Composing a Life

the despairing hours long before dawn, she would dress quickly and take Cheska, the big dog, for swift ferocious walks through the darkness.
    But Alice was more than a woman who had lost her lover and her home, with no public standing from which to grieve. She was still married to the effort of those long months and still the person who had given form to Demonics, her technical knowledge and concern for an effective working team supporting Jack’s flashes of erratic brilliance. More and more, she lived at the office. Over the next year, her commitment to Jack evolved into a commitment to guide the still-struggling company, renamed Rise Technology, through the next stages of its life. Her impulse to help Jack deal with his losses through creativity changed slowly into a thoughtful questioning of the kind of leadership that would make the company a place where many creative people could do their best work.

SIX
GIVE AND TAKE

    P ART OF THE SECRET of continuing development—especially for women, who may be pressed by social expectations into childlike positions of weakness—is the discovery through a variety of relationships that social expectations can be changed and that difference can be a source of strength rather than of weakness. We grow in dialogue, not only in the rare intensity of passionate collaboration, but through a multiplicity of forms of friendship and collegiality.
    Throughout this project, I have been pursuing questions of friendship and collegiality. Each of the five of us seems to seek out relationships across difference, and yet we are all sensitive to the treatment of difference as invidious that is so common in American culture. Joan, for instance, has done much of her work in the highly hierarchical and degree-conscious world of the mental hospital, and she speaks with forgiving frustration of the slowness of doctors to recognize the complementary contributions of others to treatment, to recognize that the work artists do with patients could be as essential as that of physicians.
    “They don’t think anybody has anything unless they can put it into language. I said, art is a language, and it’s too bad that you don’t understand it. I couldn’t believe my ears. The Activities Program is absolutely sacrosanct now in its own little building at Riggs, and I don’t think anyone would touch it. They know they get patients because of it. But what baffles me is that although all this is true, you cannot get the doctors to think through what is happening there. They still want to be the successful ones—to say that it was the therapy that did it. Even though you can show that the turning point has come, say, working on a painting. I don’t know what’s going on with these MDs, but they can’t bring themselves to think seriously about it theoretically. They’ll say, yes, it’s important, and we wouldn’t be without it: but it just seems too hard for them to say that their work isn’t what’s doing it, because they work very hard and they care very much. I really believe that. I think it’s the combination of the two things that changes people, the Activities Program
and
the therapy. But it’s very hard to do what the Activities people do and get so little credit.
    “The doctors have stopped using certain kinds of language, though. It’s subtle but it’s made a mark. They don’t take on the stance of the therapist any more and just say, look what I did. So obviously, the nurses have contributed and the Activities Program too. They have some woman therapists now, and they are much more careful, and the men are learning from them. It pleased me. I spent my whole time, when I was in emergency recently, watching my doctor, who was a woman, and the other women, and seeing that the men treated them with real respect. When the women speak to you you feel like a person, and when the men speak to you, you feel like a patient, but they’re learning different. I enjoyed this. But I don’t think there’s anything you can do but muddle along the way we’re doing, writing about it and trying to get men off the high horse where they have so little air—they’re up so high there’s not enough ozone, they’re really not feeling and sensing what they should about the world. It’s not enviable.” Joan laughed and told me a story about Erik being challenged on something he wrote about “penis envy” years ago. “Did I write that?” he said. “Well, I was wrong.”
    While we seem to seek