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.