irksome in
the history of the medium.
Between
its recipe for a natural abortifacient cocktail, its emphasis on the bride’s
overwhelming beauty (“she probably doesn’t have many” bad hair days, the Times observes), and its dash of
tragic manslaughter, it's certainly staggeringly bizarre.
Perhaps Weaver does not know what an abortifacient is, but
the concoction recommended by the woman’s midwife was supposed to speed up her
contractions during delivery.
Weaver is right; the Times
article is staggering, but telling. It tells us something about how the paper
wants people to see the perfect relationship. It gives you the chance to feel
badly if your relationship or marriage does not contain the spiritual
serenity as Erika Halweil and Corey De Rosa have found.
You see, Halweil and De Rosa are yoga teachers. They live
the correct yogic life, full of serenity, oblivious to the world around them. For
a paper than tends to disparage all signs of religiosity, the Times drools over
their spirituality.
For many people the therapy culture has been replaced by the
religion of yoga.
Turn now to the Times.
Doesn’t this sound like something of a human ideal:
People
describe Erika Halweil, a longtime yoga teacher in the Hamptons, as someone who
has a lot of backbone in every way. She has great posture. She rarely gets
upset over things like parking tickets or bad-hair days. (Naturally pretty, she
probably doesn’t have many.) She is sometimes stern but never shy.
The Times offers
an equally flattering description of De Rosa:
“You
always need to go a little further than you think you can in order to make
progress,” said Mr. De Rosa, who in a single conversation might discuss Hindu
deities, the connection between the knees and the ego, an energy healer he
admires, Indian spices, juice cleanses and his ideas about love (timing is
everything).
Surely, their lives have not been a bed of roses. Since Times readers definitely want to know how
they deal with trauma, the paper reports on a horrific experience.
It explains how Halweil dealt with the trauma of accidentally
running down and killing a 5 year old girl with her car:
On Aug.
17, 2008, Ms. Halweil was driving on Montauk Highway when a 5-year-old girl
rode a red toy wagon down a steep driveway and shot out onto the road in front
of Ms. Halweil’s car. When she recounts the accident (the child died and Ms.
Halweil was not charged) you can really see her calm, philosophical and open
demeanor. In an almost plaintive voice, she said: “It was clear sky, clear
road. I saw a flash of red coming toward my car.” She swerved but still hit the
wagon. “I got out of the car and this really beautiful little girl with pale
skin and blue eyes was laying in the road. Her eyes were glazed over. I knew
the spirit had left her body.”
Today,
she says the accident taught her about fate, her own and the girl’s, but at the
time she was devastated. She started taking daily classes at Tapovana and
finding comfort in Ashtanga’s rigorous, some say purifying, series of poses
that are practiced in silence. Sometimes, she stayed after class to discuss
meditation techniques or the yogic perspective on suffering with Mr. De Rosa.
He said he found her “amazingly beautiful and radiating,”
Halweil sounds as though she is drugged. She sees pale skin and blue eyes, but
she sees no blood. She can talk about vehicular manslaughter with a “calm,
philosophical and open demeanor.” Oh really, what happened to mental anguish?
Halweil talks about the little girl as though she were
talking about a doll. She has no sense of the horror of the situation. She does
not see a human body that has just been hit by a car. She has no feeling for
the pain the accident caused the child’s parents.
She says that she was devastated, but there is no sign of
it. She tried to purify her soul by taking yoga classes and talked about
suffering with De Rosa, who also had no real feeling for the loss of a child either.
Listening to Halweil express her anguish, assuming that there was some, De Rosa
found her “amazingly beautiful and radiant.”
In their world nothing makes you radiant like running down a
child. Do you think that the average individual would so easily have sloughed
off normal feelings of having participated in an act that caused a child’s
death.
Describing Halweil, De Rosa explains:
“She’s
so light and fun,” Mr. De Rosa said. “No matter what’s happening, it’s fun. And
if it’s not, it turns fun really quickly.”
Considering that the couple connected over the death of a
child, there is something jarring about this description.
As for De Rosa himself, the Times makes him into a faith
healer:
Mr. De
Rosa, who is so knowledgeable about food he can tell you what to eat to feel
more grounded, to get over a broken heart or to sleep better.
Of course, the two are perfect soul mates:
Once a
skeptic about the notion of soul mates, Mr. De Rosa said, “It was like, ‘O.K.,
this idea of true unconditional love really does exist.’ ” So, he was
asked, What is it? “It’s a combination of really loving being around each
other; perfect sexual chemistry has a lot to do with it; and openness,” he
said. “We’ve been so open about even the deepest secrets. That’s one of the
keys to really strengthening a relationship because you’re breaking barriers
and clearing blockages.”
Everybody who knows anything about human relationships knows
that it’s a bad idea to share everything. Adolescents believe in it, and they
have every right to believe in it. Adults should know better. Oversharing
causes far more pain than pleasure.
The happy couple was recently married. He wore white; she
wore a dress that she called “pigeon-blood red.”
Good to see that she has a sense of humor about blood.
6 comments:
i live on the east end of long island, i remember that accident. the driver was a young mother herself who slammed her car into a guard rail to avoid what was coming at her. the front of her car exploded. all eye witness accounts said that she avoided the child. they also confirmed that the child did not have any blood on her body. i feel for this poor woman; i am sure she did not want this included in the article.
Thank your for sharing your recollection. I trust its accuracy. I agree with you that she probably did not want the story told in the Times at the time of her wedding.
I was trying to emphasize two points: first, that her reaction was basically affectless. I accept that she did everything in her power to avoid the child and that she bears no responsibility for the accident. Still, if you are involved in such a horrific accident and are perfectly blameless you would still show some emotion over the vision of a dead child on the pavement. I do not see any in the Times account. The second point I wanted to make was that the Times has presented her reaction as a sign of her being superior, more spiritual, living in a higher more transcendent plane. Thus, it is encouraging people to admire those who arrive at such a state and who seem to be unmoved by the death of a child.
Another sign, to me, the NYT and its staff have no soul(s), and that their readers like it that way.
Too bad you had to read that story, Stuart.
Yet another example of emotional voyeurism by a culture so out of touch with real relationships that it has to read about a couple of yoga people to find its way to inner peace.
"I read it in the paper, you see... that's the way real relationships are."
Barf.
Tip
I guess some people just know how to handle horrible experiences in life just like Miss Erika Halweil handled that traumatic event in her life. We all go through hardships in life but this should not stop us from continue living and appreciating life. For some of us, it may take a lot of time before we could bounce back, but the most important thing here is, we were able to recover from those sad experiences.
EvolvingFamilies.net
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