When I was Mormon and very much serious about trying to believe, which, as I look back on it, was a youthful philosophical stance that hoped to make sense of the world without actually having to pick through its thornbushes, wade upstream, or sleep on its stony ground, I suffered a persistent itch about the Lord's Supper, which we called the sacrament. Every Sunday we met as a congregation, which we called a ward, and took the sacrament like this: after an opening hymn and a prayer and the reading of "ward business", mostly announcements about upcoming events, we would sing another hymn while two boys about 16 years old tore slices of bread into small bits and piled them in chromed serving trays. At the end of that hymn, one of them would kneel down and read a set prayer into a handheld microphone, blessing the bread, making it holy in remembrance of the Son. Then the tray was passed around by a troop of younger boys, all in white shirts and ties. The same was then done with hundreds of tiny waxed-paper cups of water, one for each of us.
Most readers know that Jesus, whom we called Christ, broke bread and passed a cup of wine at his last supper with his disciples. We Mormons used water because we had additional commandments forbidding alcohol, and we understood, as we were taught, that any liquid would work in a pinch, if water wasn't available. Not wine, of course, but apple juice, for example, would make an acceptable substitute for tap water.
By extension, if not by explicit teaching, I understood that other solid foods could substitute for bread. I once asked a teacher, I was maybe 17, if breaded fried chicken would be OK in place of bread, but he didn't really answer. Instead, he admonished me to be more reverent. Anyway, I pictured standing up in front of the ward breaking peanut-butter sandwiches and trying to keep a straight face, or serving Coke, caffeine-free, of course, while contemplating the gravity of His sacrifice. I tried to banish these thoughts, which were so obviously unworthy.
But one itch remained, that I remember bothering me every Sunday: if any deviation from the orthodoxy of bread and water required some justification in never-described emergency, or food shortage, or extremity of circumstance, then why didn't we use bread like what Jesus Himself served to his disciples? Why had the orthodoxy settled on Wonder Bread? As these things usually happen, there was never any kind of official proclamation from the Brethren specifying Wonder Bread. It just came to be that way. And, true, some other brands of extremely soft American-style white sandwich bread did occasionally make it into the sacrament. But the families entrusted with providing the bread each week almost never brought anything but Wonder. Wonder was the sine qua non of sacramental bread, and to show up with anything else, I discovered, was to disrupt the pivotal holy moment of our life as a ward.
My family [always on the fringes of the ward: we were recent converts, my parents were educated, we never really did things the expected way] received the assignment one week to provide the bread. In our typical chaotic Sunday-morning scramble we realized we hadn't thought about the bread all week, so my father grabbed a frozen loaf of whole-wheat from the freezer and we rushed to the car. I suddenly fell into an adolescent terror. This frozen, brown, lumpy loaf, with its hippie artwork on the label and its several coarse grains, was not right. It would call attention to me, link me to my family's unorthodoxy, embarrass me in front of my friends, and disrupt the sacrament. My sister, just younger and far more shamed by the family even than I, suggested that we stop at a store and get "the right kind" of bread. My mother got agitated and pointed out that we were already late. When we got to the chapel, my sister, who had been hugging the loaf, maybe trying to at least thaw it, tried to hand it to me, but I wouldn't take it. I was so overcome by a kind of aversion, a mixture of shame and maybe even contempt for my family, that I turned around and walked down the sidewalk. My mother called something angry after me, but I kept going. Once around the corner of the building I sped up, and got away. I don't remember how I spent the next hour, but it was the first time I had willingly skipped a sacrament meeting. I just couldn't go in. I do remember considering walking home, but even my taste for drama wouldn't have sufficed: we lived several miles away, and it was well over 100 degrees in Tucson that day.
As I remember, I spent the time thinking about bread, and about how it could mean so much even before it was prayed-over. I thought of bread as a social symbol, and became aware, maybe for the first time, of the strangeness of the socio-economic trajectory of the coarseness of bread in America: how only the rich could afford white bread until industrial milling made it widely available, and how the relatively affluent and educated had chosen to return to the coarse whole-grain breads that their parents had happily foresworn. I certainly considered where this put me in the ward. Among all these lifelong Mormons, almost all of them from old Arizona pioneer families -a pragmatic, uneducated, unquestioning people- my family stood out for our education, our questing and questioning attitude, our New England roots, our fast-talking opinions, my mother's disdain for grooming, my father's sideburns. Eventually, I told myself that probably nobody would think about the unorthodox bread after sacrament meeting ended, and that it surely mattered more to me than to any of my friends. So I went back inside after an hour and slid into my chair in Sunday School, with all the other kids my age.
As it turns out, nobody ever brought it up. In my aloofness and severity, I had made myself unavailable for ribbing, anyhow, and I think now that the other kids had probably forgotten about the strange bread right away. But long after that hour of acute adolescent shame I kept thinking about how bread can mean something, many things; how full of import it can be; and how thoughtlessly we usually eat it. Years later, long after I had left the Mormon church for good, I made bread one day and served it to my kids. It was still hot, and we ate it with Irish butter and chokecherry jam, which I had also made that morning. The pleasure we felt completely united us for a moment. The kids set aside their Sunday morning squabbles and just focused on the pleasure of eating, and I thought: this is how we make simple bread holy: we set aside time to make it, we lean into it, we sit down together and eat it, and for a moment we are all completely in out bodies, full for now.
Now I see it like this: there are two ways to sanctify a thing. You can set any old thing, without regard for its origins or qualities, in front of you, and pray over it, thus transforming it into something sacred. This is what the Mormons [and Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol] did. Or you can find the finest components, from the best sources, with great ethical and aesthetic care, and apply effort and craft and then serve it with excitement and anticipation, and holiness will rise from it like steam.
I may be taking this too far, but I suspect that what separates these two ways is an attitude toward the world. The way of prayer is focused on an idea of perfection, and on the transformation required to achieve the ideal. The way of making is focused on the senses per se, and places its faith in the holiness of what is, right here, right now.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Sunday, July 18, 2010
A Letter to Blake About Killing, Desire, and Craft
Please do not agree with the following. Please push back because in this push and pull is lively awareness of each other as others, as separate beings not owned, not fully domesticated, not too cultivated and not too wild to argue. I will make an ethical argument, and I am in love with your willingness to see it differently and to disagree with conviction. Your conviction is passionate, and comes from experience in the world. It is grown in rocky ground, sun-scorched, and wind-bent, so different from callow and ingenuous opinion that I want to know you as you, and to argue 'til one of us dies. And if one of us ever comes to agree with the other on the following topic, let it be from experience, not from acquiescence or bullying, and let us continue arguing about everything else, orbiting around each other's positions and raising tides.
Let me start with an illustration: I find a piece of twisted, sun-bleached and silver juniper on the ground, and take it home because it is beautiful. It is part of nature, not crafted. It has never been mulled over, converted to any use, altered for any purpose, because nature has no intentions or preferences or needs. I take it home because it will be interesting in juxtaposition to something crafted, maybe as it sits on a bookshelf or by the front door, there to be seen in a fresh context, moved there by human hands and will. Maybe I'll put it next to the incense box I made out of boards from that apricot tree I cut down. The juniper, uncrafted, gains something from being next to the box.
The box is two things in tension: an idea and a material. The idea came from my mind, in which right angles, flat planes, and seamless joints exist in a kind of mathematical-spiritual perfection. The material has no ideas, just its own strength and structure, which, from my perspective, is resistance to geometry. As a craftsman, I can alter the wood to approximate my idea, but the wood pushes back, and no matter how much I fuss with it and force it, it will always exert its own strength. As a more or less wise and thoughtful and skilled craftsman, I know that I need to stop working at some point, and live with the imperfections. The imperfections show my limits of skill, patience, and strength. They show the wood being the only thing it can be. The box ends up containing what is probably best described neither as perfection nor as incompleteness, but as erotic tension. This is what I meant when I wrote that bit about two bodies in orbit, raising tides. The box is not at all static and resolved. It's not a safe thing at all, because it shows eyes and hands that no amount of intention will ever make even a scrap of wood conform to our ideals.
Another example: the apple tree in Rachel's orchard was neglected for years, and had become wild, all water-sprouts and canker and rank ingrowth. It was producing some good apples, but your brother thought it should be cut down to make way for a younger, more productive tree. Instead, I pruned in rather severely, taking off all the sprouts, removing the crossing branches, and painting over the bare wood. This year it looks like it will produce a thousand pounds of apples. It's healthier than it was. Its wild state, which Nathanael seemed to prefer for vague aesthetic and Romantic notions, was neither useful to us, as people, nor good for the tree, out there in full sun in the orchard. It was growing rampant because it was out of its natural element, so it needed human management. But what my pruning did was set up tension between the natural, wild state of the tree and my idea of what the tree should be. My idea is too simple for a real, live, organic orchard, and the reality of the untamed tree is too wild and intractable for our needs and plans, so we have settled into an uneasy and unsettled dynamic orbit, always pulling away from the useful center, raising tides. Seen this way, pruning a tree is an erotic act, and the result is a tree that contains the same lively fascination we can see and feel in the box, at least for now. It's never done.
You are a devout Buddhist. Every day you wrestle with your harmlessness, which you swore to, and which is an impossible ideal. You can't even take a step without killing a sentient being, but you can hold harmlessness in your mind and maintain the flawless purity of your intentions. Then one night a skunk breaks into the coop and kills two chicks, and the neighbor offers to shoot it. Your vows require you to let the skunk go, and to examine your complicity in his killing. You had left the door open. That's how he got in. Regardless of your complicity, even if he had broken in despite your best efforts to keep him out, you would not shoot him.
I have been in Buddhism's orbit for a few years now, at once fascinated by its promise and not quite convinced by its insistence on harmlessness per se. I insist on always deferring harm from being to being, and insist that at some point I must act, and that the ethical imperative is to act as thoughtfully and lightly as possible. I hold open the possibility that the least harmful act may involve killing. If we can keep the skunks out of the coop, then by all means let's do that. If it works, we are free of the burden of further contemplation and action. If it doesn't work, if that skunk and others keep getting in and keep killing and eating eggs and harming our charges, then maybe the best, least-harmful option is to kill the skunks. Their bodies buried around the fence can deter future invaders, your chickens will be spared, the restaurant will have more of those excellent eggs, the dogs will not get sprayed so often... I trust in the ability of my mind to come close to ascertaining the path of least harm, and in the cleanness of conscience that such well-contemplated action allows. I want to avoid hubris, which tends to barge down the path of least resistance: it is easier to shoot a skunk than to complete all the carpentry jobs that would secure the hen-house, but I believe my stewardship requires that I do the repairs and shoot the skunk only when I think killing will be more harmless than not killing. I have to remain open to new insight that may inform my decisions [and, indeed, my ethical system per se], and I need to stay awake to the boundary between what's wild and what's ideal. We live in this margin, in a zone of artifice in which both wildness and the ideal are terrible places. Wildness feels no compunction, and the ideal brooks no contemplation, revision, or repentance.
So, can you live in the orbit of a man who kills? Can my continual, tortured puzzling over the best way forward exist alongside your absolute vow of harmlessness? I say, emphatically, yes! These two positions can't be rectified, but they can inform each other, keep each other in check, and keep our otherness alive and passionate. I hope I never absorb you or become absorbed by you. Complete agreement, when two become one, is the end of desire, and without desire there can be no real conversation, no tidal surges of longing.
"The lover wants what he does not have... All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its motive energies. Who ever desires what is not gone? No one."
-Ann Carson
Let me start with an illustration: I find a piece of twisted, sun-bleached and silver juniper on the ground, and take it home because it is beautiful. It is part of nature, not crafted. It has never been mulled over, converted to any use, altered for any purpose, because nature has no intentions or preferences or needs. I take it home because it will be interesting in juxtaposition to something crafted, maybe as it sits on a bookshelf or by the front door, there to be seen in a fresh context, moved there by human hands and will. Maybe I'll put it next to the incense box I made out of boards from that apricot tree I cut down. The juniper, uncrafted, gains something from being next to the box.
The box is two things in tension: an idea and a material. The idea came from my mind, in which right angles, flat planes, and seamless joints exist in a kind of mathematical-spiritual perfection. The material has no ideas, just its own strength and structure, which, from my perspective, is resistance to geometry. As a craftsman, I can alter the wood to approximate my idea, but the wood pushes back, and no matter how much I fuss with it and force it, it will always exert its own strength. As a more or less wise and thoughtful and skilled craftsman, I know that I need to stop working at some point, and live with the imperfections. The imperfections show my limits of skill, patience, and strength. They show the wood being the only thing it can be. The box ends up containing what is probably best described neither as perfection nor as incompleteness, but as erotic tension. This is what I meant when I wrote that bit about two bodies in orbit, raising tides. The box is not at all static and resolved. It's not a safe thing at all, because it shows eyes and hands that no amount of intention will ever make even a scrap of wood conform to our ideals.
Another example: the apple tree in Rachel's orchard was neglected for years, and had become wild, all water-sprouts and canker and rank ingrowth. It was producing some good apples, but your brother thought it should be cut down to make way for a younger, more productive tree. Instead, I pruned in rather severely, taking off all the sprouts, removing the crossing branches, and painting over the bare wood. This year it looks like it will produce a thousand pounds of apples. It's healthier than it was. Its wild state, which Nathanael seemed to prefer for vague aesthetic and Romantic notions, was neither useful to us, as people, nor good for the tree, out there in full sun in the orchard. It was growing rampant because it was out of its natural element, so it needed human management. But what my pruning did was set up tension between the natural, wild state of the tree and my idea of what the tree should be. My idea is too simple for a real, live, organic orchard, and the reality of the untamed tree is too wild and intractable for our needs and plans, so we have settled into an uneasy and unsettled dynamic orbit, always pulling away from the useful center, raising tides. Seen this way, pruning a tree is an erotic act, and the result is a tree that contains the same lively fascination we can see and feel in the box, at least for now. It's never done.
You are a devout Buddhist. Every day you wrestle with your harmlessness, which you swore to, and which is an impossible ideal. You can't even take a step without killing a sentient being, but you can hold harmlessness in your mind and maintain the flawless purity of your intentions. Then one night a skunk breaks into the coop and kills two chicks, and the neighbor offers to shoot it. Your vows require you to let the skunk go, and to examine your complicity in his killing. You had left the door open. That's how he got in. Regardless of your complicity, even if he had broken in despite your best efforts to keep him out, you would not shoot him.
I have been in Buddhism's orbit for a few years now, at once fascinated by its promise and not quite convinced by its insistence on harmlessness per se. I insist on always deferring harm from being to being, and insist that at some point I must act, and that the ethical imperative is to act as thoughtfully and lightly as possible. I hold open the possibility that the least harmful act may involve killing. If we can keep the skunks out of the coop, then by all means let's do that. If it works, we are free of the burden of further contemplation and action. If it doesn't work, if that skunk and others keep getting in and keep killing and eating eggs and harming our charges, then maybe the best, least-harmful option is to kill the skunks. Their bodies buried around the fence can deter future invaders, your chickens will be spared, the restaurant will have more of those excellent eggs, the dogs will not get sprayed so often... I trust in the ability of my mind to come close to ascertaining the path of least harm, and in the cleanness of conscience that such well-contemplated action allows. I want to avoid hubris, which tends to barge down the path of least resistance: it is easier to shoot a skunk than to complete all the carpentry jobs that would secure the hen-house, but I believe my stewardship requires that I do the repairs and shoot the skunk only when I think killing will be more harmless than not killing. I have to remain open to new insight that may inform my decisions [and, indeed, my ethical system per se], and I need to stay awake to the boundary between what's wild and what's ideal. We live in this margin, in a zone of artifice in which both wildness and the ideal are terrible places. Wildness feels no compunction, and the ideal brooks no contemplation, revision, or repentance.
So, can you live in the orbit of a man who kills? Can my continual, tortured puzzling over the best way forward exist alongside your absolute vow of harmlessness? I say, emphatically, yes! These two positions can't be rectified, but they can inform each other, keep each other in check, and keep our otherness alive and passionate. I hope I never absorb you or become absorbed by you. Complete agreement, when two become one, is the end of desire, and without desire there can be no real conversation, no tidal surges of longing.
"The lover wants what he does not have... All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its motive energies. Who ever desires what is not gone? No one."
-Ann Carson
Friday, July 16, 2010
Zoon Logon Ekhon Rockon: Why You're Not Your Parents Though You Can Make Yourself More or Less Understood By Them
I think your language-acquisition comparison is probably spot on, because we pick up identity pretty much DESPITE our sweet selves. I mean: you worked pretty hard to become the ostensible you, but you have to maintain a GRIP not to slide into your Ma's political taxonomy, even while you maintain your intellectual distance. Just like Chomsky/Pinker linguistics: we are born with slots in our brains [figurative slots, I hope] for verbs, nouns, adjectives, even ADVERBS, and then we spend our lives filling the slots. But if you fill them one way when you're young it's pretty hard to go back and fill them up a new way when you're old. Our linguistic identity is pretty much coagulated by our early 20s, but our political identity tends to thicken later. Language binds us to our parents, and politics separates us. Good Lord it hurts to sit at your parents' table and disagree with their politics. It feels like they're questioning your very independent being. Politics can be ontological.
This last year and a half with my parents here a couple of times per week I learned that actually our politics aren't really terribly different, but our REASONS for believing what we believe show our time in American history. Maybe the deepest vein of that history is what appears to be the inevitable expansion of categories protected by legal rights: first it was the king, then it was the royals, then it was white men, then men, then smart cooperative grownups. Now gays and illegals, in some states. Even animals are afforded some protection. And corporations. It's a slippery slope, brah, and your identity is on it. How could you NOT be different from your parents with all this slip-sliding liberalizing going on?
This last year and a half with my parents here a couple of times per week I learned that actually our politics aren't really terribly different, but our REASONS for believing what we believe show our time in American history. Maybe the deepest vein of that history is what appears to be the inevitable expansion of categories protected by legal rights: first it was the king, then it was the royals, then it was white men, then men, then smart cooperative grownups. Now gays and illegals, in some states. Even animals are afforded some protection. And corporations. It's a slippery slope, brah, and your identity is on it. How could you NOT be different from your parents with all this slip-sliding liberalizing going on?
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Goin' Down to Tennessee
"His parents try to freeze his identity and to erect a wall around it."
Going down for a few days to see the old folks. In twelve hours I'll be sipping grave scotch at the knobbly elbow of me Da. I want to return to this conversation when I get back. But it makes me think of my mother's response last time we talked about the War, or whatever it is. She said, roughly, But Sweetie, you're young, urban and educated: people like you oppose every war. Well, when you put it like it does sound pretty bad. I assumed I'd been insulted but wasn't quick enough to see how. Not insulted, exhorted: she comes from a Southern military family, and she is genuinely concerned for me and for the country, should the nation's prime specimens of manhood (such as we are) choose not to fight for worthwhile causes and should word of our moral passivity get out to those who prey on the weak and passive. I can sort of think my way back into that way of seeing it; the undertow is still convincing enough to keep me near my waterwings, gotta say. The continental shelf--beyond which all that cold murk rises with near-natural fury-- is culture. What I mean is that she's not wrong, as much as it galls me, to point out my sad demographic tendencies: our opinions about the war are not just opinions: mine are connected to a certain way of walking that I learned to do in order to look up at tall buildings and cross the street in traffic.
She was the one who raised me to be compassionate, feminist, New Testiment-quoting and a reader, who encourage my curiosity and my writing, most of the stuff that led me very naturally to where I am now. Somehow she can't see the connections, Lord love her. Somehow, although she has no use for this compliment, it was her mystagoguery that brought me here.
The connection you make to theatre, role-playing, a phase for the young, seems really important, and I hadn't seen it. So, yeah: line dancing stock brokers, suburban kids posting Facebook photos of themselves flashing gang signs, Martha Stewart's multifarious adhesive-sniffing minions, some marching band kid tightening his scrotum to walk into school wearing his first Mötley Crüe concert t, and my buddy Garth learning Sanskrit so he can study Buddhism, all these fine Americans are somewhere in the same conversation. Interesting how strict the social taboos are against that sort of behavior, too. Who t'feck you thank you are, boy? That suspicion must be there for good evolutionary reasons, which I suspect the species has now largely outgrown. I think it has to do with the sort of social regulation you're describing below.
And yet people who manage to be cool or natural (or, like, educated) or who succeed in becoming themselves, somehow do it by disregarding the taboos and pretending with conviction. Maybe the acquisition of a social and cultural gestures isn't much different than the acquisition of language. 'Love' and 'justice' exist no more than jazz rhythms or Chanel's boyish lines until you learn them and move to them, use them in a sentence. And soon your brain and your body don't remember who they were before they learned that gesture. Our growth is, quite precisely, organic.
I'm going to take The Hidden Wound with, and do some rereading. Barely remember it.
Going down for a few days to see the old folks. In twelve hours I'll be sipping grave scotch at the knobbly elbow of me Da. I want to return to this conversation when I get back. But it makes me think of my mother's response last time we talked about the War, or whatever it is. She said, roughly, But Sweetie, you're young, urban and educated: people like you oppose every war. Well, when you put it like it does sound pretty bad. I assumed I'd been insulted but wasn't quick enough to see how. Not insulted, exhorted: she comes from a Southern military family, and she is genuinely concerned for me and for the country, should the nation's prime specimens of manhood (such as we are) choose not to fight for worthwhile causes and should word of our moral passivity get out to those who prey on the weak and passive. I can sort of think my way back into that way of seeing it; the undertow is still convincing enough to keep me near my waterwings, gotta say. The continental shelf--beyond which all that cold murk rises with near-natural fury-- is culture. What I mean is that she's not wrong, as much as it galls me, to point out my sad demographic tendencies: our opinions about the war are not just opinions: mine are connected to a certain way of walking that I learned to do in order to look up at tall buildings and cross the street in traffic.
She was the one who raised me to be compassionate, feminist, New Testiment-quoting and a reader, who encourage my curiosity and my writing, most of the stuff that led me very naturally to where I am now. Somehow she can't see the connections, Lord love her. Somehow, although she has no use for this compliment, it was her mystagoguery that brought me here.
The connection you make to theatre, role-playing, a phase for the young, seems really important, and I hadn't seen it. So, yeah: line dancing stock brokers, suburban kids posting Facebook photos of themselves flashing gang signs, Martha Stewart's multifarious adhesive-sniffing minions, some marching band kid tightening his scrotum to walk into school wearing his first Mötley Crüe concert t, and my buddy Garth learning Sanskrit so he can study Buddhism, all these fine Americans are somewhere in the same conversation. Interesting how strict the social taboos are against that sort of behavior, too. Who t'feck you thank you are, boy? That suspicion must be there for good evolutionary reasons, which I suspect the species has now largely outgrown. I think it has to do with the sort of social regulation you're describing below.
And yet people who manage to be cool or natural (or, like, educated) or who succeed in becoming themselves, somehow do it by disregarding the taboos and pretending with conviction. Maybe the acquisition of a social and cultural gestures isn't much different than the acquisition of language. 'Love' and 'justice' exist no more than jazz rhythms or Chanel's boyish lines until you learn them and move to them, use them in a sentence. And soon your brain and your body don't remember who they were before they learned that gesture. Our growth is, quite precisely, organic.
I'm going to take The Hidden Wound with, and do some rereading. Barely remember it.
Two Book Ideas for Your Ruthless Exfoliation
1. In which I masquerade as a journalist trying to reconstruct the events leading up to the deployment of a mysterious superweapon that harnesses the force of intention, once thought to be merely human will, but discovered by physicists to be an actual, measurable force. Loosely based on the Sappho fragments.
2. A multi-media book, essays and painting mostly, about food and shelter seen as the concerns that make us most human. Lays out a continuum of experience, from, say, food as commodity to food as sacrament, or mass housing to "dwelling" a la Eliade and Heidegger. Should be considerably more entertaining than this blurb suggests, and will make no overt reference to Heidegger at all.
2. A multi-media book, essays and painting mostly, about food and shelter seen as the concerns that make us most human. Lays out a continuum of experience, from, say, food as commodity to food as sacrament, or mass housing to "dwelling" a la Eliade and Heidegger. Should be considerably more entertaining than this blurb suggests, and will make no overt reference to Heidegger at all.
High-Low in American Identity
This takes me to Wendell Berry's The Hidden Wound, his painful and honest reversal of his earlier "avoidance" of writing about black people. Over and over Berry ends up talking about the division between ownership and labor, and he uses the same words you have to explain, with some surprise, that this division is actually liminal, not a wall, but a threshold between rooms of experience. You and he make the point that crossing this threshhold involves identity, and identity is social -"to do as much with acquired culture as with received culture" -so it requires transgression. I think you open a door on, at very least, current American politics here: social transgression elicits generally predictable responses: "high" people experience disdain and fear when the "low" try to pass, and the "low" experience contempt and bitterness when the "high" try to pass. In response, we learn to hide our transgressive interests and behaviors in attempted naturalness, and in hiding we put on a disguise, and we become adept at trying on and even parading the others' clothes. This way Americans bring much of the theater into our public personae: the costume, the behavior [first caricatured and stereotyped, eventually maybe so adept that we can 'pass'], even the inhabiting of a character so fully that we, in fact, change. This can be cruel theater, as in minstrelsy and blackface, it can be a phase or a game for the young, and I think it can also be an act of earnest reaching out and understanding. However well done, this role-playing tends to support some amount of empathy, of compassion, or maybe democratic sentiment. It's not often done aggressively. Usually some envy or social craving or desire is involved, making the transgression poignant and loaded. This is how we Americans operate in social settings of any diversity whatsoever: we play a role for the present audience. My speech changes radically from meeting to meeting: my rich Mormon clients hear one V, my carpenters hear another, my banker hears another, and my dinner guests hear another. I'm not sure there's a "real V" anywhere "in here", except what I can identify as the me who changes from place to place, wearing whatever clothes fit the company, no matter how poorly they fit. Maybe we are more like Antoinette slumming with the milkmaids in the Trianon than Ruskin struggling to understand the Cornish farmers and refusing their offers of beer. Berry has a section in The Hidden Wound that shows a white child moving freely between black and white worlds on his father's plantation. A year later the child's sexuality suddenly buds, and immediately his white family remove him from contact with the slaves, and begin to coach him on "who he is", and on "putting away childish things". He is coerced into a set of distinctions he would not have made otherwise. His parents try to freeze his identity and to erect a wall around it.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Some Stuff I've Been Reading: The Build-your-own-America Kit Redux
When I go back to Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes now, looking for a brief sentence that sums up the book, I realize how much I’ve invented my own version. Or maybe I have a clearer idea of what the book is about than Marcus could have. He only wrote it. The book centers around Bob Dylan and The Band and the extraordinarily jumble of tunes and fragments they recorded at an ad hoc studio in Woodstock, New York, during the summer and fall of 1967. Marcus attempts a sort of excavation of the images in the songs—the murder ballads and flood laments, twisted novelty songs and stomped-through blues standards— to figure out where Dylan might have come across them and what they might say about the way that Dylan was thinking about America at that moment.
But what comes out of a reading of the book is the sense that one could build one’s own America. That America is not merely something given at birth but something that changes over one’s lifetime and to which one might contribute. Or more than that, in Marcus’s chapter on Harry Smith’s construction of The Anthology of American Folk Music you get the sense that you could assemble your own America out of the hundred possible versions and all the spare parts, that the American past is a vast sourcebook of images, sounds, ideas, events and decisions, any of which might be an important clue about how to live. I was used to the idea that there is a black America and a white America, a rich America and poor America, red and blue, urban and rural, East and South and West.
But what Marcus shows is that Harry Smith assembled his six disc anthology in such a way as to rework those categories. Smith presents the American past as an odd and uncomfortable jumble of images, black and white performers presented side by side, unified not by race or class but by the basic occasions and themes of American life. He calls the three sets of tracks (two discs for each) “Ballads”, “Social Music”, and “Songs”. Smith’s anthology privileges the grotesque and the tendencies towards tall tales in American music, and invites you to think not about ethnicity or even genre but about ways of inhabiting the American imagination. I would have denied that there might be such a thing as an American imagination before reading Invisible Republic and then going back and spending several months with the Harry Smith anthology. Now “the American imagination” seems to me a useful and optimistic phrase. Of course one can, and should, go beyond national boundaries in exploring and constructing one’s world. But for most of us, the things that have formed our assumptions, desires and sensibilities are American, and so the American past is as much a sort of cultural genetic record as it is a warehouse of spare parts.
But the phrase “American imagination” seems optimistic for a couple of reasons that have to do with much of the rest of my reading of the last year. One has to do with something that Ralph Ellison says in his 1970 essay, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks”. “Despite his racial difference and social status, something indisputably American about Negroes not only raised doubts about the white man's value system but aroused the troubling suspicion that whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black… Without the presence of Negro American style, our jokes, our tall tales, even our sports would be lacking in the sudden turns, the shocks, the swift changes of pace.” This seems true to me. I know that my gait can be distinguished from an Englishman’s at 100 yards: I’ve had it done. I resented it in my Anglophile youth. Then for many years my loose-hipped American stride just seemed a flat fact, like the fact of the slight twist in my spine. It now seems to suggest the openness of human nature.
That is, America really is a mishmash of ethnicities and regional peculiarities. Salad bowl seems not quite right: burrito, maybe. But it also seems true in my experience that, although we may not be converging towards a single ethnicity, Americans mostly share certain elements of a recognizable national sensibility. If we are all, despite our other differences, “also somehow black,” then there must be something about our literature, music and political process that actually shapes us. The working definition of ‘identity’ in America must have to do as much with acquired culture as with received culture. We can work our way towards each other, or towards a fuller version of ourselves, by working with the sourcebook of the American tradition.
Here’s why this matters to me. The circumstances of my childhood presented me—maybe this is true of most of us?—with a number of seemingly unbreachable barriers between myself and the people and traditions around me. I was raised during formative years by a middle class and relatively lettered family in poor, rural Tennessee town called Copperhill. My father was a white collar worker in a mining concern that essentially was the local economy and that almost entirely imported its management from the world outside of Appalachia. Further, this mining concern had a history of union/management conflict that went back nearly a hundred years. Even before that the people who worked in the mines, often at great personal risk and physical expense, were locals; the people who directed the mining and grew wealthy from it were, from the earliest days of industrial production, outsiders. The outside world, for all its promise and importance, was deeply suspect. I was raised up on the weird doubleness of a culture that at once sorts people into definite categories and sends them to the same schools, that at once prizes and disdains wealth and culture. And although it’s not as if I had that much of either, in the context of a town in which many children’s parents were on welfare and functionally illiterate, the marks of relative wealth and culture were ubiquitous in me like a sort of ostentatious over-grooming. My speech, dress, bearing, sense of the seemly and unseemly, sense of the importance of seemliness—all this betrayed me as a foreigner with every gesture.
My response to this was to wear my foreignness with as much defiance and panache as I could muster. And as I reflect on this now, the two—defiance and panache—are very much at odds. I’m sure no one was fooled. At any rate, I played up my odd, invented foreignness, and it suited me in a way. I went to the English and Irish traditions looking for cues about how to think and be, became enamored of the young Yeats, the English Romantics, the tweed jacket, the pentameter line. And everything American, including the flag, reminded me of my quasi-exile in this country that I grew to hate for excluding me. But of course it also formed me. It’s the problem of the anti-Semitic Jew, the misogynist woman, the racist African-American. I’m sure this dissonance isn’t peculiar to America. There must be some self-suspicion and self-loathing wherever there is both social division and the hope of crossing through it. But America makes this sense of being alienated from what is right in front of you common and binding to an unusual degree. The reason is in the word “America”. The country is called The United States of America but we actually use the word “American” to mean something different than “of or relating to the United States.” To be American in some way is something exalted and ideal. At any moment the actual United States only approximates to the ideal of being American. As a boy I was an American without feeling in the slightest American.
But Ellison helps, especially when seen through Dylan as seen through Marcus. Ellison suggests that whatever we are, whether we recognize it or not, we are formed in our sensibility by each other. And Dylan’s growth as a musician suggests that we can participate in our own formation, build our own America and coin our own way of living it. Dylan’s restless movement beyond the walls around his Jewish and mid-Western heritage into the broad, muddy, polyglot, multi-ethnic American voice—itself restlessly moving between high and low culture, between sacred and profane—becomes a kind of self-revision.
Maybe it’s also through Invisible Republic that I see the three big novels that I’ve read lately. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, and Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country all make an argument about the extent to which it’s possible to make one’s own America, either in one’s own existential imagination or in one’s external world. Because I’m still reading and thinking through Shadow Country, I’ll start with that.
The central figure of the novel is a farmer and sometime desperado, Edgar A. Watson. His own identity and place in the culture are problematic because he is among the large group of Southern whites who grew up with the grand legend of the antebellum South, the difficult present reality of belonging to an ethnic group that had outlived its economy, and a cabal of Northern whites and freed slaves as the ostensible cause. As Edgar grows up he loses his father to drink and racial vigilantism (his father’s own), his mother to fantasies of the past, his sister to the psychological toll of domestic violence, a black half brother to lynching, his inheritance to debt, his public honor to rumor, and finally his heritage to exile. Watson finds himself forced to flee a corrupt law and reinvent himself again and again, each time with different materials to hand. The central events of the narrative begin when Watson, aged 36 and several times a fugitive, arrives in southern Florida and begins to establish himself.
But actually this is not where the novel begins. The first of its three sections is a series of first-hand accounts of Watson’s life, beginning with the time in Florida when he was already seen as a tyrant and murderer. The second follows one of Watson's sons through an attempt to clear him of much of his rumored brutality, and ends with this son's conclusion that although his father's crimes are greatly exaggerated, they are too great to warrant defense. They are also too entangled in the great history of Southern violence to be told with anything like a moral lesson. There is none.
So while the narrative circles around E.A. Watson the whole time, we arguably never see the man. Ain't that the way of it? The structure of the novel suggests that Matthiessen’s real subject is not so much Watson’s life as the question of why various people think it happened and what various people think it means for the present. By the time Watson is gunned down by a group of locals, most of them his neighbors and associates, the reader is pretty sure that vigilantism is in fact the only possible way deal with people like him. The answer to violence really is violence? Well, no, but the understanding required to reach acceptance may be beyond all but the best of us. In a book that reminds me more accurately and uncomfortably than anything I’ve perhaps ever read of the air of violence of my Tennessee childhood, violence finally comes to seem both piteous and completely human.
Both Watson’s brutality, and the violence finally required to stop him, seem to come out of the same gravitational force of historical violence. This violence first seeks land and and wealth, and then finds its sturdy, enduring orbit around race, class and region, and finally becomes so much a part of every thought and gesture that it is nearly invisible. But then before you show up in Copperhill, Tennessee today and assert such a thing, first you ought to be sure it’s worth fighting about. The mutual hatreds that kept me from my classmates in grade school continue to sweep our worlds farther apart. But that hatred was false: it had to do with our heritage and not ourselves. And with deliberate and soulful effort heritage can be reworked.
But what comes out of a reading of the book is the sense that one could build one’s own America. That America is not merely something given at birth but something that changes over one’s lifetime and to which one might contribute. Or more than that, in Marcus’s chapter on Harry Smith’s construction of The Anthology of American Folk Music you get the sense that you could assemble your own America out of the hundred possible versions and all the spare parts, that the American past is a vast sourcebook of images, sounds, ideas, events and decisions, any of which might be an important clue about how to live. I was used to the idea that there is a black America and a white America, a rich America and poor America, red and blue, urban and rural, East and South and West.
But what Marcus shows is that Harry Smith assembled his six disc anthology in such a way as to rework those categories. Smith presents the American past as an odd and uncomfortable jumble of images, black and white performers presented side by side, unified not by race or class but by the basic occasions and themes of American life. He calls the three sets of tracks (two discs for each) “Ballads”, “Social Music”, and “Songs”. Smith’s anthology privileges the grotesque and the tendencies towards tall tales in American music, and invites you to think not about ethnicity or even genre but about ways of inhabiting the American imagination. I would have denied that there might be such a thing as an American imagination before reading Invisible Republic and then going back and spending several months with the Harry Smith anthology. Now “the American imagination” seems to me a useful and optimistic phrase. Of course one can, and should, go beyond national boundaries in exploring and constructing one’s world. But for most of us, the things that have formed our assumptions, desires and sensibilities are American, and so the American past is as much a sort of cultural genetic record as it is a warehouse of spare parts.
But the phrase “American imagination” seems optimistic for a couple of reasons that have to do with much of the rest of my reading of the last year. One has to do with something that Ralph Ellison says in his 1970 essay, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks”. “Despite his racial difference and social status, something indisputably American about Negroes not only raised doubts about the white man's value system but aroused the troubling suspicion that whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black… Without the presence of Negro American style, our jokes, our tall tales, even our sports would be lacking in the sudden turns, the shocks, the swift changes of pace.” This seems true to me. I know that my gait can be distinguished from an Englishman’s at 100 yards: I’ve had it done. I resented it in my Anglophile youth. Then for many years my loose-hipped American stride just seemed a flat fact, like the fact of the slight twist in my spine. It now seems to suggest the openness of human nature.
That is, America really is a mishmash of ethnicities and regional peculiarities. Salad bowl seems not quite right: burrito, maybe. But it also seems true in my experience that, although we may not be converging towards a single ethnicity, Americans mostly share certain elements of a recognizable national sensibility. If we are all, despite our other differences, “also somehow black,” then there must be something about our literature, music and political process that actually shapes us. The working definition of ‘identity’ in America must have to do as much with acquired culture as with received culture. We can work our way towards each other, or towards a fuller version of ourselves, by working with the sourcebook of the American tradition.
Here’s why this matters to me. The circumstances of my childhood presented me—maybe this is true of most of us?—with a number of seemingly unbreachable barriers between myself and the people and traditions around me. I was raised during formative years by a middle class and relatively lettered family in poor, rural Tennessee town called Copperhill. My father was a white collar worker in a mining concern that essentially was the local economy and that almost entirely imported its management from the world outside of Appalachia. Further, this mining concern had a history of union/management conflict that went back nearly a hundred years. Even before that the people who worked in the mines, often at great personal risk and physical expense, were locals; the people who directed the mining and grew wealthy from it were, from the earliest days of industrial production, outsiders. The outside world, for all its promise and importance, was deeply suspect. I was raised up on the weird doubleness of a culture that at once sorts people into definite categories and sends them to the same schools, that at once prizes and disdains wealth and culture. And although it’s not as if I had that much of either, in the context of a town in which many children’s parents were on welfare and functionally illiterate, the marks of relative wealth and culture were ubiquitous in me like a sort of ostentatious over-grooming. My speech, dress, bearing, sense of the seemly and unseemly, sense of the importance of seemliness—all this betrayed me as a foreigner with every gesture.
My response to this was to wear my foreignness with as much defiance and panache as I could muster. And as I reflect on this now, the two—defiance and panache—are very much at odds. I’m sure no one was fooled. At any rate, I played up my odd, invented foreignness, and it suited me in a way. I went to the English and Irish traditions looking for cues about how to think and be, became enamored of the young Yeats, the English Romantics, the tweed jacket, the pentameter line. And everything American, including the flag, reminded me of my quasi-exile in this country that I grew to hate for excluding me. But of course it also formed me. It’s the problem of the anti-Semitic Jew, the misogynist woman, the racist African-American. I’m sure this dissonance isn’t peculiar to America. There must be some self-suspicion and self-loathing wherever there is both social division and the hope of crossing through it. But America makes this sense of being alienated from what is right in front of you common and binding to an unusual degree. The reason is in the word “America”. The country is called The United States of America but we actually use the word “American” to mean something different than “of or relating to the United States.” To be American in some way is something exalted and ideal. At any moment the actual United States only approximates to the ideal of being American. As a boy I was an American without feeling in the slightest American.
But Ellison helps, especially when seen through Dylan as seen through Marcus. Ellison suggests that whatever we are, whether we recognize it or not, we are formed in our sensibility by each other. And Dylan’s growth as a musician suggests that we can participate in our own formation, build our own America and coin our own way of living it. Dylan’s restless movement beyond the walls around his Jewish and mid-Western heritage into the broad, muddy, polyglot, multi-ethnic American voice—itself restlessly moving between high and low culture, between sacred and profane—becomes a kind of self-revision.
Maybe it’s also through Invisible Republic that I see the three big novels that I’ve read lately. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, and Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country all make an argument about the extent to which it’s possible to make one’s own America, either in one’s own existential imagination or in one’s external world. Because I’m still reading and thinking through Shadow Country, I’ll start with that.
The central figure of the novel is a farmer and sometime desperado, Edgar A. Watson. His own identity and place in the culture are problematic because he is among the large group of Southern whites who grew up with the grand legend of the antebellum South, the difficult present reality of belonging to an ethnic group that had outlived its economy, and a cabal of Northern whites and freed slaves as the ostensible cause. As Edgar grows up he loses his father to drink and racial vigilantism (his father’s own), his mother to fantasies of the past, his sister to the psychological toll of domestic violence, a black half brother to lynching, his inheritance to debt, his public honor to rumor, and finally his heritage to exile. Watson finds himself forced to flee a corrupt law and reinvent himself again and again, each time with different materials to hand. The central events of the narrative begin when Watson, aged 36 and several times a fugitive, arrives in southern Florida and begins to establish himself.
But actually this is not where the novel begins. The first of its three sections is a series of first-hand accounts of Watson’s life, beginning with the time in Florida when he was already seen as a tyrant and murderer. The second follows one of Watson's sons through an attempt to clear him of much of his rumored brutality, and ends with this son's conclusion that although his father's crimes are greatly exaggerated, they are too great to warrant defense. They are also too entangled in the great history of Southern violence to be told with anything like a moral lesson. There is none.
So while the narrative circles around E.A. Watson the whole time, we arguably never see the man. Ain't that the way of it? The structure of the novel suggests that Matthiessen’s real subject is not so much Watson’s life as the question of why various people think it happened and what various people think it means for the present. By the time Watson is gunned down by a group of locals, most of them his neighbors and associates, the reader is pretty sure that vigilantism is in fact the only possible way deal with people like him. The answer to violence really is violence? Well, no, but the understanding required to reach acceptance may be beyond all but the best of us. In a book that reminds me more accurately and uncomfortably than anything I’ve perhaps ever read of the air of violence of my Tennessee childhood, violence finally comes to seem both piteous and completely human.
Both Watson’s brutality, and the violence finally required to stop him, seem to come out of the same gravitational force of historical violence. This violence first seeks land and and wealth, and then finds its sturdy, enduring orbit around race, class and region, and finally becomes so much a part of every thought and gesture that it is nearly invisible. But then before you show up in Copperhill, Tennessee today and assert such a thing, first you ought to be sure it’s worth fighting about. The mutual hatreds that kept me from my classmates in grade school continue to sweep our worlds farther apart. But that hatred was false: it had to do with our heritage and not ourselves. And with deliberate and soulful effort heritage can be reworked.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
FYI: Something Important I Learned About Kindergarten after Kindergarten
So kindergarten means children's garden, of course, but garten doesn't really mean just garden exactly, in its current American sense as an unbounded greensward: it means a walled enclosure, which everyone used to build to keep fauna and would-be cabbage thieves honest and hungry, so really, unless you want to stop etymologically half-way because that's where the compound noun is most picturesque --children frolicking in Nature, or its tame and picturesque cultural simulacrum --you have to re-imagine kindergarten as a protective walled enclosure for children, which is more accurate, anyway. Cabbage-patch kid, ma petite chou, you must not stray into the woods.
Also notice that I failed to unpack greensward, which contains the English cognate of gart: ward. Again the wall. In England a greensward used to be a walled garden, not what we've done since Olmstead. Hearth, house, garth, und aus. Outlandish kindergarteners are verboten.
Also notice that I failed to unpack greensward, which contains the English cognate of gart: ward. Again the wall. In England a greensward used to be a walled garden, not what we've done since Olmstead. Hearth, house, garth, und aus. Outlandish kindergarteners are verboten.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
BP Exec Puts Down the Pelican at Hand and Extemporizes a Country Western Lyric
It felt good to love in Memphis--
it ain't the King that came between us.
Unless you mean King Laugh or the King of the Road.
I loved big but never easily. This breezy love was freezing me,
until one breeze was one too many, and I up and blowed.
And tonight she's looking for me,
but she's dangerously lonely.
And she could could come to grievous harm
just to spend the night in someone's loving arms.
But it's fire: you can't love safely,
and tonight she's dangerously lonely.
And that's as close to fire as a heart can be
without ever getting warm.
Did the same breeze blow me back around
or was it always her in every town?--
the queen of each last cigarette and each frozen first light?
She was in every gray and every green and every blue
until I fell out with or fell into
every woman who wasn't you, which mostly felt alright.
But tonight...
You take the weight of holding onto dreams
or the weight of loving lesser things,
the pain of every time you hit the ground
or the fear of ever falling down.
You walk until you walk the mountains near
or watch until you wait the water clear.
But know that woman that you haven't found
is the woman with both arms around you
and both feet on the ground.
And tonight she's looking for me,
but she's dangerously lonely,
and she could could come to grievous harm
or she could spend the night in someone's loving arms.
But it's fire: you can't love safely,
and tonight she's dangerously lonely.
And that's as close to fire as a heart can be
without ever getting warm.
it ain't the King that came between us.
Unless you mean King Laugh or the King of the Road.
I loved big but never easily. This breezy love was freezing me,
until one breeze was one too many, and I up and blowed.
And tonight she's looking for me,
but she's dangerously lonely.
And she could could come to grievous harm
just to spend the night in someone's loving arms.
But it's fire: you can't love safely,
and tonight she's dangerously lonely.
And that's as close to fire as a heart can be
without ever getting warm.
Did the same breeze blow me back around
or was it always her in every town?--
the queen of each last cigarette and each frozen first light?
She was in every gray and every green and every blue
until I fell out with or fell into
every woman who wasn't you, which mostly felt alright.
But tonight...
You take the weight of holding onto dreams
or the weight of loving lesser things,
the pain of every time you hit the ground
or the fear of ever falling down.
You walk until you walk the mountains near
or watch until you wait the water clear.
But know that woman that you haven't found
is the woman with both arms around you
and both feet on the ground.
And tonight she's looking for me,
but she's dangerously lonely,
and she could could come to grievous harm
or she could spend the night in someone's loving arms.
But it's fire: you can't love safely,
and tonight she's dangerously lonely.
And that's as close to fire as a heart can be
without ever getting warm.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)