Giving up everything else for passion

Cover of Loving Frank: A Novel

I don’t read a lot of historical fiction, but I saw Loving Frank by Nancy Horan at a used book store recently and it jumped out at me because I had been drawn to the same book at the library. When I flipped through it, I discovered it is about Mamah Borthwick Cheney‘s love affair with Frank Llyod Wright. I really knew nothing before reading this novel about the famous architect’s life, and certainly not that he left his wife for another woman. Intrigued, I purchased the novel and took it home.

This novel, published in 2007, is written from Mamah’s point of view. It carefully follows what little is known about the love affair, without changing the order of all but one event. Nancy Horan apparently did very careful research into these events, even locating letters written by Mamah Borthwick Cheney to Ellen Key, a Swedish feminist philosopher very influential in Europe at the time, and drawing upon a master’s thesis by Anne Nissan on Frank Llyod Wright and Mamah.

Mamah first met Frank Llyod Wright in 1903, when she and her husband, Edwin Cheney, commissioned him to build a house for them in a suburb of Chicago. Four years later, she reconnected with him, and they began an affair.  The novel explores what may have happened between then and the tragic murder of Mamah and her two children in the summer of 1914. After about a year of meeting clandestinely, Mamah followed Frank to Germany and then Italy. They spent roughly a year in together Europe, during which time Mamah met Ellen Key and became her translator for American audiences. Mamah stayed in Europe, learning Swedish in order to translate directly from the original Swedish, while Frank Llyod Wright began building a home in the Wisconsin valley where he grew up. Mamah then moved in with him, after securing a divorce.

English: Frank Lloyd Wright home in Oak Park, Illinois. Entrance to studio, looking southeast. Italiano: La casa di Frank Lloyd Wright a Oak Park, nell’Illinois. L’entrata dello studio, guardando verso sud-est. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mamah was an early feminist, who as a young woman fought for the right to vote and to have a fulfilling job, and then insisted upon the right to love Frank, whose wife refused a divorce. Abandoning her children to follow Frank was one of the most difficult decisions Mamah ever made. She struggles with this issue throughout the novel. She also deals with the disapproval of most of the world, and very public shaming through newspaper articles about her affair with the famous architect, and struggles with him over his bad handling of finances. Her ex-husband eventually allowed her children to visit during summers and holidays, which helped ease some of her guilt.

Many people believe Mamah was the great love of Frank Llyod Wright’s life, and one of his biggest influences, despite the sparse evidence that still exists. Her tragic death, axed and then burned along with her children and several others by a crazed employee she had just fired, inspired a long letter from him to the editor, which is reproduced in the novel, and shows his strong feelings.

Despite the incredible drama inherent in this story of a very public love affair considered incredibly scandalous and its horrible ending, this novel is understated. It often drags, especially in the last third, as their lives in Wisconsin settle down into a pattern. Mamah pretty much stayed on the farm, supervising the household and avoiding the public eye. No great conflict inhabits its pages. Even the conflict with Julian Carlton, the fired servant who commits the awful murders, occupies only a few pages, as it probably did in real life. As a probable reconstruction of the life of a very brave woman who was willing to give up her social standing and her children to follow her Frank, it is very interesting, but, as a novel, not always. I found myself wondering towards the end if the author couldn’t have wandered a little more from the known or else left out some of the boring parts in order to improve the story.

Still, all in all, I enjoyed this novel. I grew up taking flute lessons next door to Grady Gammage auditorium (we called it the toilet bowl, being irreverent kids, for its shape), which was designed by Frank Llyod Wright near the end of his life, and built after his death, and have always had an unexplored curiosity about this famous man.

Spontaneous myofascial release

I experienced a minor miracle the other night, one that not only affected my body, but may change the way I work with massage clients. I am also wondering if any one out there has had a similar experience. Please share! Maybe it wasn’t as weird as I think.

You can see that way the flute is played can lead to a tilted head position after a while. This sketch is by me.

I’ve had neck issues for years. Between being stressed and tense, having a lot of curvature in my spine (think hunchback, turtle neck and swayback all at once), and playing the flute, it’s amazing that my neck is as good as it is. That said, bad posture is one reason people experience pain, so I have had pain off and on. I’ve written in previous blogs about some of the things I have done over the years to straighten my posture and calm my nervous system. It’s worked to a large extent, but I still have a lot of tightness in the soft tissues of my neck, and a compressed disk on the right side.

To help with this, lately I’ve been spending a little time when I first go to bed lying on my stomach with my head turned to the left and pressing into the pillow to stretch out the right side of my neck. I usually stay there for a minute or so. The other night, when I was doing this stretch, I started to feel some softening in my upper chest. That’s great, I’ve been getting some softening as my torso straightens.  But then it turned into a huge wave that moved into my neck, up to my jaw, back down my neck, up around my ear, and down again into the back of the right side of my neck. It felt like someone was lifting a piece of plastic wrap off of me.

If I didn’t know something about the myofascial planes in the body, and the visco-elastic nature of that tissue, I would have been alarmed. Instead, I was delighted. You see, we have sheets of connective tissue that are much like plastic wrap, in that they wrap parts of the body. And, like plastic wrap, they can become stuck to the underlying tissues. They can also form thick hard areas. But when you pull on them with the right amount of pressure, they either will become unstuck and slip, or they will soften in a wave (rather than ripping). So I was pretty sure that my fascia (connective tissue) was either softening or slipping free and moving to where it needs to be.

My neck is by no means healed, but it does seem a little better. And the wave got me thinking. What if one reason my clients have these hard trouble areas is that their sheets are stuck? What if we could pull on them just right and they would send a wave of change through their whole body? This isn’t a novel idea. There are techniques which attempt to do just that, and I’ve even studied a couple of them and experienced even more. But I’ve never experienced anything like that rush, almost like being pulled down a waterfall.

Was that a fluke? The result of my dogged pursuit over many years of better posture? Or is it something that could be transferred to my clients? Are there people who just will never improve unless something like that happens to them? A particular older man comes to mind. His torso is hard as steel and his legs are about as bad. Is this what he needs? Am I wasting my time with him unless I figure out a way to pull on his tissues like I pulled on my neck, and I hold his tissues for a long time, like I did my own? I really don’t know.

Certainly, I’ve done this stretch a bunch of times before, but this is the first time it let go like that. Why was that night the magic night? I have way more questions than answers right now. Any ideas? Know anyone who has had this kind of spontaneous (nearly) healing?

Related articles

• What is Rolfing anyway? (lumuellerkaul.com)
• Why You Should Care About Posture (kchenausky.typepad.com)
• Kinesis Myofascial Integration (en.wikipedia.org)