Random thoughts inspired by the Capitol riot, pt. 2

The Homecoming, Marianne von Werefkin (1860-1938)

First of all, if you are not up for political discussion, I totally understand. It won't hurt my feelings a bit if you just go check out these fabulous avian guitarists and skip the unpleasantness below. (H/T to my old friend ScentScelf for the video.) 

***

I thought about never coming back* to comment further on the insurrection. We’re all sick to death of thinking about it, aren't we? When someone like Anne Applebaum suggests that maybe the best course of action would be to change the subject, that's an option worth considering. (I don't share Applebaum's rightwing political bent, but her book Twilight of Democracy is an interesting and insightful — if depressing — read.)

Looking through some old posts on this blog, though, especially from 2008 and 2012, I was struck by the strong continuity between then and now. I was wrong about a lot of things back then. (Me on the Tea Party in 2009: "I think our side should calm down a little and stop worrying that they're going to stage a coup or something.”) But the elements that created January 6 were all in place years ago. And they were not hidden, though most of us couldn't see them with any clarity. This makes me think it’s worth setting down my thoughts now, however incoherent they may be, if only for the sake of revisiting them somewhere down the road, when who knows where we'll have wound up.

***

In the weeks since the Capitol riot, it's become clear that there were several distinct factions involved: some who showed up with a plan, some who seemed to be there mostly to party, and a large segment of folks who, like Comet Ping Pong dude before them, apparently believed something heinous was going on and they better put a stop to it. And have fun breaking windows and knocking heads in the process, of course. 

It's that third group that interests me because I can most clearly see my own folks in them. Not that I share their delusions or their ideology, but they're the ones who seem the most like the people I grew up around, the people I see around me today. All those aging white men with beards, wearing Walmart jeans and jackets from the army surplus store, with the Confederate flag, Old Glory, and MAGA/Trump gear easily blending as cultural identifiers. They are so familiar. That guy beating the cop with the flagpole — he looks exactly like one of the characters who used to hang out in my dad's favorite tavern. I feel like I know him. I feel like, had my life taken just a slightly different turn early on, I might have wound up married to him.

This feeling of embarrassed kinship with the rioters is something that anywhere-left-of-center white people, especially the ones with rural roots, do not seem to be talking about very much. (I'd like to digress briefly here to say that I will never get used to the way mainstream liberal Democrats are now routinely labeled "the left" by almost everyone, including themselves. Joe Biden, tool of the left. Good lord.) I know for sure I'm not the only one who feels the kinship, thanks to the popularity of the wild rant Corey Forrester tweeted on January 7. Granted, Forrester is a comedian and this kind of thing is his business, but he wouldn't have said it if he wasn't pretty sure there'd be an audience for it, and a lot of that audience is people like me, who watched the riot with a sense of cringing shame, as well as outrage: Oh my god — it's us. (For more from Forrester on the shame of our kind, watch this.) 

I can't decide whether my inability — or unwillingness — to see myself as culturally Other to the insurrectionists is a good thing or a bad thing. It reminds me a lot of the way I felt about my paternal grandmother, who was a second mother to me and my brothers, a good and loving person in many ways, but who was also a confirmed segregationist. However outwardly friendly and kind she was willing to be toward Black people (and she was, in my memory, unfailingly so), she could not/would not let go of the deeply racist, white supremacist view of the world she was raised with. 

I could never disown my grandmother. It would be dishonest. She helped make me who I am, without a doubt. I hate many of the things she believed, but I know there's not a bright line between the parts of our shared culture I love and the parts I hate. And I don't see any reason to believe that I'm a better human than she was. That's the sticky, troubling truth I have lived with forever, and the insanity at the Capitol is a powerful reminder. I honestly don't know what to do with it.

For another lens on this same territory, read Abby Lee Hood's recent piece in the NYT. And for a thought-provoking take on the enduring role of shame in white Southern culture and how it operates among the Trumpian evangelicals, read David French's thoughts at The Dispatch. (French sees the political landscape very differently than I do, and some of the positions he takes — like his signing of the Nashville Statement — are, in my view, deeply destructive, to put it mildly. But he understands the rising Christian nationalism as well as anyone out there, and he unfailingly writes from a thoughtful place, trying to grapple with the larger moral implications of the moment.)

***

And speaking of nationalism, this weekend I watched Daniel Lombroso's White Noise, a documentary presented by The Atlantic, that follows Lauren Southern, Richard Spencer, and Mike Cernovich as they do their alt-right, white nationalist thing in the period leading up to and after Charlottesville. It's a compelling piece of filmmaking, well worth watching, but I'm still not sure what I think about it. 

The film presents the three main subjects as narcissistic, damaged people, equal parts insufferable and pitiable — a take that is definitely not surprising to anyone who's ever known one of this tribe. But I came away feeling like the film did not go deep enough, that it spent too much time deconstructing the personalities, and none at all deconstructing the ideology. The evil of white nationalism is simply taken as a given, and at no point does anybody actually challenge the substance of what Southern, Spencer, and Cernovich are peddling. They are never asked to defend what they're doing in any meaningful way. I suspect that was a strategic choice on the part of the filmmakers, a way of earning trust by avoiding conflict. And it paid off in terms of letting us see the humans behind the rhetoric, but it fell short in furthering our understanding of the movement they speak to. You can see the trailer at the link above and on Youtube. You can read a profile Lombroso wrote about Southern here.  

*Part 1 of this post is here. 

Addendum

The Good and the Evil, Imre Ámos, 1938

I woke up this morning with the flu, so I’m even more muzzy-headed than usual. The thermostat is turned up to an environmentally irresponsible 72 degrees, and I’m clutching a heating pad against my belly, trying to quiet the chills. I probably shouldn’t be writing anything, not even a blog post. But I can’t seem to resist the urge. Chalk it up to fever-diminished impulse control. So here goes—

Back at Thanksgiving, I wrote up a longish Facebook post about spending the holiday with my mother and her partner, deep in rural Trumpland. Chapter 16 was kind enough to publish a slightly modified version of it this week, which you can read here.

Writers make a nervous bargain with their readers. We get the gratification of sharing our work, and in return we accept that people are 100% entitled to take from it what they will. Once something’s out of our hands, it has a life of its own, and we don’t get to run around trying to referee its relationship with the world.

This deal has its down side. There are people who seem to read with hostile intent, determined to find a reflection of their own bad faith in someone else’s words. But those people are, thankfully, very few. Most readers meet your work with generosity and intelligence, and sometimes they find things that you could never have hidden there yourself. They find the beauty of their own souls—their own sorrow or joy or love.

Judging by comments on Facebook and a few private messages, it seems like most people read my Thanksgiving essay as a commentary on the way love and shared ritual help us transcend the things that divide us. I think that’s a lovely way to receive it. I’m happy to know that people are so ready—eager, even—to find possibilities for redemption. Part of me wants to believe in redemption.

If you asked me, though, what I was trying to get at in that essay, I’d have to say that it has little to do with redemption or transcendence. (I know, I know — I just said I don’t get to referee how my words are read. Think of this as an addendum.) What fascinated me about that day was the way beauty and ugliness existed in such close proximity, distinct but thoroughly entwined.

In response to one of the private messages I received, I wrote, “One of the saddest things to me about our current predicament is the way no one seems willing to accept the contradictions of the human soul. Acceptance = cowardice to a lot of my friends. Cowardice, or appeasement, or...something. Anyway, I think you have to take people whole and as you find them—or try to, at least.”


I think that whether we try to deny the humanity of people who have evil ideas or minimize the powerful reality of those ideas, we’re making the same mistake. We're turning away from the capacity for evil that lurks within us. It's a dangerous arrogance. My grandmother used to say that you’re never more in danger of hell than when you’re congratulating yourself for being a good person, and all these years later—having abandoned the notion of hell altogether—I still think often about those words. The challenge of being human is seeing yourself in what you abhor. There are no monsters. We are all monsters.

Saturday with Mom

I travel to my mother’s house on a curving country road, past well-tended farms with driveway signs that quote the Old Testament.

Create in me a clean heart, O God

Sin is a reproach to any people

A soft answer turneth away wrath

Early morning light graces the trees and pastures, and I think, as always, of stopping to use the camera I’ve brought along. But I don’t stop today. I hardly ever stop. Mom is waiting.

When I get to her house, she’s all dressed in her purple outfit, a strand of costume pearls around her neck today instead of the rose quartz necklace she’s been wearing lately.

I have a tiny plush dog with oversized, sparkly blue eyes to give her. Its fur is gray with white markings, and I hope it will remind her of her long-dead Malamute named Bear. She's delighted with the toy. “Oh, how cute!”

“I think it looks like Bear,” I say. “Do you remember Bear?”

“Of course,” she says, caressing her new baby. It’s impossible to know whether she really remembers Bear, and I have no idea why I still feel the need to invoke the past with her.

Mom’s current dog comes up to say hello. Katie, a fluffy black mutt with spotted feet, is so fat she breathes heavily and waddles when she walks. Mom will not be discouraged from constantly giving her “treats” — whole slices of cheese and ham, sweet rolls, leftovers of all kinds. Sometimes I can convince her to refrain while I'm present, but I know she'll forget as soon as I'm gone. In her mind, Katie seems to represent every dog and child she ever cared for. She often talks as if she has a whole houseful of creatures to look after. I hate to see what's happening to Katie, but the only remedy would be to take her away from Mom. None of us is prepared to be that cruel. So I just pet the dog and feel guilty.

Mom’s partner helps her get her jacket on, and she and I head out to Southernaire, a restaurant near Kentucky Lake. Our family’s been eating there for years, and my eldest brother and I take Mom there most Saturdays for breakfast. His absence today makes Mom anxious.

"Is somebody coming with us?"

"No, Jeff can't come today. He's tied up with work. He's gonna come next week."

"Oh." A long pause. "He seems like a really good guy."

"He is a really good guy."

We repeat this exchange at least four times in the 15 minutes it takes to drive to the restaurant. It's not entirely clear whether she knows we're talking about her son. She seems to understand who I am, but I know that when I'm not around she refers to me as "my friend."

***

Southernaire is homey and charming and odd. The lobby features a big screen TV, video games, and a taxidermied beaver sporting seasonal headgear. The dining room, by contrast, is like a genteel tea room, all lace curtains and aquamarine walls.

While Mom slowly works on her heaped-up plate of eggs and bacon, the usual cast of characters cycles through —local families, couples, a pair of 60+ pilots who've just flown in on the air strip across the road. Three huge young men lumber in and take up a table. They look like brothers, or maybe cousins. They strike me as farm boys, though I can't quite put my finger on why. Two of them are decked out in Vol orange.  I half expect the room to list in their direction, they're so big. "You got a pork chop back there?" one of them asks the waitress. "Fry me up a pork chop."

While I'm studying the farm boys, Mom is fixated on a little blond girl at the next table. She keeps trying, without success, to get the child to smile back at her.  Mom has always loved kids, and whenever we're out in public she invariably zeros in on young children, especially girls. It's sweet to see, but it's also a little intense. She looks at them the way a 4-year-old looks at a puppy — fascinated, delighted, covetous. She'll often speak to the parents if she gets a chance, usually saying something admiring and innocuous like “That's a beautiful child.” Out here in the country, people always respond in a friendly way, and I'm grateful for that. I've often wondered whether an elderly man with a similar fixation on kids would be treated so tolerantly.

We box up Mom's leftovers to take home, where she'll likely feed them to Katie. I've only had to stop her a couple of times today from putting salt in her coffee or sugar on her eggs, and she was easily persuaded to leave the little tubs of half & half on the table. She offers to pay, pulling bills out of her purse and trying to hand them to me. We never let her pay, but I don't think she'll ever stop trying. She grew up poor and has a deeply ingrained sense of the importance of money.

Out in the parking lot, there's a vintage El Camino, fire engine red, with an unopened sack of something — maybe horse feed — lying in the middle of the pristine bed. I like to think it belongs to the large young men, though the cab looks like a tight fit for even one of them.

***

On the way home, we stop at a dollar store to look at the Christmas stuff. Mom has no Christmas decorations of any kind at her house, and she doesn't really understand the holiday anymore. She wouldn't refuse a present, and she thinks the lights are pretty, but it's not at all clear that she registers what any of it means. Nevertheless, I'm suddenly determined that she'll have something in her house to mark the season. As with the little plush dog, this is more about my needs than hers, and as we paw through the snow globes and reindeer ornaments, I'm painfully aware of the source of all these cheap gewgaws.

I find a little aluminum tabletop tree covered in gold glitter. $3.00. “This is pretty, Mom, don't you think?”

“Oh, it is pretty. And just $3.00.”

I get the feeling she's humoring me, but it's hard to tell. She might actually like it. And she regards all gifts as expressions of love, always has.

When I pay, the young woman behind the counter hands me a slip of paper along with my receipt. It's a note, handwritten on a piece of register tape. It says, “God Bless + Merry Christmas,” with a little 😊

A blast of cold wind hits us as we head to the car. Mom clutches her jacket and grimaces. She seems so frail, as brittle as the brown leaves blowing across the asphalt. While I drive, she lifts the little tree out of the plastic bag and admires it. “This is something I can treasure forever,” she says, and repeats it a few more times before we turn down the dirt road to her house.



*Photo by BitterGrace

Unbearable

Brooding, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

Prompted by a mention of it in a very fine memoir, I tried twice in the past few days to watch Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), but I just couldn't do it. I could not force myself to keep watching past the first few minutes of that awful scene with Rusk and Brenda Blaney. The moment when she reaches for the phone and he stops her made me feel physically ill, and I had to abandon the film both times. This squeamishness is new. I sat through Frenzy years ago, and while I remember thinking the movie was misogynistic trash, I don't recall being particularly disturbed by it. Now it's suddenly unbearable. Why?

I'm sure it's partly to do with the incessant post-Weinstein conversation about sexual harassment and assault. I've contributed to that chatter myself, and I think the discussion is important, but there's no question that it has stirred up a lot of buried rage and fear for many of us. I've relived experiences over the past few weeks that I would have gladly forgotten forever. Is this healing? I can't say. All I know is it's painful and maddening.

I really think it's part of a much larger sorrow, though. I feel like I'm grieving for the world these days, trying to reconcile myself to my "feast of losses" and not succeeding. Not sure anyone does. What surprises me is that age seems to heighten the capacity to grieve, not lessen it. I feel it all more deeply now than I once did—more deeply than I could have imagined when I was young. Probably because I understand now that none of it is fixable.





You can see the book trailer for Kelly Grey Carlisle's memoir, We Are All Shipwrecks, here.

If you have the stomach for Frenzy, the full movie is currently up on Youtube.

Nurture

Photo by BitterGrace, taken in October 2016

I looked out my kitchen window today and smiled as I watched a tiny bird hover uncertainly below a bottle of sugar water. There is reliable, instant joy in seeing a migrating hummingbird discover a feeder and commence feasting. It's a sacred moment.

An article is making the rounds right now about how the lack of childhood play and friendship helps create the angry, alienated men who commit mass killings. I have no doubt that the writer's theory is true. It feels true. Loneliness is everywhere.

But I also wonder whether kids get enough opportunity to nurture, and specifically to nurture the earth—to feed and protect living things that won't repay them in any way except through the miracle of their continued existence. How many children, especially boys, never get to know that pure pleasure of the spirit?

I keep thinking about what we know of the Las Vegas killer—his empty existence, drinking and popping Valium and spending countless hours in the heartless and utterly unnatural environment of casinos. It sounds like an excellent way to stifle a human soul. How many decades ago did that man last feel anything resembling joy? 

There's joy in nurturing wild things, and there's humility, too—true humility, which has nothing to do with shame or thinking poorly of oneself. You feel like a tiny, essential part of a great whole, which of course you are. And you know your fundamental powerlessness.

All these feelings work against the isolation and shame and twisted grandiosity that make violence look like release.

I don't mean to be facile. There's no simple answer, and it doesn't escape me that the impulse to kill is itself a part of the natural order. We are predators, and we've always killed our own kind. But we're also natural caregivers, hardwired to nurture and to take joy in beauty as well. We should foster those gifts in our children.

Myth

As all good con artists know, a compelling lie is a powerful and resilient beast. My great-great grandfather’s obituary noted his “splendid soldier record” in service to the Confederacy, even though he died almost 60 years after the war, in 1924. Forty years after that, when I was a little girl, play Confederate money was still a prize in gumball machines, and I had a grade school teacher who talked of kind slave owners and the cruelty of emancipation. I like to think of myself as a fairly smart and empathetic person, but without some excellent high school and college history teachers, I might still be attached to some vaguely romantic notion of the Lost Cause. I know plenty of people who are. Humans are hungry for myth—we need myth—and once we latch onto a gratifying story, we don't readily let go of it, no matter how empty or false or toxic it may be. It seems like a terrible weakness of the species. And yet...how would we survive without our gift for stories that nourish and sustain, stories that reconcile us to life and each other?

   

Myth
by Muriel Rukeyser

Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the Roads.
He smelled a familiar smell.
It was the Sphinx
Oedipus said, "I want to ask one question.
Why didn't I recognize my mother?"
"You gave the wrong answer," said the Sphinx.
"But that was what made everything possible," said Oedipus.
"No," she said. When I asked, what walks on four legs in the morning,
Two at noon and three in the evening, you answered,
Man.
You didn't say anything about woman."
"When you say Man," said Oedipus,
"You include women too.
Everyone knows that."
She said, "That's what you think."

*See the poem in its proper form here.


1. Portrait of Pvt. Edwin Francis Jemison, 2nd Louisiana Infantry Regiment. He served in the Peninsula campaign under General J.B. Magruder and was killed in the battle of Malvern Hill, July, 1862. From Wikimedia Commons.

2.  A former slave of U.S. President Andrew Jackson (probably Betty Jackson) and two of her great-grandchildren, 1867. From Wikimedia Commons.

A brief taste of happiness

Dessert Still-life, Georg Flegel (1566-1638)

I've been thinking a lot about happiness lately. Not deep, enduring, TED Talk happiness, but shallow, ephemeral happiness—the kind that rescues you from irritation and drudgery for an hour and then departs as if it had pressing business elsewhere. I'm pretty sure this is the only kind of happiness I'll ever really know, and I hold it in high regard. I don't understand why it never gets a TED Talk. There are lots of ways to court fleeting bliss but none better than music. So here's my own  random and shamelessly cheesy happiness hit parade, good for today only. Tomorrow I'd have a completely different list. Cheers.

Random notes to self and others, re resisting the Creep

Political movements worthy of the name are invariably messy and burdened by conflict. There’s never been one yet that didn’t have to grapple with serious ethical, tactical, and ideological disputes. Internal argument is part of the process. Try to keep that in mind when you see people doing or saying stuff that strikes you as wrongheaded or counterproductive. Unity isn’t everything, and perfect unity isn’t possible. Speak up, but resist the urge to attack allies or accuse them of bad faith. Likewise, don’t take disagreement personally. We are all on the same side, at least in this cause. Forest, trees, etc.

That said, agents provocateurs and appeals to extremism are real concerns for any political movement, and it’s important to be wary of them. You can certainly justify breaking a bad law, but rhetoric that encourages unethical or malicious behavior in the name of a higher good is suspect, always. Gut check everything.

Don't let the Creep or his apologists silence you by saying one of his outrages is “just temporary.” Softening resistance to repressive edicts by claiming they’re temporary is one of the oldest tricks in the authoritarian handbook. Egypt declared a state of emergency after Sadat’s assassination in 1981, legalizing censorship and indefinite detention, among other things. That state of emergency remained in effect for 31 years. Closer to home, the most intrusive and controversial elements of the Patriot Act were originally supposed to expire in 2005, but they were first reauthorized under Bush the Younger and then replaced in modified form in the Freedom Act, with the support of President Obama. Nothing is more permanent than the temporary, as the poet said.

Never forget the humanity of the ordinary people on the other side. This is the hardest task. There are no monsters. Demonizing fellow citizens is a good way to win battles while losing the war.



Femme écrivant, Ferdinand Lepcke (1866-1909)

A rambling proposal

I was born in November 1961, so some of my earliest impressions of the world beyond my little hometown were shaped by the tumult of the late 60s/early 70s. The war in Vietnam, the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, the Kent State shootings, Watergate — I was very aware of all those things as they were happening. Our TV was always on, and in between the soap operas, variety shows, and sitcoms came regular doses of real-world political upheaval. Those reports scared me pretty badly, though I don’t think I ever said so to my parents. I had a strong sense that the country I lived in was in crisis. It seemed as if we were on the verge of catastrophe, and my comfy existence might change for the worse at any moment.

By the time I was into my teens, those deep fears had fallen away. I was fully aware that bad things still went on, of course, but I had moved quite unconsciously into the psychic bubble of safety most white Americans inhabit. I stopped thinking catastrophe was imminent. My grandmother had insisted I watch the Watergate hearings with her, and the outcome of that scandal seemed to me to offer proof that we had a kind of bedrock stability in this country that almost nothing — certainly no sorry-ass politician or political dispute — could destroy. Not that I trusted or admired the government. No, my default position was always distrust, leaning toward outright opposition, and there’ve been plenty of things worth opposing in every political era in my lifetime. But no matter how much ugliness invaded Washington, a better day seemed eternally possible, even likely.

How incredibly stupid and naive that idea seems now.

These days I’m back to being that kid glued to the TV, watching the news footage from Vietnam and envisioning the end of the United States as I know it. This mindset has been slowly overtaking me since the election, but the news this weekend of Bannon’s appointment to the NSC erased all lingering hope that we might get through this without irreparable damage to the country and the world. That sounds overwrought even to me, but my heart and head tell me it’s true.

Which brings me to my proposal: I’ve decided to keep a private record of my impressions and experiences in this new, unlovely political era, and I hope some of you will do the same. Essays, op-eds, blog posts, Facebook rants, and Twitter zingers are all great, but I want the freedom to write words that are safe from the eyes of strangers, at least for now. I don’t want to debate my thoughts away or tweak them to attract a wider audience. I want to be both thoughtful and unfiltered. Most of us do very little writing of that sort anymore. We no longer write long, reflective letters to each other, since it’s so easy to pick up the phone or get the instant gratification of texting. The few people I know who keep journals write about themselves, not the world. I suspect most people feel they haven’t anything important to say, but I believe just the opposite is true. The more powerless and insignificant you feel yourself to be, the more we need a record of how this time looks to you. History is what happens to ordinary people. History is happening to us, right now, and we will do the future a favor if we keep a record of it.

One more thing: I’m writing my record by hand in a simple bound notebook. For now, I won’t digitize it in any way. I encourage you to do likewise. That’s partly paranoia. No electronic medium seems safe to me these days. But it’s also a practical, cheap hedge against changing technology, and there’s something mood- and mind-altering about the physical process of putting pen to paper. It’s calming, and it makes me feel focused and fully human in a way I never do before a keyboard.

Mary Magdalene writing, Master of the Female Half-Lengths, c.1520

Fanatics and the sweetness of God

I was at the grocery store this afternoon when my phone rang. It was a woman from the local chapter of Planned Parenthood, calling to tell me the location of a meeting to organize activism and support for the organization. This meeting is open to anyone, and the date and time are publicly announced, but you have to register with your name and contact info before they tell you where it will be held. Security is a constant concern for Planned Parenthood. There's a cadre of people ever eager to harass them and their patients, and of course there's also the occasional lunatic ready to do much worse.

Driving home, it hit me hard, the way it does more and more lately, how bizarre and infuriating it is that the campaign is still going strong against a woman's right to simple autonomy. And it's becoming stronger. A couple of days ago I saw a screed from one of my neighbors on Facebook in which she called Planned Parenthood clinics "wholesale slaughterhouses." This is a woman who has likely never stepped foot in a PP clinic and never would, but in her mind the people who work and get care there (I've been one of those) are the embodiment of evil. We're not people who disagree with her or have different beliefs. We're not innocently misguided or unenlightened. We're cold-blooded murderers and accessories to murder. And I have to wonder — who really benefits from encouraging this woman to believe that? And why does she want to believe it?

Shortly after I got home, the news came on the radio that Dylann Roof has been sentenced to death. He claims he has no remorse, they said. He thinks he had to do it to save the white race. And again I have the same questions: Whose interests are served when he frames the world this way? Why does he choose this story as his own and not a different one? There are plenty of others to pick from.

While reading some online stories about Roof's sentence, I saw a reference to one of his victims, Ethel Lee Lance, that said she was a perfume enthusiast, and naturally I was intrigued. Google led me to a newspaper article that includes a lovely portrait of Ms. Lance and this sentence:

Her daughter, Sharon Risher, recalled that her mother loved fine perfumes. “After putting on the perfume she would always say, ‘God is sweet.’ ” 

I don't know why, but those words just went all over me, as my mom used to say. Lump in my throat. Tears. She was so alive to me in that moment, this woman I would never know existed if not for her terrible death. If not for Roof's inexplicable choice.

***

The evaluation of the mysteries by the sons of all
experience. All suffering, if we call the light a thing
all men should know. Or find. Where ever, in the dark folds
of the next second, there is some diminishing beauty we might
  one day
understand, and scream to, in some wild fit of acknowledged
  Godliness.

~ Amiri Baraka, from "History as Process"


Allegory of the Sense of Smell, Circle of Bartolomeo Pasarotti (?), c.1620s. There's an interesting article about the painting here.

Once, I knew a white supremacist...

I once knew a budding white supremacist. This was a long time ago — Carter was president, and the internet, at least in its present form, was undreamed of. I've forgotten his name now, but I remember the boy himself pretty well: a tall chubby kid, face of a mean cherub, who always carried a few knives and ninja stars, which he loved to pull out and display, trying to impress me. He seemed to think I was his friend. I believe I qualified for this status because I was the only girl who would talk to him.

I never reacted much when he waved the weapons around or tested out his race rhetoric on me. He was clearly trying to shock, and I knew better than to take that bait. And anyhow, it was more interesting to keep quiet and see what he'd say. He struck me as equal parts creepy, repulsive, and pitiful. Typical teenage girl that I was, it was his pitiful aspect that fascinated me. I felt sorry for him, or at least thought I should. He was evasive when I asked about his home life, but from hints he dropped here and there, I gathered that his mother was absent and his father was a tough guy, a bully. He despised his dad but really wanted to be just like him. I suspect he succeeded.

I've thought about that kid a lot over the years, and recent events, of course, bring him to mind again. I see him in Dylann Roof and in those well-groomed young fascists Sieg Heiling around DC. Bannon actually looks a bit like I imagine my pal would after growing old and seedy. I wish everyone could see the screwed-up 16-year-old behind the cruelty and madness of our current crop of devout racists. It's not that I think we should pity those people. God forbid. I'm not a teenage girl anymore and I spend my pity a little more sensibly now. And I don't mean to downplay the danger they present. But to effectively answer the danger, I do think it's essential to keep in mind how utterly ordinary they are.

There's nothing special about hate mongers. They don't carry any evil gene or suffer from some unique pathology. They're simply people who've made decisions about how to relate to the world. Their decisions make exactly the same sense to them that ours do to us. They don't know their  own corruption. That's why we've got to remember that resistance doesn't just mean outwardly opposing them and their agenda. It means, for some of us, building up an immunity to it within ourselves and among our own. "Nice" white people can believe we're deaf to the siren song of racism, but we never are. And those of us who grew up with hellfire religion know that the first step to conversion — to the con of "salvation" — is fear. Fear makes the mind soft and the heart stupid. It makes us pliant. It makes us doubt ourselves and scramble for what feels like safety without questioning whether that feeling is true. So above all else, we've got to refuse to fear the haters. Don't let them scare you. They're just fucked-up little twerps, desperate for our attention.


Vision, Odilon Redon, 1883

Handey-esque

There are endless ways to get lost in the journey from a principle to an opinion, and it can be so damn hard to find your way home.



The Wanderer by George Grosz, 1943

Resisting the Creep

 
Remember that piece of girlfriend advice we got from Maya Angelou via Oprah? — "When people show you who they are, believe them the first time." There's never been a better moment to keep it in mind. It's always tempting to give someone another chance, to believe that, deep down, he's not quite as bad as he seems. Don't go there. He's been showing you who he is for months, years, decades. He's every bit as bad as he seems. Oh, sure, he'll show you a "better" side just often enough to keep you hopeful and make you feel a bit guilty for judging him. And then he'll play you for a fool. Every single time.

Make it your mission to resist him. Keep your mind free, even when your heart wants to believe something comforting. Don't let yourself fall into the trap of hoping he'll change. You're liable to pull a bunch of other people in with you, and everyone will die in there. If you can keep seeing him for what he is, you'll help others see it, too. They'll start to resist with you. And pretty soon you'll be rid of the Creep, once and for all.

Skull Crowned with Snakes and Flowers by Henry Weston Keen, ca. 1930.

The mess

 

Since Little Donnie (as I will be referring to him from now on) was declared the winner in the recent unpleasantness that passed for an election, I've heard a couple of friends question the value of their creative work. What's the point of pursuing art when the world is so deeply screwed up? Shouldn't we all be putting our energy toward something more important? Etc., etc. Here's my answer for all the artists — and by the way, if you create, you are an artist, whether you have paintings hanging in major museums or you write poems no one ever sees:

The living world is chaotic, complex, and messy, and artists glory in the mess. It feeds us. We take it in and transform it, and thus we thrive. Authoritarians of every sort hate us for that because the mess scares the hell out of them. They're ruled by fear, and we’re braver than they are. They need to flatten, smooth, and simplify in order to make their world feel safe. We're their natural enemies. They keep trying to tidy the mess, and we keep stirring it back up. We can’t help ourselves. Simply by being who we are, by engaging with the world in a way that feels natural and necessary, we make them squirm. And making bullies squirm is a good thing, worth doing. Always.


Photo by BitterGrace

"Elements unaltered— / Universe the same"

Back in 2008, I wrote a post about seeing more and more of my mother in myself as I age. It was a happy, loving post, and I was especially pleased with the way it conveyed the complicated bond I feel with my mother. I went back to that old post today, after not revisiting it in quite a while, and I was struck by something in the final paragraph — something I didn't remember was there:

It’s strange to be reminded that characteristics we think of as profoundly our own—even ones as seemingly individual as a facial expression—are built into our DNA; stranger still to think that they can be wired to hide themselves for decades, emerging when the organism hits just the right level of decay. Not that I’m complaining. As genetic time bombs go, a quirky walk beats the hell out of early-onset Alzheimer’s.

That reference to Alzheimer's startled me because my mother is now entering the moderate stage of that disease, or perhaps I should say that she appears to be. There's been no official diagnosis, since she shuns doctors, but her progressive memory loss and other cognitive problems present a textbook picture of someone suffering from Alzheimer's, and her list of risk factors is long.

As sad as it is to think about my mother's fate, there's a lot to be grateful for. Her partner is looking after her, and she still reliably knows all her close family. She's physically well, and best of all, she remains essentially the same happy, sweet person I described in that original post. I brought her some gifts and took her out to lunch on Christmas Eve, and even though I'm not sure she grasped the significance of the holiday, she clearly loved every minute of my visit. Things are likely to change down the road, but right now she takes her characteristic pleasure in living, and every day she hangs onto that will be a gift.

Given the way I blathered on back in 2008 about my potent genetic inheritance, you'd think I'd be pretty freaked out these days over my own prospects. The sentence "I could do a lot worse than to end up like my mother" suggests a whole new set of possibilities now, and some of them are truly terrible.  Strangely enough, though, I can't seem to get scared. I'm 54 and life feels too short — death feels too close — to waste time and energy kicking against an unknowable future. It seems foolish even to invest much mental energy preparing for my mother's future, since she, like any of us, might die tomorrow. Still, I do have moments of dreading the day she no longer lights up like a delighted child at the sight of people she loves. I came across these lines from Emily Dickinson last night and couldn't help imagining the sad moment when they might apply to my mother and me:

Now I knew I lost her —
Not that she was gone —
But Remoteness travelled
On her Face and Tongue.

Alien, though adjoining
As a Foreign Race —
Traversed she though pausing
Latitudeless Place.

Elements Unaltered —
Universe the same
But Love's transmigration —
Somehow this had come

The complete poem is here.

Photo by BitterGrace

"and we dead stand undefended everywhere"

My drive home from Nashville takes me past a lot of churches, and this evening as I watched them flicker by I got to thinking about being a little girl in church myself, listening to preachers present Bible stories as lessons for sinners, every narrative wrangled into instructive service. There was no room for ambiguity in the religion I knew. Every tale had a good guy and a bad guy, and there was never any confusion about who deserved sympathy. But I was confused, always. I loved the stories and I tried hard to see them the way I was supposed to. I just couldn't. I liked the troublemakers and the losers — Eve, Cain, Esau, Lot's wife, even Judas — and from the time I was very small I felt a mixture of shame and resentment about that: What's wrong with me that I can't understand things properly? Why does there have to be a proper way of understanding? I was baffled by many things about church when I was a child, but nothing troubled me more than the feeling that I was in some way too stupid or too corrupt to root unreservedly for the star on God's team.

I was still brooding about my morally bewildered young self when I got home, and that sent me to a poem I loved early on, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," which in turn led me to James Wright's "At the Executed Murderer's Grave." I never think about one of those poems without thinking of the other. I've spent most of my Saturday night pondering sin and death with Wilde and Wright. Somehow that feels more sustaining than church ever did. The stanzas below are from Wright.

I pity myself, because a man is dead.

If Belmont County killed him, what of me?   

His victims never loved him. Why should we?   

And yet, nobody had to kill him either.   

It does no good to woo the grass, to veil

The quicklime hole of a man’s defeat and shame.   

Nature-lovers are gone. To hell with them.   

I kick the clods away, and speak my name.

This grave’s gash festers. Maybe it will heal,   

When all are caught with what they had to do   

In fear of love, when every man stands still   

By the last sea,

And the princes of the sea come down

To lay away their robes, to judge the earth

And its dead, and we dead stand undefended everywhere,   

And my bodies—father and child and unskilled criminal—

Ridiculously kneel to bare my scars,   

My sneaking crimes, to God’s unpitying stars.

*The girl in the photograph is 11-year-old Ellen Woodman, who was sentenced to seven days hard labor for stealing in Newcastle, England, c.1870-1873. Image from Wikimedia Commons 

A few thoughts on loneliness

"...nothing helps loneliness. I mean–you either feed off of it, or it feeds off you."

I came across those words last week while working on an article about Charles Wright, the new U.S. poet laureate. Wright said them years ago in offhand response to a rather silly interview question, but they struck a chord with me that has echoed for days now. I understand the ineluctability of loneliness, and lord knows I get the part about loneliness eating you up. But what does it mean to feed off of loneliness?

Loneliness pushes you into a state of uncertainty, silence, self-absorption. It's hard to know anything while dwelling in loneliness. The world is remote, and there's nothing to trust. A terrible sense of voicelessness takes over. Expression begins to seem worthless when there is no hope of response, no promise of communion. You're left looking deeper and deeper within, slowly but surely reaching the void at the center of everything you believe you are.

And yet...the writer in me nods in intuitive understanding of the nourishing, illuminating power of loneliness: Yes, of course. Embraced, loneliness can be a kind of magic potion that cures glibness and dissolves ego. It can offer a glimpse of the utter fragility we share with every living thing. It has something of the exquisite extremity of being in love.

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there,

look: the last village of words and, higher,

(but how tiny) still one last

farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground

under your hands. Even here, though,

something can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge

an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

translated by Stephen Mitchell

Silêncio, Odilon Redon, 1900

A rambling post, beginning with perfume and moving on to a vessel of the devil

A few friends have mentioned that they miss the perfume posts here. I'm glad to know that people have enjoyed my perfume writing, but I'm afraid I won't be returning to it anytime soon. (I will, however, go on writing about interesting projects that touch on the subject of perfume, such as this and this.) For the record, I still love perfume. I still wear it and buy it, although I do a lot less buying lately. There was a time when I could afford to be both a bibliophile and a perfume freak. Now the budget only allows one expensive addiction, and between books and perfume there’s really no contest. My days of dropping $100 for a little bottle of scent are over.

That sounds a little sad. It isn't. Life changes (mine sure has), and flowing with the changes is part of the pleasure of living. Being poorer doesn't bother me, and it’s not really the reason I’ve stopped blogging about perfume. I’ve still got a large collection worth writing about, and I could always swap samples if I wanted to review new things. The truth is that I just don’t want to think about perfume anymore. I still thoroughly enjoy the stuff, but my cerebral engagement with it has almost disappeared. I now love perfume in the instinctive, easily satisfied way that I did as a kid, when I first started raiding the pretty bottles on my mother’s dresser: Spritz. Happiness. Done.

The perfume obsession is not the only fancy that has fallen away over the past couple of years. I used to love to cook and collect recipes, but these days scrambling an egg constitutes a major culinary effort. My cookbooks all have a thick coating of dust and I happily subsist on yogurt and almonds for weeks at a time. I was a pretty serious amateur herbalist for years, with a large collection of exotic herbs, homemade tinctures and the like. Since my divorce, I have – with frightening ease, it seems to me – forgotten most everything I used to know about damiana and he shou wu. A couple of months ago, I finally just said the hell with it and put all my herbs and the attendant paraphernalia in the trash. Birding has also gone by the wayside. I used to maintain a half dozen bird feeders year-round, monitoring the visitors and keeping a journal about their comings and goings. I still feed the hummingbirds, but the rest are on their own and it’s rare for me to spend any time observing the avian population in my yard.

I’ve been getting rid of material things, too. Keepsakes, clothes, furniture -- all kinds of items I acquired and kept for reasons I can't now fathom are leaving my life, one carload or garbage bin at a time. I aim to keep paring away until my house is empty of everything I don’t need or genuinely cherish. Unloading my too-large house is probably not an option anytime soon, but I plan to sell it the second I can get a decent price. In the future, home is going to be someplace small, and I hope to spend plenty of time far away from it.

The idea of a wandering, unencumbered life has always appealed to me. Most of my childhood fantasies revolved around achieving — alone — some exalted state of freedom or knowledge. In my dreams I found secret passages to magical places, befriended spirits in the woods, became a bird or a wild horse. Some remnant of those dreams still lurks in me. It fuels my desire to write, and it keeps my mind turning on certain myths and stories – especially, for more than a year now, the story of Mary of Egypt.

Everything about Mary’s life, particularly Sophronius’s version of it, fascinates me. Strip away the expressly Christian trappings (please), and the life of Mary of Egypt is a myth about the dualities that define human existence – body and spirit, feminine and masculine. It’s also a story about death and loss, and the struggle to find some meaning to life as death approaches. But apart from all those grand themes, it’s a tale about a remarkable woman who pursued the life she desired, first as a "vessel of the devil,” and then as a desert hermit. I admire her, and I feel a certain sisterhood. Lately, my 22-year marriage seems more and more like Mary’s long career as a harlot: a false life from which I’ve been delivered. I won’t be following her path as an ascetic. I’m a pleasure-loving animal to the marrow of my bones and that will never change.  But to walk, as Mary did,  out into the unknown, abandoning myself to the mere possibility of  wisdom, seems like a good way to pass the time until I finally rest on the riverbank.



Saint Mary of Egypt, José de Ribera, 1691

A random list, 2011 ed. (mostly books)

'Tis the time of year to make annual lists -- best of, top ten, etc. -- and you'll find mine below. But first, a disclaimer: I’m not a big fan of these lists, or to put it more accurately, I'm not a big fan of creating them. I enjoy other people’s lists (like these, for instance), but when I try to make my own I find that I don’t relish the linear thought process required. I'm not the kind of person who wants or needs her ducks in a row, as even a brief look around my house will confirm. Also, I don’t like the exclusionary nature of lists: This always implies not that, and I hate to reject things that are essentially worthy. (That’s why I possess several hundred perfumes, even though I only wear about 20.) But if I cast aside all thoughts of organization and ranking, list-making does offer me the simple pleasure of revisiting good things, especially the ones that have taught me something or otherwise rocked my world. And, more importantly, a list is a handy way to share those things with people who might not otherwise know about them. Seen in that light, an annual list is a sort of gift to myself and to you. So, with a little ambivalence and a sincere hope that you'll find something that gives you pleasure, here's a random list of  ten things I loved in 2011:

1. Frederick Busch’s Domestic Particulars: A Family Chronicle
This is a quiet, sad, beautifully constructed novel about parents and children, among other things. I wrote a brief review of it at Goodreads. I would never have read it if a friend had not urged it on me. Let me pay a favor forward and encourage you to get your hands on a copy. You'll be rewarded for the trouble.

2. Rodney Crowell’s memoir Chinaberry Sidewalks
This is absolutely not a book I would ever have picked up on my own, but I enjoyed every page. My review is here.

3. Ann Beattie’s Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life
One of the most interesting and entertaining books I’ve read in a long time, Mrs. Nixon transcends genre. It's an artful blend of fiction, literary criticism, history and memoir, and reading it is a little like being happily lost in a house of mirrors. The book is not really concerned with Pat Nixon, but with “Mrs. Nixon,” a fictional person who is as much the creation of Pat Nixon as of Ann Beattie. The brilliance of Mrs. Nixon was completely lost on David Greenberg, who wrote a simple-minded, lukewarm review for The New York Times, and on Michiko Kakutani, who delivered a review that is so willfully dumb and mean-spirited I won’t even link to it. At least the book is getting some appreciation from smart readers like this one.

4. The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, trans. by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin
 Mandelstam’s poems push me to a place I could never get to on my own, and I can never find my way back without their help.

5. Before the Great Troubling by Corey Mesler
 I featured the title poem on the blog a while back, but the whole collection is wise, playful, and very smart. Go here to see some links to other recent poems by Mesler.

6. Some other good books I read or reread this year, in no particular order and excluding lots of worthy titles that I would list if I wasn’t afraid of trying your patience:

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell

A Hole in the Earth by Robert Bausch

Brill Among the Ruins by Vance Bourjaily

The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey

1982, Janine by Alasdair Gray

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

Appalachee Red by Raymond Andrews

Rebel Powers by Richard Bausch


7. Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Apart from the way 3D glasses kept falling down my face, watching this film was a magical experience. Herzog, once again, has inspired me to do plenty of wondering about the primal sources of art and about our complex relationship to animals. I won't bore you with my musings, but the film strengthened my long held opinion that our sentimental attachment to our pets is a degraded expression of our deepest, most spiritual selves.

8. Brian Pera's Woman's Picture
Like many of my fellow perfume fanatics, I've been following the production of this film, and I was thrilled to finally see it at the Indie Memphis festival earlier this fall. A beautiful movie in every way, I hope it will be available on DVD soon so that more people can have the chance to see it. And I can't wait to see where Brian Pera takes his considerable talent in the years to come.

9. Susan Bryant's alternative process photography, exhibited this fall at Nashville's Cumberland Gallery
That's one of her images at the top of this post, and you can see more here and here. Wonderful, evocative stuff. Go look.

10. Glasgow in spring
I spent a couple of weeks in Glasgow this year and pretty much fell in love with a city I already liked quite a lot. I have thoughts of making it home someday. To see a few pictures from my visit, go here.



F.A.R., Copyright ©2011 by Susan Bryant. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Edith Wharton and other fools for love (myself included)

First, some sublime words on erotic escape, from Wharton's 1909 poem "Terminus" --

And thus some woman like me, waking alone before dawn,
While her lover slept, as I woke & heard the calm stir of your breathing,
Some woman has heard as I heard the farewell shriek of the trains
Crying good-bye to the city & staggering out into darkness,
And shaken at heart has thought: "So must we forth in the darkness,
Sped down the fixed rail of habit by the hand of implacable fate–
So shall we issue to life, & the rain, & the dull dark dawning;
You to the wide flare of cities, with windy garlands and shouting,
Carrying to populous places the freight of holiday throngs;
I, by waste lands, & stretches of low-skied marsh
To a harbourless wind-bitten shore, where a dull town moulders & shrinks...

You can read the rest of the poem here.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

These are some less sublime words from Wharton, taken from one of her letters to Morton Fullerton. They are consolation to anyone who has ever drunk dialed, or otherwise been pitiful in the grasp of unrequited love:

I never expected to tell you this; but under the weight of this silence I don't know what to say or leave unsaid. After nearly a month my frank tender of friendship remains unanswered. If that was not what you wished, what is then your feeling for me? My reason rejects the idea that a man like you, who has felt a warm sympathy for a woman like me, can suddenly, from one day to another; without any act or word on her part, lose even a friendly regard for her, & discard the mere outward signs of consideration by which friendship speaks. And so I am almost driven to conclude that your silence has another meaning, which I have not guessed. If any feeling subsists under it, may these words reach it, & tell you what I felt in silence when we were together!

You will find the rest of the letter here.

Nothing can quite top Wharton, but I'm posting so rarely these days I feel I should give you your money's worth when I do show up, so here are a few more variations on the theme:

There's a wonderful piece in Guernica on Pauline Réage/Dominique Aury, the author of The Story of O. The article is an excerpt from Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, by Carmela Ciuraru. The discussion of the novel is skippable if you have read it, but the examination of Aury's relationship with Jean Paulhan is pretty interesting. "She wrote the book to entice him, claim him, and keep him—and she wrote it exclusively for him. It was the ultimate love letter."

In case you missed it, here's a slide show at The Daily Beast of e.e. cummings' erotic drawings, along with snippets of his love poems.

Finally -- because what's a blog without a little shameless self-promotion? -- here's a new essay by me about how some things survive our loving foolishness.



Evening, Anders Zorn, 1892 (Many thanks to Jon, an erudite friend of the blog, for providing the proper title and date of this gorgeous painting.)